Categories

[ADBest]

This is a pretty fundamental question and certainly belongs in the ‘rookie’ section.

In one or two posts recently I have seen reference to ‘films’, ‘A/V presentations’ and ‘Sequences’.

Could someone please define these categories.

Arthur

[Dave Watterson]

Hi Arthur

Thanks for bringing this up. We all tend to drop into the use of jargon forgetting that it is not familiar to everyone. Sorry.

These days "film" is used for the sort of moving pictures we see in cinemas or on television. They are usually created on digital video now and stored on tape, hard drive or memory card. But there are still people using the older chemical film formats like 9.5mm, 8mm, super-8mm and even 16mm. Those are strips of light-sensitive plastic which have to be developed in chemical baths before you can see the images stored on them.

When we want to distinguish between video and those older formats, we refer to the old forms as "cine".

AV or "audio-visual" or "diaporama" is an art form which starts with still photography. In the past it used two slide projectors, linked to a tape recorder playing a soundtrack. The slides were changed and - crucially - blended so that two images came together to create a third image. (Sometimes several projectors were used and such extra images might consist of several different still pictures.) In the "cine" days, AV offered much higher quality of image and sound than moviemakers could achieve.

Nowadays the AV world has gone digital. Most new cameras record images digitally. There are special projectors and computer programs which can combine those digitals still pictures just like the old slide projectors did ... and often much faster or more subtly.

An AV presentation is called a "sequence" since it presents a set of still images in sequence.

Does that make sense? It is difficult to devise a formal definition of all those things. Maybe other people could suggest better ones.
-Dave

[ADBest]

Dave

Thanks for the very prompt reply.

Would I be correct if I said that anything that started life as a moving image is a 'film' and any thing that started life as a still image is an 'AV production' and if this 'AV production' is then processed by a computer it becomes a 'sequence'?

Not an important issue but I read all the web site traffic and find it a good way to steadily increase my understanding. The more technical stuff that I don't understand may be left to dawn as I gain in knowledge.

Arthur

[Brian Saberton]

Hi Arthur

You've nearly got it. I'm afraid some of the terminology can be a bit confusing - especially the use of the word "sequence" which is also used to refer to a section within a film, rather than the whole movie. In Audio Visual terminology a "sequence" is the complete production.

As you rightly say, anything produced as a moving image is commonly referred to as a film.

Individual photographs produced on a digital still camera can be edited using software packages into an Audio Visual sequence where a soundtrack can be added. The common factor between film and AV is that they can both be transfered to DVD and played on a TV or projected onto a large screen using a standard digital projector.

I hope this helps