Digital Video Production

Legendarily successful filmmaker George Lucas forecast years ago that digital methods of movie making will come to supplant, if not altogether replace, traditional film-based methods. During the course of the first decade of the 21st century he has been proven correct. The low cost, predictability, and ease of video production editing made possible with digital movies has been an invaluable asset to the independent and low-budget filmmaker. At the same time, its many new possibilities for creative special effects have earned digital video respect and wide use in Hollywood.

During the last decade, a number of respected directors have experimented with digital film-making. From Spike Lee's Bamboozled, to David Lynch's slow-paced yet harrowing Inland Empire, these experiments have been largely successful. At this point, digital techniques are taught in almost any film making school--from the community college, to the prestigious Chicago arts school. Whether you aspire to be an independent film maker, or merely a specialist in video production, digital techniques are going to be a key component of video production training.

Advantages of Digital Video Production

One of the main technical advantages of digital video production is its predictability. If you're using traditional 16 or 35mm film stock to shoot your movie, you're not going to be able to see what the scenes you shoot look like until you get the film developed. This is a process that requires access to a specialized lab and can take many days, depending on how easy it is to acquire this access.

Plus, with traditional camera film, every kind of stock is different. To be even remotely to control the final product, a film maker needs to have intimate knowledge of what kind of stock he or she is using. While some film makers find it fascinating to think about the chemical composition and light-sensitivity of different types of stock, others want to skip the preliminaries and start telling their story.

With digital video, trained cinematographers can see what they're filming as they're filming it. High-end digital equipment can display the scene being filmed, in addition to important statistics about light and color balance in the shot, as well as any focusing tools that are being used. This makes digital video production significantly easier, and, often, less costly.

However, perhaps the most celebrated advantage of digital video among artists is the immense amount of control it offers during the editing process. Computers make ordinarily complicated tasks of video production editing easy and fast. Although it's possible to convert a 35mm or 16mm film into a digital format to allow for computer-aided editing, the process is expensive. With digital video, the powerful editing tools once available only to large studios enter the hands of individual artists.

Digital Video Skills You'll Learn In Film Making School

At any digital film production training program, you'll learn to use digital video equipment in conjunction with the most up-to-date industry-standard video production editing software. Many of your classes will be taught from within actual digital production labs.