Over the next five years we can expect dramatic change in all levels of capturing content. This was the overall opinion from a panel of industry experts at the recent Digital Hollywood Conference that took place in Hollywood, California. They emphasized that Intellectual Property laws will change significantly and tape, while currently used extensively in television production, will be replaced by other digital capturing mediums that will allow it to be instantly published anywhere.

“The Holy Grail today is the move toward High Definition,” says Kenneth Yas marketing development manager from Grass Valley. Yas went on to say that the substantial investment in High Definition would keep it as the preferred medium of the future. Producer John Dietsch believes that consumers will want to view more content on small portable devices and that the lower cost of standard definition will keep it as an option for the immediate future in capturing content. “We’re going for smaller screens,” says Dietsch.

Tomas Ohanian, VP of Product Management at Signiant says that time is moving much more quickly. He indicated that it used to  take approximately 12 months to make a feature, and now that time has been shrunk to 7 months. “”Everything is just shrinking or (your could say) accelerating,” says Ohanian. 

Other panelists include Steve Jacobs, VP of Sony, Bernie Laramie, CEO of Mos Sync, Inc, Ben Weinberger, CEO of Digitalsmiths and moderator Joel Ordesky, from Wexler Video. The title of the session was “Imagining the Digital Future of Film and TV Production – Tools & Technologies to liberate the Imagination. Ordesky asked the group to discuss “were content creation is going to be in the next five years.”  Most agreed that the future is really about choice. The consumer is changing and its about intelligently using technology to give them variable options to satisfy their needs.

This was just one of many terrific sessions put on by Digital Hollywood Los Angeles. To find out more about Digital Hollywood Conferences check out their website at www.digitalhollywood.com.