(exciting music) - [Mason] This is a camera.

- [Mark] This was a camera.

I'm Mark.

- [Mason] I'm Mason.

- [Paul] I'm Paul.

We've each made videos with VPM for over 35 years.

- [Mark] The TV technology we use locally has really changed over the decades.

For instance, cameras used to be big, heavy, and extremely expensive.

- [Paul] Now they can be tiny, and a really nice camera is affordable.

- [Mark] Today's cameras are digital.

A digital picture is made up of a lot of pixels, each representing a color, like in a mosaic.

The number of pixels in a digital picture keep increasing, so pictures look better and better.

- [Paul] Before digital was the norm, cameras were analog.

An electronic signal carried brightness and color information and was sent to a cathode ray tube, which used scan lines to recreate a picture.

- [Mason] Today's cameras, even the camera on your phone, have an image size, or resolution, like this.

35 years ago, this was the image of a high quality studio camera.

This camera can create an image this big.

- [Paul] And with a fish eye lens on each side, it can record a 360 degree view.

It can record about an hour of 5K video on this micro SD card.

- [Mark] In the past, video was recorded on analog tape.

One of these holds less video information than one of these.

- [Paul] In the early days of TV, videotape was edited by cutting the tape with a razor blade and then Scotch taping pieces together.

It was so difficult to get right, most people avoided it.

- [Paul] So TV programs were usually recorded live to tape.

If an actor messed up during recording, it usually stayed that way.

- [Mark] Later, video was edited with tape machines.

One machine would play video into another machine that would then record it.

It was all about pushing buttons at the right moment.

Things didn't always sync up and tape glitches often happened.

- [Paul] Eventually, simple computers were used to control multiple tape machines.

Time code recorded on each videotape provided a way to synchronize machines and make precise edits.

But there was still little that could be done to a video image, other than change the color some or move some boxes around the screen.

- [Mason] In the mid 1990s, the analog world became digital.

First, there were digital tapes.

- [Mark] Video was digitized into desktop computers, and video could be edited non-destructively, much like typing and editing a Word document.

- [Paul] Computers evolved and the ways video and pictures were manipulated multiplied.

- [Mason] Now, much of this can be done on a phone.

- [Paul] 35 years ago, working at a local TV station, we were limited by technology.

- [Mason] Today in the multimedia world- - [Paul] If we can imagine it, we can pretty much make it.

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