This coding will play a widescreen flv video from my site named "video.flv" It uses a player named "flvplayer.swf" to play it. Cut, paste, and figure it out. (Watch out for dropped brackets and quotes. Getting html code to display on an html page is a bitch.)

And here's what that code produces:

TUTORIALS:
Here's the sermon on the mount, straight from the source: Adobe - Developer Center : Flash Video Learning Guide

Here's WebMonkey on embedding the video.

Here's University of Florida instructor Mindy McAdams' instructions: Flash and Video . (pdf)

Here's how to do it with Windows Movie Maker and Riva: Boutell.com's "WWW FAQs: How do I add video to my web site?"

Another good one is at VideoHelp.com's forums.

Here's a WordPress page with links to a lot of plugins to get the video on your WordPress blog -- but many work with other types of pages.

The Wimpy Player is a nice one. This has ways to play in both html and javascript.

For an overview of Flash video, including streaming vs progressive, see the Flash Video 101 articles on this page from Peachpit.

Good luck.

Video killed the TV Star

Newspapers and TV Stations are circling around each other like dogs looking for a fight. In this Washington Post story, Newspaper-TV Marriage Shows Signs of Strain , Frank Ahrens explains the trend.
“At the Washington bureau of the Belo newspaper chain, two veteran television reporters whose stories appeared on Belo’s 19 broadcast stations were laid off and are to be replaced by videographers who will shoot digital video for the Web sites of Belo’s 11 newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News.”

Handycams: tape is dying

A bunch of new camcorders were introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show. New hard drive and digital camcorders with proprietary codecs that you won’t be able to edit in your NLE. See http://www.camcorderinfo.com/

The Panasonic GS300 is apparently discontinued and replaced by a model that doesn’t have external microphone input.

Treat your Optura 50’s and GS 400’s with care — they were apparently the last of their breed: cheap ‘corders with manual controls and inputs.

TV Jersey

Jersey’s got their own TV now: http://www.tvjersey.com/

YouTube is their friend.

Pangea Ultima

Convergence is coming — but not soon: New York Times

Quality Counts

It is entirely possible to produce good content with cheap cameras. See this music video, produced with a cell phone: ‘Oceans’ by Rob Dickinson

But much of what we do as journalists involves making a story rather than just covering it. Plane crashes and shootings aren’t going to happen in front of your staff very often, no matter how many point-and-shoot cameras you put on the street. Much of what we do for a living is to explain boring stuff in interesting ways.

To make compelling video of those stories takes talent and decent gear. And any business that depends on gear should have equipment that stands up to daily use.

Beyond that, though, we need to produce stories that have more than novelty. We don’t want our video to become the pet rocks or cb radio of this generation. If all you want is traffic, run porn or mentos videos … or maybe porn AND mentos videos….

The buzz these days is all about community. But newspapers have ALWAYS been about community. Newspapers exist to land on the doorstep of people who have put down roots, who are raising their kids, and who are fully vested in their neighborhoods.

We need to invest in serving our communities online — in ways that our viewers will remember favorably. Quality counts. Viewers — our subjects — have very long memories and will never forget that we made them look bad or made their voices sound awful.

As a journalist of long experience, I can tell you that nothing is as final as the door slammed in your face by a news-making person who once had a story done on them they didn’t like. And no one is as helpful as the subject who respects what your institution has done to them previously.

Your community deserves steady, clear video with good sound.

(This was written in response to Mindy McAdams blog entry “Cheap cameras fine for video?” )

VIDEO SURVIVAL GUIDE by Chuck Fadely

Here’s what you need to know if your boss hands you a camera and tells you to do a video story:

IF YOU ARE SHOOTING TAPE, ALWAYS PRE-ROLL AND POST-ROLL: this is a REALLY IMPORTANT technical thing related to editing that will bite you in the ass if you don’t follow the rules. This means:
1) ALWAYS record a minute of tape before starting. Video editing programs need extra space before and after the bit you want. (Pre-roll and post-roll!) Write down the story, date and your name on a piece of paper and tape that for 60 seconds. Or tape your cat for 60 seconds. This avoids tape dropouts that always happen at the beginning. It also reassures you that the camera works.
2) ALWAYS record at least 4 seconds before someone starts talking and at least another 4 seconds after they stop. (you can’t capture the soundbite in the editing program otherwise. Pre-roll and post-roll!)
3) ALWAYS record a minute of tape after you’ve finished everything. Your cat is still fair game. (pre-roll and post-roll!)
4) REALLY REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT: Never break timecode! If you try to watch what you’ve recorded and then start recording again with even a half-second of blank tape in between, the piece cannot be edited. DON’T REWIND UNTIL YOU’RE DONE! NEVER! EVER!

RULES FOR SHOOTING VIDEO:

HOLD THE SHOT: Line up your shot in the viewfinder, press record, and then HOLD IT FOR TEN SECONDS. Don’t pan. Don’t zoom. HOLD THE SHOT. Count to ten! Even if we only need a second of it, hold the shot so it can be edited later.

