Twenty-five years ago, we believed that the trifecta of miniDV, firewire and Final Cut Pro was going to revolutionize filmmaking. We didn’t think the existing dealers in Toronto were doing a very good job championing these new solutions (yes that means you Vistek and Henry’s), and we wanted to make a store dedicated to this new paradigm, so we opened The DV Shop on May 7, 2001.
In May 2001, the biggest hard drive you could buy was 75GB. Final Cut Pro 2 had just come out. The fastest Mac was a G4 733 MHz with a 32MB video card. Authoring your own DVDs had just started January with the SuperDrive. Remember Maxtor, Quantum, Keyspan, Media 100, Pinnacle and Canopus, to name a few?
We had no money when we opened the store. We were a couple of levels below shoe-string. We got through the first year by racking up massive credit card debt. We were the new kid on the block, competing against some very established companies - Precision Camera, Extra Bytes, Solutions in Computing, Merkle Camera, Carbon Computing, MacWarehouse … none of whom are in business today. We were the scrappy underdog, with a dingy store that had terrible carpet. We almost pulled the plug and closed down twice in our first year. But we kept going. And honestly, we owe it to Apple. Apple took a huge gamble with us - they liked our vision and focus, and they authorized us, despite not having any experience selling computers. It gave us credibility (and revenue).
In 2001, HIDef was more a concept than reality, and 4K wasn’t even conceived of yet. There were no LED lights, no Facebook or RED cameras. The elusive “film look”, the holy grail of video shooting, that was impossible to do in 2001? Now you can do it on a smartphone. Or a $799 entry-level camera. In 2001, you couldn’t even conceive of shooting high quality video on a phone, let alone streaming it in real time on the internet. Drones? Little helicopters that shoot 4K video and cost under $2000? Stabilizers that rival a Steadicam for under $1000? Please - that would have been crazy talk. Inconceivable. Couldn’t be done. Especially at the price and timeframe. Maybe in 30 or 40 years.
The rapid change of technology in the last 25 years has been truly breathtaking. What will the next 25 years bring? Besides 16K 5D cat videos?
The tag line for our first ad was “You want to put a dent in the universe. We want to help.” And for 25 years, that has been our motto. Thank you to all of our loyal customers for riding this technological wave with us. It has been quite the journey.
