Ben Syverson, creator of the wonderful, powerful and (best-of-all) affordable DVMatte plug-in for After Effects, posted some comments recently on the DVGarage forums about eliminating the need for videotape in his video shoots. In fact, he said he recently shot for six hours with no tape in the camera, recording footage directly to his iBook's hard drive.
Running Final Cut Pro, I just shot directly to the hard drive. At first I was also shooting tape, but after a while, I realized there was no reason. After you capture a clip, it pops up and you can instantly review it and figure out if you need to do another take -- no more switching to VTR mode, rewinding, watching, then requeuing. This saves you hard disk space (since you only need to save the good takes) and time (since you don't need to log and capture your footage when it's done). You can even start a rough cut on set! I shot for about six hours with the PB, and only filled up 6gb (about half an hour).I really believe that we are entering a time when the barriers to generating big ideas, capturing those ideas in a camera, manipulating those images and broadcasting them to an audience are fast becoming obsolete. Actually, we may already be there.
I tell you what, I'm really jonesing to jump back to the Mac world. I've been stuck in Wintel land for far too long. Stories like this don't help. Those new iBooks are so stinking cool.
Also, Ben points out this freeware app for OS X that will let you use for DV tapes (that you don't need for videotaping anymore!) as a data back-up destination.
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