video 2 zero

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 3 in 7 things Videojournalists can learn from Musicians: never allow hesitation, indecision or lack of preparation to affect your performance.

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 featured in Voices don’t answer questions, they don’t respond to comments, they justsit in front of a white background and talk directly to camera.

Basically it’s a series of infomercials promoting various corporations/causes by allowing the principals to pontificate without interruption or comment. “What are these types of video doing on a newspaper website?” You may ask. That’s simple: they are generating a lot of hits. Wapo claims a huge increase in web videos watched since the series appeared in June: 1.4 million video views in September.

The videos (several dozen in all) are advertised heavily on the WaPo front page - four large link boxes on today’s wapo.com lead to the series. The only other video linked on the front page is a clip featuring Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

Associated with avoid talking heads is the notion that videographers should avoid information-intensive presentations. Information is more efficiently conveyed in text and pictures - it doesn’t need video.

But many thousands of viewers would rather watch David Pogue than crack a manual….

As the information density goes up, and the age of the target audience goes down - the preference for video over text increases exponentially. Absorbing even mildly technical detail from a book is a chore. That same information repackaged as visual media is digested effortlessly.

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 you expect anyone to watch it. Continue Reading »

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 York Times has broken ground by creating a sort of “contextual” video player which displays multiple clips related to the subject of the story, on the page where the text article appears.  This is one of the most notable aspects of the implementation of a new video content management system from Brightcove introduced last week”. beet.tv

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. Getting someone to pay a nickel is easier than getting them to pay $1 - big surprise. But if the guy who charges a nickel can’t turn a profit - who cares?

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 are newspaper execs losing faith in the redeeming power of video? Video is working in so many other sectors - YouTube is now the second most popular search engine - but newspapers are struggling to find successful strategies for online video.

7 tips to encourage those of you in regional newsrooms across the US who haven’t given up on video.

1. Ban people who teach videojournalism from judging videojournalism awards. This is just a self-fulfilling method of promoting an unproven agenda. Yes I am a great teacher - students who follow my methods win awards.

2. Ban videojournalism awards, that are not based on real world performance. The very notion of refining video strategy with rosettes assumes that there are an elite group of judges who have the answers every one is looking for.

3. Encourage transparent competition - put all the videos on youtube get journalists to compete for “minutes-viewed” or whatever. Video-journalism is a trade/craft - it is not an art-form. Dieing penniless and scorned is not an option.

4. Get reliable metrics. What does “1000 hits on a video” mean? Did anyone ever watch past 30 seconds? And if it does mean 1000 people watched the whole thing, then how many people watched the first 10 seconds then clicked out?

5. Fail fast - the idea that audiences take time to build is seductive. “Is our policy working? Well people need to catch on”. People caught on to the iPod pretty quick.

6. Caffeinated video - Habits not hits. This is the biggest problem with metrics - it is relatively easy to measure minutes viewed, but it can be difficult to tell the decaf from the regular. Until you notice your customers keep coming back for more.

7. Telling truth to power. As a commercial videographer I produce videos for clients who want to present certain aspects of what they do in a certain light. Way too much video on newspaper sites is doing the same thing. The client/subject agrees to collaborate with the videographer, knowing that he will receive positive treatment. It is not in newspapers interests that the barrier between journalism and press releases is further eroded. Not in my interests either.

ANOTHER cool tool for FCP released today, EditGroove. This bit of software manages preferences and user settings for multiple users…on one machine or across a network. If you are working on one machine one day, then move to another, you can load your keyboard layouts, your preferences (including levels of undo, frequency of autosave, favorite effects) onto that machine as well. Pretty darn cool for those of us in multi-editor environments, and for those who have several editors that share one machine.Oh, and it trashes preferences, restores saved preferences, and can recover accidentally deleted preferences. Nice.” from Little frog in high def

YouTube Cofounder Chad Hurley spoke at the MIPCOM Conference in Cannes, France yesterday.In the talk, which is transcribed here, Hurley compares the current state of online video to the nascent years of television. In 1941, he says, “CBS has just launched its new television network amidst cries that it means the death of radio.” Advertisers were hard to come by. Content owners were afraid of alienating their existing audiences. etc.Key soundbites from the speech:

• YouTube wants to partner with content owners to help them “gain unprecedented reach and scope to touch new audiences”

I believe Chad Hurley - YouTube has added huge value for content producers over the past few months. Who would have thought those folks at Google were so darn smart?

