Falling Drive Prices Point the Way
to High Definition Editing Rooms

by Steven J. Cohen

In 1995, a 63-gigabyte Avid tower containing seven 9-gig drives cost $23,000. Today, if you shop carefully, you can buy over two terabytes (2,000 gigs) of fast RAID storage for the same price. The old 63-gig tower now fits into the space of a paperback book and costs $250. Prices are continuing to fall by roughly 50 percent per year with no short-term end in sight. These changes are bound to affect the structure of picture cutting rooms and the nature of our jobs.

Look at it this way: in 1995 you could put 100,000 feet of film on an Avid tower at AVR 5e. Today, for the same price, you can store double that amount of film at full NTSC broadcast quality. No compression, no compromises. What makes this even more startling is that the high-definition video that’s in use today is typically compressed and, in the case of Sony’s HDCAM, takes up the same amount of space as uncompressed NTSC. The result is that working with HD today could cost less than working at AVR 5 a few years ago.

That’s a tectonic change. Sound professionals work with full-resolution materials at all times. There’s no equivalent to the picture editor’s compressed offline/high-res online paradigm. In a sound editing room or on a dubbing stage, what you hear is what you get. If you don’t like it, you have a problem. If you do like it, you’re done. That’s what’s coming to picture cutting rooms in the future: full-res HD materials used everywhere. When you’ve cut your show, you output to an HD deck and send it to color correction. When you’re done with a visual effect, you’re done. No online, no conforming. What you see is what you get.

Drive prices aren’t the entire picture. We’ll also need lower-cost media sharing, faster computers, faster video boards and improved software. But all of that is in the pipeline and will be available sooner than many of us might imagine. It won’t be free, of course. HD decks and monitors are still very expensive. And the road won’t be without technical bumps. But our members are familiar with the bleeding edge of the technological revolution.

Today, most Guild picture editors are still using Version 7 Avids, and the company is offering their Meridian upgrade, which I cover in detail in this issue. But as rental houses debate the wisdom of upgrading their old machines, the possibility of directly cutting HD waits in the wings.

In television, a full 24P cutting environment will offer a much more straightforward workflow than what we’re used to. And the integration of finish-quality effects capabilities into today’s cutting rooms will mean more creative possibilities for editors. But to get there, our jobs will have to change. We’re going to be doing more work, shouldering more responsibility, completing shows faster and at less cost. The Guild has a powerful role to play, helping members fight the tendency toward overwork that seems to be part of every technical revolution we’ve experienced.

It isn’t clear when HD will become the media format of choice in our cutting rooms. It may arrive next year or it may take five years. When it gets here isn’t the point. The point is that it’s inevitable, and we need to start planning for it now.

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington took place as we were wrapping up this issue. On behalf of the Guild, I would like to extend my deepest sympathy and support to all those who were, and continue to be, affected by this tragedy. Our Guild is composed of people on both coasts. But in this time of crisis, all Americans, and all Guild Members, are New Yorkers.