Our school auditorium looked like a presidential press conference or an appearance by Lindsay Lohan.
Last week our elementary school had its spring choir performance. The choir features all grades, with some songs performed by just the older or younger kids. So it shouldn't be surprising that there were a lot of parents with cameras. Maybe it shouldn't even be surprising that there were a lot of parents with camcorders. But I was very surprised to see the number of parents who had their cameras mounted on tripods. Some had the courtesy to stay in the back (maybe to take advantage of power outlets), rubbing elbows with those parents who chose to stand and video the whole performance while relying on the "steady-cam" feature. But there were quite a few parents who just sat down in the 2nd or 3rd row, with the tripod propped up right between their knees.
Now I'm not complaining. No one was blocking my view from 8 rows back (except for the 3-year-old that kept standing on his chair). It's a free country. If someone wants to videotape 60 minutes of a school choir performance featuring their child, then more power to them. It's good for the camcorder industry, and will help drive down prices by the time I'm ready to purchase an HD direct-to-hardrive camcorder. It could also eventually help Sun Microsystems when the video is made available for streaming. Tivo could get a lift from use of their new Home Movie Sharing service. And that means more broadband use that will drive down DSL and Cable prices. Right?
Oh, there is just one thing that has to happen before we can all rejoice as our Google/YouTube stock soars. The video footage has to make it off the camera's tape/mini-DVD/harddisk and onto the computer. That means that all those dads (yes, it was mostly dads) have to find the time to upload an hour's worth of footage to their computer, edit it, add menus and titles, burn DVDs, upload to sharing sites and alert all their relatives and friends so that they can enjoying the 1-hour performance featuring (if you listen very carefully) one 9-year-old kid among 50 K-6th graders. Maybe one day someone will be clever and just charge a small fee to record all school performances and put them on a download site. One camera tripod instead of 30. For those who want their own child highlighted, it's easy enough to splice in close-up footage of a particular kid a few seconds at a time.
Meanwhile, I was content to just sit back in my chair, holding the camera up above my head and using the flip-out viewing screen to zoom in on my girls and their friends for maybe 30 seconds per song. No tripod, no blocked views. True, my camcorder battery was starting to get in the red zone, but I had no intention of video-taping a 60-minute elementary school choir performance. My family certainly wouldn't watch all 60 minutes. And who else would?
My guess: all those tapes will join 30 others sitting in some dad's shoebox waiting for the time when dad has nothing else more pressing to do. No more homework to help with, no more household maintenance backlog, no more episodes of Lost or Heroes to watch on Tivo. I can speak from experience. Only for me it's 15 tapes, not 30. And it's a big cigar box, not a shoebox. And I've given up trying to follow Lost on a weekly basis. I'll wait until I retire, and get the whole 20-season series on Blu-ray. Save the video. Save the world.