Engineers describe the performance of new media like television or motion pictures in terms of "technical resolution"-measurements such as frame rate, spatial resolution, brightness, and dynamic range. If you design lenses or build projection systems for a living, this technical resolution is likely to be of more than passing interest-it's usually how your work is judged.

But if you're a writer or film director, you need another axis-"emotional resolution"-to describe how well you are using the technology to convey a message to your audience. Put more simply, that term measures how effectively you are communicating. Your mastery of emotional resolution is how your work is judged.

While it's convenient for some of us to think that one can separate the technical performance of a media-delivery system from the content itself, this is useful only to technicians. Everyone else cares about the final result when the two are inextricably merged. Most of us don't watch test patterns for fun, and moviegoers shouldn't be thinking about the theater's projection or sound systems. The engineer should design these systems so well that they are transparent to the viewer. And paradoxically, increasing the technical resolution of an imaging system can sometimes diminish the quality of the viewer's experience. For example, more detail in a motion picture can hurt the ability to tell a good story.

A key member of the filmmaking team is the director of photography (DP for short). The "look" of the picture is almost completely in the hands of the DP: even if the sets are great, the costumes gorgeous, the makeup amazing, and the performance captivating, if the DP is asleep at the switch, the movie will look bad. This is not desirable when thirty to a hundred million dollars are at stake.