editor's view

Judging our yearly NAB Best in Show Digital Video Black Diamond Awards isn’t pretty. We shut our editors, writers and tech experts in a windowless room, bury them in brochures and spec sheets, and feed them nothing but Twizzlers and diet soda. Despite the Twizzlers hangover, every year I am excited about the discoveries made on the NAB Show exhibit floor and the technological innovations these products reflect. I love the moment when a judge extracts something from a backpack pocket and says, “Can you believe nobody thought of this before?” These are the innovations we think will allow you to work faster and smarter.

As you know, I love to see how the role of video is expanding and evolving in our everyday lives. This could mean video as art—like the works from Greg Barth, Diana Thater and the creative minds at KLIP Collective —or it could mean video as science, like the videos being produced on the International Space Station (see dv.com/space for some of my favorites).

I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t force someone working on our magazine to stop what they’re doing and watch an insanely great video. That could mean anything from a tribute to the city of New Orleans shot by Bill and Turner Ross (Tchoupitoulas) for the NFL, to Sivu’s music video filmed inside an MRI, to “Choros,” a short film by Michael Langan that uses a “digital echo” technique to create a complicated, choreographed sequence of 32 dancers using only one performer.

I was sitting at the dog park with some friends and we were discussing the high-frame-rate 3D used for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. This was one of the first times I could remember—maybe even since the release of Titanic—that something that was incredibly interesting to me was even mildly interesting to people not in my universe … otherwise known as the real world. (My dog park friends have a median age of 70. I’m not kidding—Cloris Leachman is the unofficial mayor of this park.) This time around, literally everyone and his Bubbe has an opinion.

HFR 3D is now in the real world, not just the province of people who follow sensor size, 4K content or RED’s development cycle .

I think you’ll be interested in Witness, HBO’s four-part documentary series that follows photojournalists working in conflict zones, covering drug trafficking, poverty, gang violence, corruption and ethnic warfare.

I’d like you visit www.halftheskymovement.org for some education—and inspiration—but also for a sense of how you can work across multiple platforms.

Working in video production, there are a lot of processes: You’re recording, ingesting, rendering, encoding, transcoding, uploading. You’re evaluating capabilities, compatibilities and configurations. That’s what it is to be a video professional.

You know I’m a big proponent of continuing education, from a lecture at a local museum or a screening at a film festival (yes, even the Internet Cat Video Film Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on Aug. 30—mark your calendars!) to webinars and hands-on training. Techniques and technologies develop and evolve pretty much every five minutes, meaning there’s always something new to watch or read or learn.

In this issue, we congratulate our 2012 Digital Video All Stars, a group of video professionals we’re recognizing for their passion and creativity, as well as their ongoing commitment to the production community. The editors of Digital Video magazine and DV.com agree that the creative efforts of these pros consistently produce innovative, uncommon results, and you can read about their accomplishments and achievements starting here.

Digital Video Expo Comes to New York

If you’re paying attention, you’re familiar by now with some of my obsessions: time-lapse videos captured in Iceland and Norway, images from the International Space Station, experimental video installations

Even if you didn't know anything about the making of Act of Valor, I think you'd like it—it has everything a viewer could want in an action-adventure movie: a nuclear submarine surfacing while Navy SEALs are dropped from helicopters onto its bridge; a remote African airstrip where villains meet to exchange money and weapons; and a pre-mission briefing where the senior officer starts with, "Look, these guys are total a**holes."