Folks.

for your info .... some interesting technology developments that will affect the way videoographers work in the future ....

[1] Cloud rendering...
For those of you not in IT, cloud computing is a new computer model where companies with access to large horizontal scaled hardware sets sell the capacity to other companies as virtual instances of operating systems.
These VM's can be created,run and destroyed on demand with options to scale performance

ON2 has jumped on the bandwagon with the Amazon cloud and are offering a video render service that used large scale horizontal hardware to reduce render times ....

www.on2.com - Company News (http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=439&news_id=670)
On2 Flix Cloud | On-Demand Video Transcoding Powered by On2 Flix Engine and Zencoder (http://www.flixcloud.com/)

The down side to my mind is that while the render time may be sig faster .... uploading very large raw video files to a render cloud over the net is still significantly slow ..... especially with cable or adsl2 upload rates ....

But it may offer a solution to some people that do not want to spent 10K on a fit for purpose render box ....

[2]
3.9 terabyte optical disk technology

Holographic Versatile Disc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc)

Blueray may be dead if this technology see the light of day .....

Not that anyone has a screen that could take advantage, but perhaps those disks could store 4K shot vids with minimal compression .....

Sounds promising if you had a fiber optic link with the service.

Justin, there are already "render farms" available for rent for big projects but as Nicholas points out it takes a big pipeline to transfer data to and from these sites. Most of us do not have dedicated fiber out of our facilities. You've still got to ship drives to and from the render farms for this process to work.

I can't upload video via the net (or mail it on a hard drive) as fast as I can render and compress it on even a run of the mill, cheap quad core machine using x264 (even using a bunch of filters and at fairly slow, high quality compression settings).