Libraries are going the route of the the corner video store in choosing to circulate DVDs and phase out VHS tapes.
In Arizona, the Chandler Library is purchasing DVDs and the Friends are selling donated VHS tapes at their booksales.
But are our libraries, already strapped for cash, buying into a playback platform that’s here to stay…or are we finding ourselves in a remake of the 80’s VHS v. Betamax battle? News stories about next-gen DVDs are here and here .
found this out the hard way
when, over thanksgiving, we tried to find head-cleaners/alcohol for our car TV/VCR combo. Not at the video store, nor Circuit City. Luckily our media guy here has a stash.
VHS still works
I know that at church we still stick with VHS for filming. Why? Such is much more settled as a platform and has little disruption. For our purposes it makes little sense if we are filming services for “shut-ins” to see if we give them something complex to handle. Popping in a VHS tape and starting playback is sufficiently simple. Requiring those either not feeling the best or are under the care of nursing home staff to navigate DVD menus works against us.
DVD is nice. VHS is not yet done, I think.
Platform war?
No platform war on the DVD front: That was avoided, thanks to some lobbying by computer manufacturers (who convinced Sony’s consortium and Toshiba’s consortium to merge their competing formats). There simply is no “Betamax vs. VHS” comparison; the two sides compromised.
Platform war for the high-definition next-generation playback medium? You betcha. But both Blu-Ray and HI-DVD will play regular DVDs. So no problem with forward compatibility. It’s still possible that the Toshiba/Matsushita group or the Sony group will blink, but Blu-Ray (Sony’s higher-quality, as usual, offering) is already on the Japanese market in recordable form.
Sticking with VHS? Good luck. With recordable DVD getting cheap (this Saturday, the local CompUSA will be selling 100, count them, 100 DVD-R or DVD+R blanks for $20, and the drives are already pretty cheap as well–tried to buy $0.20 blank videocassettes?), there really isn’t any future for DVD. It’ll stick around for a while, but (unlike LPs) there aren’t even any plausible “it’s really BETTER quality” claims. Try to buy a name-brand VCR two years from now that isn’t sourced from China with the nameplate slapped on: Unlikely. Try to buy the only high-quality VHS format (S-VHS) two years from now: Ditto. It’ll be around for a while, but it’s dying slowly.
Re:Platform war?
I use S-VHS for editing at the local cable station. They started providing DVD-R this year, they’ve been doing digital editing for several years now. I’m still learning the new stuff but this time next year I imagine I’ll be doing digital only.
The only thing that makes me hesitate in agreeing is that going digital involves a lot of equipment and software upgrades. VHS editing doesn’t require a computer and digital video requires serious computer power, a $500 jobby won’t cut it. I’ve made the mistake before of assuming that every library in our area is as up to speed as ours when in fact they’re 4-5 years behind. Is every local broadcast station in a position to do this, every college with a video department?
Re:Platform war?
Technically, digital video editing should no more require a general-purpose computer than VHS editing. I haven’t done any–I’m not a “creative person” in the video realm–but various reviews by people I trust (spec. Jan Ozer in PC Magazine and elsewhere) suggest that modestly-priced video editing programs and almost any midrange contemporary PC (not a “$500 jobby” but certainly the $1,500 units we’d consider bargains a few years ago) should be able to handle editing at least as well as, and probably better than, VHS editing without specialized equipment.
Fundamentally, every $1,000+ PC on the market today has “serious computer power”–a 3+GHz Pentium-4 (or the Mac equivalent), 1GB RAM (probably the only special requirement, and RAM is cheap these days), 250GB hard disk, and multiformat DVD burner would still be in the $1,500 range. (Or, more likely, someone with serious editing interests would pay $2K-$2,500 and get a system with a RAID-0 array of hard disks for even faster access, and possibly 500GB-1TB of storage. Sure, that’s serious computing power, but power has gotten cheap, and–as Roy Tennant says–mass storage is cheaper than dirt.)
In any case, isn’t the input going digital at least as fast as the output? Today’s digicams are so much smaller, lighter weight, and higher quality than yesterday’s videocams that they seem likely to replace analog videotaping for most purposes fairly rapidly, particularly since they’re down to reasonable prices as well. (Actually, you *can* edit digital video without a computer, working directly from a digicam to another digicam or a DVD burner, but it’s the worst possible way to edit, like editing directly from a videocamera to a VCR.)
Caveat again: I don’t actually do video editing. But everything I’ve read says that non-linear editing of digital video, the stuff you really want to do, is much easier and cheaper than you’d expect.
Re:Platform war?
We use high quality digital videocameras that use mini DV digital video cassettes (they’re about 3/4 the length of an audiocassette and twice the width). The quality is incredible and the input is realtime. The cameras cost $4-5000, an unpleasant thought that comes to me everytime I sign one out.
When I went in to edit last week the staff actually attached a secondary drive in order to keep projects off the main computer. Its a Mac with Mac software (can’t remember what it is). It comes down to scale. The bigger the project your working on the more space it takes and processing speed it requires to jump around from clip to clip. Its definitly easier then ever before but how much you pony up decides how many times you crash the program while your working. I think I crashed about 5 times and learned after the first time to save religously.