How things change

I was working over the weekend at a facility that has a fibre infrastructure that looks like it was done by people who lack opposable thumbs! They want an assessment of how easy it will be for them to move up to a four gig Avid Unity. Anyhow - while there I spotted this BKSTS poster about film formats - I was tickled by the how assured the authors were of film's future as an origination format.

Film is the ideal origination format for HDTV

Which I suppose was true up to a couple of years ago if resolution was your only concern - film has poor motion rendition compared to video but it does have more detail.
The day before I was having a coffee with my good chum Dan Sassen - chief engineer at Envy. He told me an interesting thing - apparently Arri UK have just taken delivery of seven extra D20 digital cameras to service the requirements of the European film production community - they now have fourteen of those cameras for hire. Fantastic you might think - digital cinematography takes another leap forward - clearly the demand to shoot at 4k has doubled in the last year or so. However - compare this to the number of pre-orders for the Red camera - 11,000 (in case you were wondering!) and I think film as an acquisition medium will die even quicker than I thought.
It seems HD is the ideal acquisition format for film!