Some of the most popular discussions and concerns in television these days deal with the potential impact of recently introduced digital compression technologies. This discussion typically ignores the fact that a number of digitally based television enhancements have been with us for many years. One of the very successful early forms was digital graphics. The initial units allowed graphic artists to create still frame text and graphic overlays very quickly and accurately. The early graphics units were essentially limited to stills and frame by frame renditions for program titles, commercials and similar content. Over time, substantially enhanced versions of digital graphics systems have eliminated paint and brushes as tools of the trade at many television studios. The reasons are obvious. Digital graphics can render very consistent, high quality images much faster than hand created art. The digital graphic development work also paved the way for techniques to manipulate and thereby animate graphic images. As more exotic methods evolved, the industry devised ways to capture, merge and manipulate portions of real and graphic generated images on a frame by frame basis. These expanded capabilities are showing up as entirely new forms of film and video. Some of the most successful artists in film and television have learned to merge real and fantasy worlds in exciting new ways. It has become clear that modern graphics systems based upon digital technology have spawned very successful new industry segments while nearly eliminating the labor intensive hand crafted forms of video art. There are likely parallels between the transitions to digital based graphic arts and other more recent transitions to digital in the video industry. The graphic arts changes did not take place over-night, but rather evolved over a period of many years. A number of very successful film and video organizations have emerged as a result of their pioneering uses of digital graphics. A large number of organizations who were slow to invest in digital graphics are no longer in business.
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