There are several levels of effort required to make a good video out of raw footage, even very good raw footage. I am seeing more and more people come through our little tourist town with their hands wrapped around a video camera. Within five years they will be gripping a video camera equal to the one mentioned here for which they paid less than four hundred dollars. Within ten a few of them may even have a grip on the effort required to use that camera and the good cheap video editing software to create a finished looking product. We have access to over five hundred channels of TV at our house today, but there is still nothing to watch. Maybe this revolution presages a day when everything you could dream of and some nightmares too will appear on video accessible to you.

That video will not be delivered via the TV we know today. If we have five hundred channels of dreck today we will have the equivalent of five thousand channels or more within fifteen years. And all of them will have recorded images equal to hundreds of hours to choose from. Most of it will be as bad or worse than current reality TV but there will be pearls among the swine droppings. There will be something for everyone for those who care to glean through the volumes of material available. There will inevitably be ratings services and matching services that offer you the opportunity to find something that matches your taste. So if you picture two million avid amateur videagraphers pumping out material as fast as their multiple cameras can rotate the tape past the heads you will get an idea of the world of fifteen years hence. It is the beginning of a world where the video camera has taken over the function of the typewriter. We will tell our stories with video in the next generation and the process will be cheap and easy. It will have to be because the people using it will be trying to carry out all the functions of a production crew themselves.

Now I have bought one of these new camera's for my own personal use, so beware, I will be lurking out there with the eyes of an avid video creator looking for that embarrassing moment or that odd expression or whatever else makes me press the record button. I will no doubt have hundreds of hours of video of my grandchildren by next year and thousands by the time they grow up. I intend to put every hour of their precocious little lives on video that I can manage. Of course one of them is going to extract some price from me every time I point a camera in her direction, but paying for talent is part of the deal. All of them are cute enough to make a short list of the cutest children alive after all.

Then there are the films I will take of the people in our town of fifty thousand. Ours is a town that doubles in population during the tourist season. My wife has suggested one video documenting the driving habits of the tourists. At the end of every year we could give an award to the most creative law-breaker in the crowd. They range from the mundane red light dashers to the ridiculous left turn from a rightmost lane into a one-way street headed the wrong way. The five-mile an hour creep in a fifty mile per hour zone weaving from lane to lane competition should really draw interest. Then there will be the invisible bad driver competition restricted to people so short that they are looking through the steering wheel and they cannot reach the pedals without extenders. They will have to be driving one of two vehicles, a Lincoln Town Car, or a Cadillac in order to qualify. That will leave my wife's mother and aunts out of the competition and save my life for a little longer. I expect to extract a lot of good fun out of this camera in the time I have to spend using it, in between home improvement projects. Come to think of it I could learn to use the remote and tape myself too, hmmm. God bless you all and keep you safe from all of the mad, mad, mad videographers among us.