Videoconferencing is not my best look. I do have a special pair of black glasses so that when I speak into the little web camera mounted above my monitor I can look like Christiane Amanpour reporting from a videophone. Even so, videoconferencing is not practical in my real life. But as an editor managing a team that is spread throughout the United States, I decided to investigate it.

Of course, I'm not really the target consumer for videoconferencing. In the first months post-September 11, the sense was that large companies would save travel budgets and hassles by huddling in conference rooms and conducting business with remote colleagues via the power of the pixel.

Technically speaking, there has never been a better time for videoconferencing than now. The Navy conducts videoconferencing across the fleet in high def. At the Universal Studios lot, the editors of Max Bickford work with their N.Y. producer via a videoconferencing setup that includes high-tech, realtime video file-sharing and a pretty low-tech web camera mounted on a little TV monitor. High-end securities companies now conduct trades via videoconference, lawyers take remote depositions, prisoners attend parole hearings.

Pricing, according to consultant (and Extron/AMX veteran) Gary Kayye, can be lower than commonly perceived: So-called full-bandwidth, ISDN-based VTC calls (384K) cost between 50 cents to $1.20 per minute, and IP-based calls can be virtually free, depending on the type and design of the corporate network and application of the video call.

Does any of this mean that the videoconferencing market is surging ahead like the national defense budget? Not necessarily. On page 43, Steve Porter considers the market for videoconferencing and its webconferencing siblings. While the case studies in his story hardly point to a terrorist-inspired communications revolution, they illustrate the broad range and potential for the right conferencing technology in the right setting.

While videoconferencing remains a trend in search of validation, outputting to DVD is rapidly gaining acceptance and popularity. For image-quality-conscious shooters, there are things to know before you swap tape for disc. On page 67, veteran shooter Barry Braverman offers his experiences with various software and hardware options for encoding to DVD.

Also in this issue, Pete Putman talks to a small, intrepid video production company that found a way to see Europe with an ideal travel accessory — an HD camera. Formerly a Beta SP house, Small World Productions discovered the potential of HD and — as you'll see in the photos accompanying the article that begins on page 30 — really used the medium the way it should be used: to create a new aesthetic approach to classic subjects.