I could not move the equivalent amount of film without the aid of heavy machinery. Surely not the six it would take to get to Kevin Bacon. Of course, the video cameras used to record programs such as Cops or Big Brother are of a much higher quality than your home video-camera, but better technology becomes more affordable every month. The video camera has become a standard accessory for all but the grindingly poor. But let s consider the argument for film.
Television technology paints each image onto photo-sensitive pixels line by line.
The pixels are coated on the inside of your television screen, and the highest quality video image shown on high-definition television, a technology not even widely available in the United States, creates an image made up of 1,125 horizontal lines of pixels. The current televised standard is 525 lines. Any finer detail than that resolution is lost, at least by current standards of reception which is to say the box in my living room or yours. Video also tends to harden colors, and shadows aren t black so much as washed black. So if the goal of reality television is to capture reality, the argument ought to run that film is capable of putting a lot more of it into a viewer s consciousness than video.