The next step for home video
In the past twenty years, big steps have been made in the enhancement to motion pictures, and how we view them. Movies, even in the eighties, looked like movies. They looked like they were not real, and this was due to quality of film, lack of technology in the post production realm, and techniques for filmmaking. Those factors made for a �not so real� picture on the big screen, but when you bought a VHS tape and brought it home, the quality was even worse, and it was two channel audio, and the aspect ration was off; it was a horrible way to view movies.
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Many formats and processes were created to make the movie experience better. One that almost caught on was laser disk. These disks were huge though, and you could not fit much video on one disk. Finally around 1997, DVD was introduced. Digital Versatile Disk or Digital Video Disk, depending on whom you ask is great because you can fit 4.7 gigabytes of data on a single disk, and the video is encoded in MPEG-2, which the file sizes are small enough so that you can have exceptional quality and still fit it on a disk. Plus, DVD can allow up to 7.1 surround sound. If you are not familiar with sound, that is 7 speakers all around you and 1 subwoofer. DVD can support more but for two reasons, a. most people do not have that many speakers, and b. the DVD�s audio track will become so large the movie quality will start to suffer, so it is best for the standard to be 5.1 surround.
DVD has really changed the way we view movies. Finally there are DVD recorders. Like optical media though, it is difficult to record to them on the fly. With a VHS, you could stick it in, and hit record, but with a DVD you can�t stop the recording, you have to close out the session, and unless it is rewritable, you can�t write to that disk again. So there are solutions that will be developed to make this possible. DVD gives you great quality and if the medium for viewing the movies has great quality, then filmmakers have to increase the quality for which they shoot, edit, and duplicate.
The future of watching movies it soon approaching. As soon as DVD got its foothold in the market, companies like Phillips, Hitachi, and Sony announce they have been developing a new format called Blue Ray. The main difference between blue ray and DVD is blue ray disks use a blue laser with a different type of ink that allows up to 20 gigabytes of data on a single disk. The disks essentially look the same. This will allow for the quality of movies to be even better. Not to mention, we will be able to back up serious data then. Hard drive companies are announcing 500 gigabyte disks, which means you could use 500 Cds. 100 DVDs or 25 of these blue ray disks. This is going to revolutionize how we get and store media. All we need now if 50gb disks. I give it 10 years.
