172 Chapter 8 Video
For most of the twentieth century, the creation of “motion pictures,” whether film or
video, was a restricted specialty demanding teams of skilled professionals and expensive
equipment. Home movie cameras and camcorders gave amateurs little more than a
tempting entrée to the world of video. To be sure, they could capture moving images;
but raw video is exactly that—it is only with the revision and refinement of editing that
a video “draft” becomes a memorable message. And analog editing was expensive and
complex. Few non-professionals had the skills or the resources to create effective analog
video.
As in all media, the computer transformed video and film, adding expressive pos-
sibilities that were impossible ...