I think the use of video cameras, for none professional use, is going to end. Does any one actually have any home videos (not the Paris Hilton variety) that they enjoy watching? I think we’ll still take video clips, but they’re going to be lots of 20/30 second clips. The sort of thing that a phone or still digital camera specialise in. Software like Picasa can already store and organise these, you can watch them in couple of minutes in the same way you browse through your digital photos. Or you may choose to upload them and let Google index them.

We can all take reasonable quality still photos, we don’t need to edit them much and we can easily and quickly filter out the bad ones. If we take hours of video footage, then probably we only want a 5 minute edit of it. That’s possible, and certainly the software is around to do that, but it still requires a lot of manual editing. Unless the video application’s search/editing capabilities is able to work out the interesting bits automatically, then I think long home videos (and cameras) will be finished.

I do think we’ll end up taking more and more short video clips though, it’s still nice to see short clips of our friends and family messing about, just as long as we don’t have to sit through hours of them.