Content Production Technologies

6

Recap and the Future

Haruo Hiki

This chapter summarizes Chapters 1 to 5 and at the same time looks at future developments. In addition, some items are approached from a different aspect in order to facilitate understanding.

Throughout the chapters of this book the authors have clearly described the technologies and standards related to content production using archives – a new environment for content production. The digitization of production can now be considered as certain, and various methods for content production have been introduced and more will appear as time passes. So, we have to encompass these new methods firmly and utilize them properly. In a digital world there will be tremendous possibilities as long as we resolve the issues we are now facing.

Figure 6.1 shows the analog world and the digital world. The analog world is very familiar to humans because almost all our interfaces with the world are analog, like sounds, still-images, movies, etc. We live in an analog world. A few examples of analog equipment are shown in this figure. The digital world, on the other hand, is not easy to visualize. Some say it consists of zeros and ones; others say it comprises two electrical states: on and off. Although these interpretations are correct, the problem of visualizing the digital world still remains. Here we make no attempt to explain it in detail. We can see some of the benefits of the digital world in the right-hand side of the figure. Thanks to two electrical states, ...