HD: a tangle of wires under a hotel room desk

I'd never picked up an HD camera until we started preparing for our New York filming trip. We were using the EX1 which, like almost all HD cameras, it seems, isn't "really" HD after all (don't ask me - something to do with Mbs/sec).

The camera is much like others. What's different is that it's tapeless: everything is recorded onto memory cards and copied onto a hard drive. Now I already knew about memory cards because my 14-year old son's video camera uses them. Nice to see the professional world is catching up.

But memory cards mean geeky downloading sessions at the end of every day's filming. Back to the hotel: plug the camera into the mains; wire the camera to the laptop; plug the card reader into the laptop; put another card into the side of the laptop; plug the special double hard drive into the laptop. And you're ready to start. 

Then it's just a question of opening the backup programme on the laptop, making sure your cards are lined up to be copied to the hard drive, pressing 'go' and coming back half an hour later to eject all the cards and check on the clip browser that you can still see everything you have filmed. Finally, 'execute' the reformatting of the cards, and erase everything you have filmed on them - never a decision to be taken lightly or under the influence of alcohol.

So this is the future? Scrabbling around under the desk in the hotel room, fixing endless plugs into a multi-socket board and trying to work out which wire goes into which input or drive? 

I hadn't seen so much of the floor of a hotel room since 1993, when I was making a film with the journalist Mark Lawson in the States. He triumphantly demonstrated how he could email his newspaper copy back to the Guardian by jamming bits of loose wire coming from his laptop into the hotel phone sockets. 

The internet was the high-tech frontier back then, and free because nobody had thought hotels might be able to make money by charging for it. Mark even got the overnight football scores - and didn't electrocute himself or set fire to anything.

Today, the internet is once again free in most US hotel rooms, but this time with no wires needed. 

On some days of our filming trip last week, we worked with a professional crew. They were using a "proper" HD camera (well, not quite proper in fact - see above - but more proper than our's). At the end of the day's filming, as my assistant producer and I headed for our IT session, the cameraman simply handed us a couple of tapes. 

I imagine that one day tapeless HD cameras will upload everything they film to a 'cloud' site without anyone having to worry about where it's gone or having to lug a heavy hard drive home as hand baggage. Until then, get used to travelling with the contents of a Maplin store. 

Why is the high-tech magazine called Wired? I supposed Wireless would sound even more ancient.