video 2 zero

A month ago I seemed to be almost alone in expressing a distinct lack of excitement over the video capabilities of the new DSLRs from Canon and Sony. Stu Maschwitz nails it:

Following up on the Context is King follow-up:
Further proof that with 25c and killer content, you’re only $3 short of the price of a tall latte. This time from the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference:

Jessica Guff, executive producer of ABC News Now and a veteran of ABC News, explains the new paradigm to PR honcho Richard Edelman:
PR people must pitch stories differently. Specifically, she said we need to offer fully formed four minute segments, with visuals, spokespeople and news hook all conceived. “Don’t just send me a pitch letter […]

Following up on Context is King below - this from Philip Trippenbach’s Three Rules for Online Video:
The 3 rules: Simplicity, Authenticity, Currency.
And the greatest of these is Authenticity: The BBC know this, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to be reminded.

A propos of nothing at all, two quotes. The first from Fran Leibowitz:
“The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting”
The second from me:
“If they don’t like the message, change the medium.”

Close-ups work well in web video. But they also work well in television, movies and photography.
More bandwidth, faster connections are obsoleting the 320×240 frame - so the original justification for more close-ups on the web is disappearing. But the close-ups are not.
This has nothing to do with aesthetics - Videographers are become lazy! (Joyce).
Close-ups are […]

There are two Tripod Rules. The first - Never Shoot with a Tripod, and the second Always Shoot with a Tripod - may seem to contradict one another.
Ignore them unless you are entering a competition of some sort. For everyone else just go with whatever improves your confidence, flexibility, confidence, efficiency and confidence.
- Number […]

This is the flipside of Connect Emotionally. Talking Heads don’t make for riveting movies or TV - but they work just fine on the web. Gary Vaynerchuck, Andy Plesser (beet.tv) and Michael Tomasky (guardian.co.uk) prove the point across a wide spectrum.
washingtonpost.com has extended the Talking Heads gestalt with its Voices series. The subjects […]

Emotional video works. True in movies, true on TV - not true on the web. People don’t click on emotional videos.
When you take an emotional story and edit it down to 2 or 3 minutes you transform  emotion into sentimentality. When you don’t edit it down then you better have an engaged audience if […]

Context is king. It’s not the content of the video that generates the return, it’s the ability to integrate the video into a larger information loop where value feeds back to the producers. And that involves getting a commitment to more than 3 minutes. Without appropriate context the content has limited value.
[UPDATE  10/26]   “The New […]

Michael Eisner on What works in Online Video:
Sex seems to work. User-gen, sports, news, anything with Sarah Palin works. At the end of the day, like in all the other industries from movies to TV, long-form, story-driven content is what ultimately works. paid content
Time is the currency we use to pay for online video. […]

Yesterday a journalist who (still) works at a big Florida newspaper told me, “Last year we were trying to shoot as much video as possible. This year, we’re trying to save the paper. - Mindy McAdams.

A year or so ago video was going to save newspapers! - so what went wrong? Why […]