Desktop Video
I was commissioned by Federal Publishing in 1989 to write a book about the emergence of desktop video. Naturally the Commodore Amiga was the centrepiece to illustrate how graphics and animation were now being made on a PC and could connect to the broadcast world. Of course the more cynical view was this was the perfect promo for the Amiga. But for me this was the chance to crystalise my ideas and learnings (how much can you really know at 18 anyhow?). I slaved over it and fudged my way through, whilst making up my own technical interpretations on broadcast conventions and production processes. Heck, all I'd done was a home made High School video up to that point. But I understood enough to draw simplistic diagrams for people who knew less than me. No doubt Desktop Video spread misinformation out into the world to aspiring video artists, educators and students confusing them even more.
It was quite ironic that the whole publishing process was done on a Mac and printed out and photocopied to create bromides ready for the printer. What was promised to be a book, ended up as a special edition 'magazine.' sold at newsagents. Fortunately it sold well and got me some teaching gigs and nerdy interviews in niche computer rags where I was able to spread my self taught technical know-how even further. All along I kept thinking there must be someone who knows how to do this stuff properly. But it turned out, I never met that person. But I reckon they were probably in California starting Pixar.
Apart from writing the text for Desktop Video, I was also responsible to do the illustrations and source the images. The diagrams were done in MacPaint and Mac Draw and later imported into Aldus Pagemaker as I laid out the book. But the real problem was finding graphics work done on the Amiga. Any Amiga freaks I knew via Bulletin Board chat rooms were playing games, designing games or ray tracing wine goblets. I was so short on images that I did feature a wine goblet in the book.
With no images, I starting creating some, most of which had no merit except for the merit of effort. With fortunate timing I acquired a scanner via a review I did for a magazine. I gave it a good review in and kept it. In reality if I was to give it a proper review then it would have been one star - verging on useless. The scanner's size was a bit smaller than a 6x4 photograph which meant scanning a single piece of A4 paper required about five scans and an hour of piecing it all together. If you wanted to do a descreen scan (take out the dot pixels in printed material) then you better set it off and wait until the morning. Despite these drawbacks, the scanner allowed me to scan other people's work - which looked much better than mine,. I then reworked it to 'make it mine'. I figured Andy Warhol built a career out of that. Of course a desktop scanner was really part of the zeitgeist of creativity of the time. Around the same time samplers became affordable for musicians. James Brown's Funky Drummer loop was being sampled by everyone (including me), Sampling was a sound and defined a solid five years of music before record companies clamped down on copyright. My generation really should be called the Copy and Paste Generation. Meanwhile, I was happily scanning my way through art history. But as it turns the publisher took a different view on my copyright infringement. So I was forced to go back and scan my own photographs. I may have taken photographs of other's people's photographs as well, but I will deny that.
Select pages from Desktop Video 1990
While writing the book some significant technology became available. I was lucky to get early access to Beta tech such as the NewTech Video Toaster which made the integration to video much more powerful and foreshadowed non linear editing in future years. Also the OpalVision video card produced 16 million colours which was a game changer. for a desktop system. Now you could make color gradients without banding and scans actually looked like the original. The video card cheated the natural low resolution of the computer to make thing look sharper, clearer and more vibrant. This was tech that was only available to main frame systems or expensive broadcast systems like Quantel's Paintbox, or Silicon Graphics workstations up to that point. All this on an Amiga computer!? Apple was dead in the water! Sadly, to prove their point the team at OpalVision used all 16 million colours at once on their print advertising but neglected to make a phone call to a designer in the process..
Of course the Beta tech barely worked but you could glimpse the future. A future with no limit on colour. A future with no limit on resolution. Could it be true?
No is the answer. We are still limited on colour and resolution. We will never have enough memory or processing power. We simply imagine things that computers cannot realise in real time. For creative work they are so much more powerful than decades gone by. But fundamentally, computers are too slow for us. Plus the printer never works. Alas, we are destined to watch a progress bar for the rest of our lives while the computer works out what we want.