Faced with the continued threat of rock stars using video camera lenses as ash-trays, the techs at Nikon and Canon have both hit on the same solution - have the DSLR handle the video for you. Today Canon announced the 21 MP 5D MKII following Nikon’s introduction last month of the D90, both capable of capturing HDV video.

Personally I think both Canon and Nikon have got it bass ackwards. The real threat to Sony, JVC, Panasonic and Canon video divisions is at the other end of the market. In the last year Flip video cameras have captured 20% of the video camera market with their $150 pocket cams.

With an ever higher percentage of photo and video headed for the 72dpi web - the resolution myth must surely implode sooner rather than later. As discussed previously in these pages - it’s not more resolution we need - its more control and better ergonomics.

My advice to anyone who (like myself) shoots both video and photo - take 2 cameras. If Lily Allen is in the neighborhood use a cheap lens filter.

FOLLOWUP - Colin Mulvaney asks: “My question is what impact will a camera like this have on newspaper photography departments?”masteringmultimedia.com

I hope it will encourage them to revisit Clayton Chistensen and confirm that disruptive innovation will almost invariably fail when it targets the entrenched markets most profitable product lines right out of the gate.

Reading Christensen has recently become de riguer amongst media execs, but this vital part of the pardigm seems to be oft overlooked. This small oversight continues to have big consequences for the newspaper industry - so far they have not been pretty.

Back in 1966 Ken Loach set an impossibly high standard for documentary film makers with his TV drama Cathy come Home. A fictional account of a young family plunged into despair and homelessness the play caused furore in the British Parliament, was directly responsible for sweeping changes in the British Legal system and the establishment of the charity Shelter, which quickly became the prototype for homelessness charities around the world.

In 2000 the British Film Institute nominated Cathy Come Home to the top of its list of the Hundred Greatest British Television Programs, second only to Fawlty Towers.

I can’t vouch for its cinematography, but a recent documentary on dog breeding seems set to claim the number 2 spot as most influential documentary. Pedigree Dogs Exposed details the cynical breeding practices that it claims condemn millions of dogs to lives of pain, and tens of thousands of dog owners to enormous vet bills. Following the documentary, both the BBC and the RSPCA, have withdrawn support from the Crufts dog show. Crufts is the largest and most prestigious dog show in the world.

Pedigree Dogs Exposed on Youtube.

This American Life via Joe Imel

“Video content on the web must differ from TV. It should be shorter, less intermediated, less heavily produced. It should be raw and direct, not like sitting back and watching TV” Richard Sambrook interview with Richard Edelman

Fairly conventional wisdom in 2008 I think, but why is it that so much online news/PR video ignores this advice and comes across as ponderous and stilted.

Three reasons:

1. True spontaneity in any creative endeavor is the preserve of the adept. The neophyte requires a lot of preparation to produce footage that is at once watchable/listenable and “raw”. Breaking news excepted.

2. Raw and direct = handheld. Almost a cliche right? Handheld footage from handicams can easily degenerate into a confusing mess. So while even Hollywood directors are rushing towards the “immediacy”, “authenticity” of hand-held cameras, many videojournalists remain tethered to their tripods. Sure you gain watchable and professional but often at the cost of raw and direct.

3. Less intermediated = live audio only. Lack of preparation time and lack of dedicated audio equipment/personnel, result: the resurrection of the voiceover. The trusty voiceover had all but disappeared from news/feature coverage - but now it’s back with a vengeance. Not to say that the voiceover does not have it’s place in modern video, particularly when it’s woven in to the live audio a la David Attenborough. But for short web features Voiceover = heavily produced.

The solution - more preparation, more training, better equipment - more $$$$.