Museum of the Moving Image Visit

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York has a collection of artifacts and activities that illustrate the history of, and basic concepts behind, movie and television production and consuming.
I had been there before, when I was a child. As an adult with a sharper and more focused curiosity, I took away more from the visit. My mind was opened, a bit. I strongly dislike anything to do with professional sports, but I came away with a deep respect for the people who broadcast it. Live video editing, as shown with the museum's display of Bill Webb's live editing of a Yankees game, must take a powerful and calm mind to do well. The museum display showed multiple monitors from many cameras around the field, with the center one due for broadcast. The exhibit's voice over is Webb's commands to display first this feed, then another, and the visitor can see the result of this focused multitasking on the central display. It is a instant choreography that I was very impressed by.
The museum's collections showed how the production has become more portable and higher fidelity, made especially vivid by the hand-cranked late-19th century camera, which produced films with variable frame rates, depending on how fast the operator's arm moved. The bulk of vacuum tubes was made abundantly clear by the teal-colored early television camera that weighed 300 pounds, and was practically the size of a fridge. I compare this to my small digital video camera the size of a cell phone.
Consumption has changed with the public's taste. This is shown in the collection of fashionable television sets, including a feminine-blue one from the 1950's that resembles a housewife's oven. it has been very merchandise-heavy for several decades, as seen by the room full of movie-themed merchandise from the 1930's to 1990's.
The museum had enough content to write much more than this. Its collection, if seen a thousand years from now, would explain to future visitors that television and movies, made with a variety of changing technologies, formed the heart of culture for the West in the 20th and early 21st centuries.