The advancements in both in-home and theatrical exhibition are very impressive indeed. We've seen home televisions get bigger, sharper and certainly brighter with more color reproduction. But these also have introduced engineering feats and marketing strategies that don't necessarily help the exhibition of our narrative work, such as motion interpolation and sharpening, which impede the audience's ability to suspend disbelief. We've seen remarkable laser projection and emissive screens in theaters that are so bright and have so much contrast that there's fantastic shadow detail down to almost absolute black. This brightness has increased the amount of judder seen in the highlights, which then necessitates the use of forms of motion interpolation, which again hampers the audience's ability to suspend disbelief. These "advancements" all fit into the arena of "just because you can doesn't mean you should."

We as cinematographers, imagemakers and storytellers, are usually included now in the testing and evaluating these new developments. We fought our way in over the years starting in the early 1990s with the standards setting body called the Advisory Committee On Advanced Television Services, who didn't want creatives to have anything to do with the process. After that we formed the ASC Technology Committee and Digital Cinema Initiative, a studio consortium that partnered with the ASC to create the first standardized testing material (STEM) so that when a demonstration of new technology was introduced, we knew how the screened material was produced and prepared for our scrutiny. This has done a great deal to help us know how to evaluate whatever we were looking at. The ASC Technology Committee, which was formed under my presidency in 2002, is now called the ASC Motion Imaging Technology Council (MITEC), which has developed into a very important and active entity. Other organizations have jumped in with us in these developments as well; The Motion Picture Scientific & Technical committee, SMPTE, National Theater Owners, Hollywood Production Alliance, The Advanced Imaging Society and others. Now, the MITEC, DCI and others are in the beginning process of developing STEM2 to meet the changing digital landscape of exhibition.

All of this is terrific. However, every now and then entities decide to make recommendations about how we will work in the future without taking into consideration any of the processes we, the creatives, partake in to provide the world with the entertainment that the marketplace craves.

One such entity is called Movie Labs, a technology research lab jointly run by Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Walt Disney Pictures and Television and Warner Bros. Entertainment. This group produced a white paper called "The Evolution of Media Creation - A 10-year Vision For The Future Of Media Production, Post And Creative Technologies," available at https://movielabs.com. As well-intentioned and as inspirational as this document purports to be, it serves as a warning and call to action for every below-the-line creative position - including production designers, art directors, cinematographers, costume designers, editors, and colorists - to demand that they be involved in the design and implementation of new production technologies. The studios and above-the-line talent have built their fortunes relying upon a creative process that they only vaguely understand. In preserving our crafts through this technical change, we will also be saving them from themselves.

Let the buyer beware!