Dodging Falling Dinosaurs

Every so often, Raph pops up and reminds us that yes, he does actually know what he’s talking about.

Go read; but don’t think he’s talking about the future. Most of what he’s describing (collapse of PC gaming distribution channels, the budgetary version of Mutual Assured Destruction) is the present.

About 15 years ago (dear Cthulhu I’m old) I used to dabble in video production. Back then, the “Big Iron” dominated that market too. Video production companies had huge investments in massive, mostly analog systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I helped set up an advertising agency that did the same thing, on a Macintosh that didn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with a few Frankenstinian-level video editing addons and gewgaws. Where the “Big Iron” companies charged huge hourly fees for professional level video production, we cranked out the stuff for FREE – the real money, after all, was in placing the resulting exclusive ads that were produced.

Five years later our wacky Frankenstein project was the industry standard. Funny how things change.

(By the way, if you work on digital video today, pity our little Frankenbox – since hard drives of the day couldn’t import broadcast-quality video at 30fps, we had to get it digitized the hard way – one steenkin frame at a time. Took 14 hours for 20 minutes of footage, which saved out as a then-mindblowing “entire gigabyte!!1” of file storage. Nowadays my phone makes that look sad. My phone does better video. I have a PC hooked to my TV that digitizes video on the fly so I can watch the Daily Show when I feel like it. Things change.)