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But when it comes to laying traps or fishing, it all comes down to who has more patience. Whoever loses their nerve first has already lost half the battle. Henry, with plenty of cards still hidden up his sleeve, naturally had far more confidence than most. Worst case scenario—he could always fly off to the Moon and live in seclusion.
That femme fatale's method was nothing more than another variation of the old routine: send a few small-time punks to harass a beauty, then step in as the heroic savior, exploiting the opening to get close. Henry was all too familiar with that…
Wait—hadn't he just experienced something suspiciously similar himself?
Still, Tony Stark's warning from earlier in the year echoed in his ears. His name was already on a lot of lists. It seemed wise to take some preventative measures.
While thinking things over, Henry casually asked about another matter.
"If I shut down the clinic, that wouldn't be a problem, right?"
If he was going to act as Charlize Theron's agent, he couldn't keep living the way he had for the past year—constantly on standby for the black clinic's summons bell.
If both sides demanded his attention at the same time, was he supposed to hone the skills of a time-management master? The best solution, of course, was to drop the less important side.
Charlie wasn't surprised by the question at all.
"This isn't a thought you only had today, is it?"
Henry replied irritably, "Oh, come on. Don't tell me you guys haven't noticed the FBI and the cops staking out my clinic from time to time these past months.
"Luckily, the location you helped me pick has exits in all directions, so they could never fully seal it off. That's the only reason I managed to slip away. Even if I moved somewhere else, would things really get any better?"
Charlie smiled, neither confirming nor denying anything.
"If you can solve your own problems, that's obviously for the best. The hotel's rule is that medical requests backed by gold coins can't be refused—but if they can't find you, that rule technically isn't being broken, right?"
Henry understood the implication. It was essentially an unspoken withdrawal.
That said, considering the precedent of operating on a city councilman's child, the Continental Hotel might still name him directly for certain jobs.
There were always some VVVIP clients who ran into problems conventional medicine couldn't handle—cases that required a bottom-line-free fixer like him to step in.
That kind of cooperation wasn't unacceptable. At least it wouldn't consume his time treating a bunch of scumbags.
Did anyone even know how many people he'd saved that he personally couldn't stand? He'd often wanted to inject them with an overdose of adrenaline—give them a "premium medical service," straight to heaven.
Finishing his double espresso in one gulp, Henry stood up, ready to leave.
"Thanks, Charlie. If you need to get in touch, you know my number."
The old gunman didn't say anything, simply raising his coffee cup as if in a toast, seeing off a young man who might yet return to the world of light.
For many people, the Continental Hotel was nothing more than a refuge in a fallen world—and hardly a good place.
Leaving the Continental behind, Henry turned his attention back to his original task: preparing a camera to help train Charlize Theron's acting.
There was no way he was getting a full-scale cinema camera. Thirty-five-millimeter film was expensive, developing it was expensive, and projection equipment was expensive. It simply wasn't something an ordinary household could play with—and Henry had no need for it.
Eight-millimeter cameras counted as home equipment, but they were quite early technology, riddled with issues, and unfriendly to ordinary users unless they were hardcore enthusiasts.
The most suitable option was Sony's Handycam, released in 1985—commonly known as the V8 camcorder. The "8" referred to the 8-millimeter-wide magnetic tape, not film. It recorded analog signals.
In 1988, Sony released the next generation, the Hi8 camcorder, which offered higher resolution than the original V8. "Resolution," here, could be loosely compared to what the digital era would later call image clarity.
Yet even so, there was a reason television productions sat lower than films on the disdain hierarchy. Compared to 35-millimeter film, these devices lacked far too much detail.
Anyone who'd seen them knew that with early home camcorders, even shooting a face in close-up failed to capture subtle changes at the corners of the eyes or mouth. Everything blurred together into an indistinct mess.
By digital standards, the resolution of household equipment and TVs of that era was only around 480p—or even as low as 360p.
That was why TV actors often had to exaggerate their performances just to convey emotion, separating them from film actors at opposite ends of the hierarchy.
This level of equipment clearly wasn't what Henry wanted.
A new digital standard was already in the works, established by the HD Digital VCR Consortium—formed by Panasonic, Sony, JVC, Philips, Sanyo, Hitachi, Sharp, Thomson, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba.
In April 1994, the specifications for consumer digital VCRs were finalized—the format known as DV.
By next year, Sony would release a new generation of consumer DV camcorders. They still used tape, but recorded digital rather than analog signals.
Although DV improved image quality over V8 and was roughly comparable to Hi8, Henry obviously couldn't sneak into Sony and steal a prototype. And even DV still didn't meet his standards.
By digital resolution metrics, DV only reached about 480i. Compared to 35-millimeter film, which—when translated into digital terms—was roughly equivalent to 4K (UHD), the gap was enormous.
This was also why, in the 2020s, many filmmakers turned to television.
Beyond changes in the industry ecosystem, home TVs and cameras had reached near-cinema quality, leaving movies with only one remaining advantage: the massive two-hundred-inch screen. That was what finally convinced many film actors to lower themselves into the TV market.
Trying to leap straight to cinema-level digital equipment would be unrealistic. But building an upgraded system at 720p or even 1080p on top of existing published digital standards didn't seem impossible.
After all, this was largely for self-entertainment. The real limitation wasn't encoding or decoding resolution—it was storage capacity.
Twenty minutes of uncompressed UHD footage required about 4TB of storage. In this era, hard drives were only just brushing against the gigabyte range, still counted in single digits.
If Henry wanted to skip tape and use hard drives directly, he couldn't afford to create an unrestricted high-resolution codec. Otherwise, he'd need entire disk arrays just to store the data—which would be absurd.
With his hands-on skills and the support of his super brain, Henry quickly finalized a plan. It wasn't far ahead of the times, but it was already more than sufficient for his needs.
Most importantly, many components could be adapted from existing technology. That would save enormous amounts of time and effort, letting him complete the equipment Charlize needed in a matter of days, rather than a year or more.
The reason for building a digital camera instead of using existing gear was simple.
Digital footage could be imported directly into a computer for post-processing, requiring only companion software. Processing speed depended solely on computing power.
Old analog equipment required dedicated post-production hardware. And film still had to be developed first.
Digital was the future. Since Henry could do it, there was no need to go against the tide.
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