SOUND is the most important thing in video. Record the interview sound separately from the images. Get the microphone within 12″ of the person speaking and hold it still during the interview. Don’t talk while the person is speaking — nod but don’t say “un hunh”. The interview is called “A-roll” and will be the main sound track for the piece. Keep the subject’s sentences short and sweet. Record the sound in a quiet place. Turn off the tv and radio. Air conditioners, traffic, and ringing phones are your enemy. Listen to the sound through headphones while you’re recording.

IMAGES: Now that you’ve gotten the sound, take video of everything the person talked about. Shoot close, medium and wide of each thing. Hold each shot for 10 seconds. Let the subject move, not you. Don’t pan or zoom. Get close. Brace against something so the camera doesn’t shake. The images you shoot of whatever the subject talked about is called “B-roll” For a minute-long interview, you’ll need dozens — DOZENS — of different B-roll shots related to what he’s talking about. Shoot details, establishing shots, and activity. Shoot lots of shots of the subject doing things. Make sure you’ve got at least five different shots for each good sound bite. For example, if the subject says “Oh my god — I can’t believe we’re alive! The car crashed right into the bedroom!”, you’ll need a wide shot of the house, a medium shot of the car in the wall, several shots from different angles of the car from both inside and out, close-ups of the bed, close-ups of the broken wall, details of family photos on the dresser with debris around, etc.

BE FOCUSED: Web videos need to be short — one or two minutes. Pick one aspect of your story — something with emotion — and make the video about that. Keep it short.

FIND A CHARACTER: A successful video needs a ‘character’ to be the star — find someone who is articulate and engaging, someone who makes quips and jokes — and does them in short, sweet sound bites. Run-on sentences are death in video.

GET THE SUBJECT TO TELL THE TALE: Don’t ask yes or no questions. Ask the subject to “describe” or “give me the background” or “tell me in short sentences” what happened. If they ramble, say “I’m not sure I understand. Tell me again about….” until they say it in a direct way. You need the 25-words-or-less version! See “BE FOCUSED” above.

DON’T STEP ON THE AUDIO: Don’t start talking until they’ve stopped. Don’t jump in immediately with another question after they’ve stopped speaking — first, you need a break in between for editing, and second, people hate a vacuum and will sometimes volunteer really great stuff after they’ve directly answered the question.

Remember to pre-roll and post-roll! Don’t hit the record/off switch until at least four seconds after they’ve stopped speaking.

Have fun!

FOR MORE TIPS, check out these links:

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050303mccombs/ — Shooting Web video: How to put your readers at the scene

http://www.current.tv/make/training — Current.tv producer training

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/video/ — online journalism wiki on video

http://www.ejfoundation.org/page78.html — Envronmental Justice Foundation video training

http://desktopvideo.about.com/od/editing/ht/goodvideo_ro.htm — About.com Rules for Taking Good Video

http://www.bbctraining.com/onlineCourse.asp?tID=5914&cat=2781 — BBC’s Good Shooting guide — basic principles

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Shoot-Good-Digital-Video-With-Your-Camcorder&id=162292 — Ezine “How to shoot good digital video with your camcorder”.

What is your preferred language?

Michael Browning, one of the most amazing writers ever to toil for newspapers, died recently. He worked for much of his career at the Herald, covering China for a while, and anything else his expansive mind fancied. I remember covering a hurricane in Key West with him once. While I literally waded into the storm to take pictures, he retired to his hotel room with a stack of books. In the morning, his story wove history, literature, and the cosmos together to explain man’s struggle against nature. I hated being assigned to his stories — he could never really tell you what they were going to be about.

His language was on a different plane from most journalism. His writing was advanced calculus compared to simple inverted pyramids. It was brilliant. But it didn’t lend itself to succint story budget lines. Toward the end of his career at the Herald, budget cuts and a changing emphasis on story lengths marginalized Browning, sending him off to other employers. I think editors weren’t able to deal with someone who couldn’t sum up his story a day in advance in a single paragraph. His language was not that of newspapers. But if there were more writers like him, we’d have a different language in our papers, and probably more readers.

Editors didn’t know what to do with Browning’s writing; they didn’t speak the language.

Right now, we’ve got another problem with language. Newspaper editors in general don’t speak the language of multimedia and images. They can’t wrap their minds around the possibility of telling a story in some other way than words. They don’t know how to take a great story and make an interactive graphic out of it. They don’t know how to visualize a video that will tell all the emotion and character of a story without words. They don’t know how to look at a photo and find a thousand words in it. They don’t know how to make a web page that sings. They don’t have the visual language skill.

If you’ve never watched a teen play video games, you should. You will receive an education in another — visual — language. Any kid who’s ever touched a game controller can process visual images at mind-blowing speed. Their brains are wired for this language. A flood of images come at them at 30 frames per second; they process and discriminate intricate details from this blur without a problem. It is a language — a way to process and deliver information using context, cuing and inflection. And newspaper editors, in general, don’t speak a visual language. Nor do managers — the people who are desperately trying to hire employees who do speak it… so we end up with illiterates running things.

The problem is finding journalists who speak a visual language. Do you find a journalist and teach them visuals? Or do you find artists and teach them journalism? It’s pretty clear that hiring computer geeks for your web site doesn’t produce good journalism, visual or otherwise.

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