Video camera technology in the digital age: Industry standards and the culture of videography

The central aim of my study is to track the evolution of video camera technology from the mid-1990s to the present across diverse communities of use and examine that technology’s reciprocal relationship with culture – how the development of video camera technology has affected artistic, industrial, and communicative practice and, in turn, how society and culture have shaped the imaging technology that they have produced. ❧ In the first short section, (“Pre-roll: Digital Cinema and Production-Based Theory”) I outline the nature of my intervention in the digital cinema debate and the stakes of that intervention by demonstrating the practical elements that the debate has long been lacking and situating my work to fill that absence, as a middle point between its opposing poles: a fixation on the indexical and, conversely, a medium eliminitivism. ❧ In the second section (“Video Camera Image Quality”) I argue that the engineering of the video image has been carried out in relation to the industry standards set by the use of photochemical film – a set of standards that I call the “cinematic,” following the use of that term within communities of videomaking practice. Across this section, I argue that the initial revolutionary potential of digital image manipulation was tempered through the democratization of the cinematic look, shifting markers of production quality to areas beyond image texture, and to ones more tied directly to capital and the complex manipulation of data. ❧ In the third section (“Video Camera Utility”), I argue that the development of the video camera across the digital age occurred concurrently and in concert with advances in modern computing, such that the camera itself underwent a process of computerization. Across this section, I argue that the apparent democratization of moving image-making exists in practice more as a self-perpetuating myth than a fully realized act of cultural revolution. The ability to manage, secure, and manipulate video’s existence as data becomes a dividing line among spheres of production, especially as image quality becomes homogenized. ❧ At the ground level and across the various spheres of production, I suggest that the digital revolution (surely still in progress) has been realized less as a direct uprising to slay the “media giants” and more as a slow-burning growth in videographic literacy. High-quality image-making has been democratized in that it falls under the control of more communities of practice, but the liberating power of this democratization is still held in check by established power structures that continue to separate these same communities. Revolutionary potential lies less in the reversal of the singular flows – challenging Hollywood and the major media companies on their turf – and more in the abundance of alternate networks of videographic communication and community building.