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MillimeterMedium Matters
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
Every year, Sundance gets a little more wired as the digital media on the streets begins to rival the screening theaters. People tote camcorders and cell phone cameras in the street. They text. They blog. They drive up Main Street in trucks with video side panels. This year Sprint will send video updates to cell phones. The crowds in Park City are perpetually sharing Sundance with their virtual posse in realtime and gathering ammunition for their imagined future audiences. Networking — always a staple of Sundance — takes on a whole new meaning. The Verizon commercials have it right: You're only as good as your network.
We'll be blogging there too. We don't go to a lot of screenings, or parties; we don't talk to actors much. Our beat is, of course, the technical panels, the digital projection booths, and the Digital Media Center (this year renamed with a kind of back-to-the-future flourish as the Film Center).
There the forums include mobile technology, podcasting, “finding your audience in the thousand-channel universe,” WiMAXX — all topics that seem particularly relevant as the line between the screen and the street becomes ever more porous — not just in Park City but everywhere. There will also be workshops — 444 RGB HD/DI, XDCAM, HDCAM-SR, to name just a few (without using any actual words). We'll go to Film Church and Filmmaker Lodge and hope for a glimpse of Neil Young. We'll talk to filmmakers who are among the dozens who shot HD instead of film, or used DI instead of lab timing.
This blog — our third (previously we covered NAB and did a video blog for Siggraph) — is part of a continuing expansion of our online mission. Starting March 1, we will gather the online resources of Millimeter, Video Systems, and some of our other AV sister pubs under a common banner: digitalcontentproducer.com. We're designing this hub site with two things in mind. First, we're responding to dramatic changes in the industry itself, of which the Sundance scene is just one example. More practically, we have had five years to observe how our online readers use our site. Those metrics have helped us understand how to build for maximum usefulness and how to create and deploy content the way people want to use it.
Personally, as a nearly lifelong journalist (I made my first magazines in third grade…), I can say that this change is one of the most exciting of my career. It takes our company's investment in our web infrastructure to the next level, allowing us to better respond to our world and to be of service. Those are the actual reasons I'm a journalist, and I know that when it comes to communicating, the medium matters.
