Courtesy: philotfarnsworth.com

Eighty-four years ago, the first known video transmission was made from an idea conceived by a child who was only 14 years old. August marks the birth of the man known as the Father of Television – Philo T. Farnsworth – and it seems fitting to tell a bit of his tale.

Was he a child prodigy? Or just a visionary with the drive to make something of his vision? Growing up in a home without electricity, one can imagine he might have had ‘power sources’ on his mind a lot.

Born 105 years ago in 1906, it’s an interesting fact that as popular and worldwide his invention has become, he’s not very well-known at all, and in fact lived his life in obscurity and died nearly penniless.

Farnsworth came up with the idea of picture transmission when he was 14 years old* and showed his chemistry teacher sketches for a vacuum tube that would electronically copy images on a screen, one line at a time. His first transmission was a 60-horizontal line image of a dollar bill and he subsequently applied for and earned the patent for an all-electronic TV in 1927. Electronics engineers at the time were testing other methods of transmitting images using spinning discs.

In the 1930s,engineers at RCA (Radio Corporation of America) were in the process of inventing a different type of television using a cathode tube and he became embroiled in a decade-long legal war that ended with RCA paying Farnsworth a million dollars for royalties for patent licenses for several of his inventions including TV scanning, syncing, and contrast control.

Many of Farnsworth’s 165 patents for electronic inventions include amplifiers, a system for air traffic control, night vision devices, radar and cathode-ray and vacuum tubes.

As remarkable as it sounds, television is still a ‘young’ invention – and is already disappearing form many households today. Farnsworth passed away in 1971, just when his invention was really starting to get a firm foothold in American households. Farnsworth didn’t gain wealth from his invention, and, in fact, spent his lifetime fighting to hold claim to the patent, and his wife continued to fight the battle until her death.

Want to see the man talk about his work? Here’s a YouTube clip of him on the TV classic “I’ve Got a Secret” from the 1950s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKM4MNrB25o After everyone is amazed that the inventor of TV was such an unknown man, notice what he says about TV at 6:15 on this clip. He talks about the ”future” of TV, including better utilization of the bandwidth, hoping to expand it to 2000 lines rather than 525 lines, visual memory, and flat screens – this is Hi Def, folks! It took four decades longer to get this. What a visionary.

I love history, and the history of television in particular, and although TV might be approaching the end of it’s life as we know it, as video producers we all owe a bit of gratitude to Philo T. Farnsworth for his vision and amazing mind.

If you want to read more history of TV or video, check out LabGuy’s site: http://www.labguysworld.com/ Among other things he has his very own museum of “Extinct Devices” including his collection of old video tape recorders and old video cameras. Hum… I wonder if he’d be interested in that old Panasonic VHS cam sitting on our “museum shelf”.

* Some reports say Farnsworth was 15 or 16, but he says he was 14 on the “I’ve Got a Secret” show mentioned in this report.

PHOTO CREDIT: Farnsworth Archives, philotfarnsworth.com

The world today is all about speed. Faster cars, faster processors, are the norm in today’s society. That’s why it comes at no surprise that the WiGig Alliance, a group of wireless companies and professionals, just announced their intentions to use the 60 GHz spectrum to achieve data transfer rates of up to 7 gigabits per second.  This is a logical choice for wireless manufacturers as cables such as Thunderbolt have been reaching unprecedented speeds of up to 10 Gbps.

The catch here is that this technology will only be available over short distances like a laptop to a display. This means that the technology will by no means replace current WiFi systems found in routers and computers that can provide data across several rooms. Instead, the WiGig Alliance expects that most homes and businesses will keep their current WiFi set up and simply include pockets of high speed wireless connections for the most used areas of the building or home. Nonetheless, WiFi technology is also looking to improve its range and speed next year by releasing 802.11ac which should be able to reach data transfer rates of 1 Gbps. That means that your home WiFi network might be in line for an upgrade too.

The beauty of this new technology is the fact that it is in a band that is unlicensed. This means there won’t be any large federal hurdles to jump over to make the technology become reality. Also, the wireless technology also has the support of big wigs such as Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, Cisco, Pnasonic, Dell, Toshiba, and more. All of this is an indication that this technology is very likely to stick around. Also, the speeds of this technology allow it to easily transfer large files such as HD video to computers, televisions, and other devices. It’s not much of a stretch to think that in a few years time, most camcorders could download HD footage to a hard drive by merely setting the camcorder near the computer.

The WiGig Alliance expects this technology to saturate the market by 2013 and will start releasing some products as soon as next year. Manufacturers such as Panasonic, Qualcomm, and Wilocity have already announced chipsets and antennas that work using the 60 Ghz technology proving that this technology has a good chance to be the wave of the future.

Every once in a blue moon, there are so many changes in current video technology that I feel it is worth my time to imagine what the future with this technology will be. Now I know it’s usually a rookie error for someone to write about what’s coming in the future since it changes just about every minute of the day, but honestly, it’s too fun not to try.  Besides, when the pace of technology only grows more rapid with time like it has, it’s probably a good idea to throw one’s hands up and realize that time will most definitely make anyone who dares to presume about the future look foolish.

There was a time when a person could buy a piece of technology and expect it to be at the relative top of technological advancements for almost a year, but alas, those days are far behind us. This is not all bad however. Even though I might have to endure buyer’s remorse within a week of having bought a new piece of video equipment, I also know that by the time I buy my next camera or computer I will have already seen the good and the bad of two generations worth of technology. This means that I have a great chance at buying a real solid piece of advanced equipment by the time my old one wears out. Plus, nothing beats that feeling of knowing you finally have the ability to do what others around you have been doing for years. In light of these facts, let’s take a close look at what is coming around the corner in the world of camcorder technology.

