DMN: Where would you like to improve this system? What do you think really needs some work between now and the next version of it? What is the main thing you want to change and improve?

Chiolis: We think we've nailed the camera pretty much right on the head. I just got a new one in from the factory about two days ago, with new features on it, so I'm actually excited to go shooting with it here the next few days. One of the things they added to it is a focus crawler. One of the issues that everybody has been complaining about with the electronic capture is it's not a piece of optical ground glass that I can precisely focus on. The quality of the viewfinders are not quite there yet. They're getting better, and we've added a couple of things into ours that we think make them superior. One is that I can instantly double the zoom rate, electronically in my viewfinder. I can go in, focus up and then release it, and all I've done is just electrically, in the viewfinder, zoomed the image.

DMN: That's a good idea, where you haven't actually zoomed the lens itself.

Chiolis: You don't have to touch anything, you don't have to worry about getting back to the point where you were before. It's just this electronic zoom you can focus and move on. The other thing that we just implemented in this version is the focus crawler. When you nail the focus on, you'll see the edges of things move. It allows you to know you're at the best possible focus. Exposure is done either with a light meter, or we have zebra in the viewfinder. When you see the zebra come on, you want a little bit of zebra, and you're good to go. There are a couple of different ways you can set your exposure if you're not going to have a monitor on the set.

I think where we'd like to see improvement is in the finishing process as well as the archive process. It's still a little cumbersome because there's an immense amount of data. And, what are you going to archive the finished product on? Do you shoot it back out to film? Archive it on hard drive? On Data tape? Do you archive just the finished product, or the entire shoot? What do you want to do with it?

DMN: You almost wish you had a super DVD that could store a terabyte, don't you?

Chiolis: And that's a possibility, too. I think in the future, some sort of optical disk like a DVD is a really good idea for that.

DMN: I think you're right. I think that will be the ultimate solution to that problem.

Chiolis: Right. The size is excellent, they're fairly inexpensive -- it's just a matter of getting the density of the storage, and the read speed faster, and then we'll be there.

DMN: We'll probably be seeing that two or three years from now, you think?

Chiolis: Yeah, I would think that's probably a good time frame for that. In the meantime, we have to figure out how we want to preserve all this.

DMN: You need something for now, though.

Chiolis: Yes, you do. So for right now, a couple of projects have been backed up on D6 Data tape, I've backed a couple up on USB-2 drives, and I've backed another one up on a RAID-3 disk array.

DMN: You have all the current storage systems covered at this point?

Chiolis: Yes. We would have done DVD, but I would have ended up with a stack of DVDs, and that gets a little cumbersome. I like this 120GB USB-2 drive. And somebody just announced a 400GB USB-2 drive. Obviously it's not ready for delivery, but they think they can deliver in the next six months, it's 7200 RPM, 400 gigs.

DMN: And it'll probably cost $500.

Chiolis: (laughs) That's a scary thought. Because when you start getting down to a buck-a-gig, you're in the range of tape. And that's another discussion we've had -- "OK, in twenty years, what's going to be easier to remove the data from?" Is it going to be a piece of tape, where I have to go hunt down a machine, and see if that machine, A) Works, and B), still will be able to play back this tape that wasn't recorded on it. How is my interchange on the tape?

DMN: You'll have to make a visit to the local museum.

Chiolis: Right. Or, is it a hard drive that is self-contained and has some standard mechanism that I'm going to plug into a computer or server, and I assume as long as my bearings haven't rusted out, I'll be able to get the data off in some form or another. So that's another ongoing discussion.

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