Everyone knows that the more megapixels in an image, the sharper and clearer it is. Given these facts it is exciting to note that Canon recently announced that they have developed a sensor that can pick up 120 megapixels of data in one image. This means there is definitely 13,280×9,184 pixel images in our future. With this kind of clarity, you may actually be able to take a picture of the Eiffel tower and zoom it in to see your friend’s face clearly from the top. Unless you’re making a billboard there may not seem to be a valid reason for a 120 megapixel image for now, but with rapid advancements in the space on hard drives, the better question might by why not?

We truly live in an advanced age in which camera companies are putting video functions in their DSLRs. With this revolution, camcorders suddenly went from sensor sizes of 5 mm or less, to sensor sizes of 24-35 mm or more – not to mention the addition of interchangeable lenses. While this has been a real boon to image quality and shallow depth of field capabilities, some camcorder companies are not satisfied with just that. Instead, companies such as RED are making sensors that are 186×56 mm across allowing video shot at 28K and stills shot at a whopping 261 megapixels. Now granted, there are no televisions in the world that can view the entirety of a 28K film and there isn’t even a 28K camera out yet (as RED loves to tease with information well before they actually produce a product) but you can rest assured that the day is coming. Already we’ve seen 4K and QuadHD televisions at tradeshows like CES with resolution so fine that you can count the amount of noodles in the Ramen a man is eating far off in the background of a scene.

Even the camera and camcorder companies are beginning to give us a glimpse into how they see the future. We reported in an earlier blog that Canon believes the future will hold cameras that can go from macro focus to 500 mm zooms all with one lens while taking such high resolution video that you can simply use a frame from the video and zoom and crop it in Photoshop on your computer at a later date. While this sounds fantastical, at the rate that technology is changing now, it’s not hard to imagine that a camera like that is not too far off in the future. Simply put, there seems to be enough demand for higher end products – and technology is quickly catching up. So here’s to hoping that it’s only a matter of time before pictures and video become so high in quality that it almost won’t matter how wide you shoot a scene – it can always be scaled up and cropped later.

For what seemed like ages, wireless technology was either considered too slow or obtrusive for regular use in video workflows. Instead, users were forced to use USB cables, FireWire cables, and recently, to plug their media straight into the computer. While transfer technology has definitely improved over the years with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, there is still a sense of somehow being chained down to the computer. I mean who wouldn’t want to skip an entire step in their video workflow? Enter Eye-Fi and Toshiba. When Eye-Fi introduced their wireless SD card technology back in 2007, they showed every SD card manufacturer that there was a real demand for wireless storage devices. So with Toshiba’s announcement to put together a standard for wireless SDHC memory cards, it finally seems as if the wireless data age has definitely arrived for both stills and video.

Getting rid of the cables would be great, but  in order to be a complete wireless storage solution, Toshiba will have to agree on not only a standard for SD cards (which work on AVCHD camcorders), but also a standard for CF cards (which work on DSLRs). The only real solution to this problem right now is to use a wireless SD card set inside of a CF card adapter. However, if companies can fit a wireless adapter into something as small as an SD card, can you honestly tell me that they can’t also fit one into the much larger form factor of a CF card? It seems like only a matter of time.

At the same time, if you’ve ever hauled around both a monitor and a camera at a run n’ gun shoot for a client, you know just how much of a hassle cables can be. They can get in the way of your controls, trip up both the operator and the client, and drag equipment precisely when you don’t want it to. That is why having an affordable real time wireless video transfer system would be the icing on the wireless cake for video enthusiasts. There are already wireless video transmission solutions for some camcorders, but unless you have a serious amount of cash just lying around and a really expensive camera, they are usually impossible to get. That’s why it would be a huge game changer if companies like Eye-Fi or Toshiba could make wireless storage cards that could monitor video. Maybe with the addition of Toshiba to the wireless storage market, we’ll start seeing these kinds of cards soon. Either way, it’s about time that other manufacturers joined the wireless media revolution. With the advances that result, we may finally be able to put away our cables for good.

Over the last year alone, posting on this very blog has been quite eye opening. One of my favorite experiences has been all of the various new types of technologies that have come out recently. Some of them made me scratch my head, some of them made me think, some of them solved my problems and some of them created new ones. One of the most intriguing of all of these posts, was the story of the “eyeborg.” This was basically a tiny camcorder, that was inserted into somebody’s eye! The long term hope being that it would become attached to a blind person’s brain to see. While the short term plan? Yup, to create a reality tv show.

Another interesting blog came with an editing system called “Tamper” being created by Oblong Industries, a software company that’s is trying to create an entirely new editing work flow and interface…. That is just well, remarkable to say the least. It involves users editing in a fashion more representative of something out of the movie Minority Report rather than a standard NLE. The company is the creator of what they have deemed “g-speak” which is a spatial operating environment, used for a computer program.

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When we hit NAB, there was this feeling in the air that the new & the future will be 3D. Panasonic actually revealed their take on the issue at NAB, and recently I was thinking about how impressive this technology actually is. So I thought that I’d mention the prototype they announced as the Panasonic “3D Full HD” camcorder.

It’s looks crazy and it shoots crazy but will it work?

According to Panasonic, the camera will operate by placing two cameras side by side into a single chassis. Most 3D movies are generally done by mounting two cameras together, so this would be a slight variation with the same idea. The video from both camcorders are then linked together and exported as 3D video.

So I’m not entirely certain if this is a new technology that I’m interested in seeing get developed. Why to be honest? Why should I? What benefit does 3D have? I feel like there is no point, but who am I really… Just a guy that shoots video every single day.