Concentra Award-Winning Video Journalism
At the DNA 2008 conference the winner of the Concentra 10,000-Euro prize for solo video journalism was announced tonight. The winner was Idar Eduin Krogstad, from NRK Østafjells (Norway). His winning piece, entitled “Night Watch”, is a look at the lives of nurses at a nursing home and can be seen on the Concentra site.
Krogstad holds his statue of Tin Tin the Belgian comic hero as he accepts the award:
Gear recommendations
Here’s what I use that’s essential if you’re going to be doing video as your full-time job and you give a s__t about the results:
* XHA1 with 4 BP970G batteries (I’ve never exhausted even one – you could go for a week non-stop on four)
* Sennheiser ME64 mic with K6 module and right-angle 18″ xlr cable and Ricote softie wind muff and xlr “y” splitter and various xlr cables
* Sennheiser EW100 G2 ENG wireless kit from B&H with lav mic, EV stick mic and plug-on transmitter (look at the Sennheiser site to pick which freq range won’t conflict with uhf tv stations in your area.)
* Canon VL-10Li II light (uses camera batteries)
* Sachtler DV-II tripod (actually I use a Cartoni, but we have several of these and they’re ok for a cheap tripod – only $1k!)
* Porta Brace bag, whose model number I don’t know, ’cause I inherited it from our defunct creative services department
* Petrol rain cover
* Lowel Rifa Pro 44 light kit and Impact dimmers
* Shure E2C earbuds and Sony MD7506 headphones
I can’t emphasize enough how important the mics are — this list gives you three different mics which will cover 80% of your assignments well and let you get by on the rest. If your budget is limited, get the mics first and a cheaper camera.
I also can’t emphasize enough how important a decent tripod is. You can get by with a Libec $400 tripod, but that’s the least you can spend, I’m afraid.
I’ve got the Canon wide angle but never use it anymore. Another of our videographers depends on it and never takes it off the camera. Your mileage may vary.
This adds up to a scary amount of money, I’m afraid, but compared to the TV world it’s cheap.
Remember the Basics While Shooting Video!
A plea I wrote to our less-experienced shooters, whose footage I have to help edit:
This is a gentle reminder to remember the basics.
First, the point of daily video is to get it on the web asap. We need to shoot, get into the office, and get it out with speed in mind.
So remember your training:
Get your narrative A-roll. Pull someone aside and get them to explain what happened in one minute or less. Make sure it matches your B-roll.
Shoot transitions: Get in front of the action, plant yourself, hold the camera steady and let the action come into the frame and then go out of the frame.
Shoot sequences: Wide medium tight . Beginning middle end . Getting ready, action, reaction.
Shoot details and closeups.
Audio that goes into the red is unusable. Wear your headphones!
God gave us tripods for a reason…. If you don’t have a tripod, use your camera bag, a table, a tree, a post, … whatever is steady.
Pre-roll and post-roll. We gotta have a little tape before someone starts talking. Also waste a minute of tape when you load the camera (shoot closeups of your assignment sheet; future editors will thank you!)
Keep your finger off the zoom! Use your feet! Hold your shots steady for ten seconds. Count it off!
In their own words: Times-Picayune photo staff’s Katrina coverage
From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a very powerful look back at how their staff felt while covering Katrina.
Produced by the Times-Picayune’s Danny Bourque.
It’s a must-see if you work for a newspaper. It explains why we do this job.
BRAVO!
HD video from still cameras — Kodak Z1275 and Canon TX1
I clamped three still cameras together and tried out their video functions today.
Two of them are new and capture HD 720p high-def video. The Kodak Z1275 just came out and the Canon TX1 is still an infant. They both are small, Elph-sized cameras that take both stills and video.
The third camera was the Canon Powershot S3is, which shoots 640×480 video.
Both of the HD cameras have problems with video — the Kodak’s image stabilization is worse than useless and can’t be turned off. It actually makes the video jump around. The Canon TX1 jumps in and out of focus. Both are too small and light to hand-hold steadily.
The S3is actually makes the best, steadiest video. And even though it’s video is lower resolution, it looks better.
The Kodak shoots mp4 Quicktime .mov files which are one fourth the size of the .avi files from the Canons.
All three are pretty good still cameras. I love the 16:9 aspect ratio you can set on the Kodak and TX1. I don’t like the almost-but-not-quite square format of the 4:3 aspect pictures you get with the S3is.
The Kodak actually has a useable 1600 iso setting that I think breaks new ground for small point-n-shoots. Unfortunately AA batteries only last about 15 minutes in this camera.
I clamped all three cameras on a c-stand arm and synched them up in post. You’re hearing all three audio tracks at once, though mostly what you’re hearing is the S3is — it has the best and loudest audio of the three. I know you can’t tell much from this video, but trust me, the HD from these cameras isn’t ready for the big screen yet!
Roanoke reporter video
I recently spoke at a University of Florida seminar and it is posted on Mindy McAdams’ blog at:
http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/2007/newspaper-video-experts-what-theyre-doing/
I’d like to point out that I may have given a wrong impression in describing Roanoke’s videos.
I characterized their video efforts as low end, mixed with photographers’ high-end video.
Rather than using point-and-shoot cameras as I said, they are using decent mini-dv cameras in their newsroom and have brought in outside training for their reporters to make sure their quality stays high. The video I showed during the presentation was not typical of their report.
I was trying to differentiate between Roanoke.com’s deliberately not-like-TV approach to video and the TV-on-the-net approach of their sister company, HamptonRoads.tv. I was trying to point out the very different approaches taken by different papers in the U.S., and made it sound like Roanoke doesn’t do quality work. Nothing could be further from the truth. (In my defense, I was trying to avoid mentioning that paper in California that I usually pick on…. )
I did not highlight some of the great and sophisticated reporter’s work (such as http://www.roanoke.com/multimedia/video/wb/120830 (High School graduate takes big steps))that they’re doing in Roanoke on a regular basis, so I left the impression that they’re only doing low-end. They aren’t. Roanoke is doing incredible work in multimedia. Their day-in and day-out multimedia coverage of Virginia Tech athletics is a model for our industry and is something I regularly point to as the way it should be done.
If this sounds like I’m sucking up to Seth Gitner and his work at Roanoke, you’re right. He’s doing things right there and I wronged him when I shouldn’t have. In this era of ever-tightening budgets and reduced resources, Roanoke still manages to produce quality work on a daily basis.
My apologies.
Chuck Fadely
It’s Not About Gear
Seems like every time I open my mouth about spending money for good gear, people get upset.
But I’m not advocating spending a bunch of money to equip reporters with good gear. Not at all. That’s a waste.
I’m advocating spending a bunch of money to train some staffers to be full-time video professionals. And if you’re going to do that, then equip them with decent video gear. Doesn’t matter if they’re photogs or reporters. Pick the visually literate people who can tell stories and who get along with technology.
It’ll take at least three months to get them up to speed if you already have video pros aboard who can train them. It’ll take a year if they’re learning in a vacuum.
Creating compelling stories in video is hard.
The Great Video Gold Rush — a reality check.
The publishers have sighted gold in them thar video player hills.
All the newspaper people have piled into the wagons and are heading west toward Video, in the hopes of striking it rich. Imagine! Those pre-roll ads get higher rates than banners! Let’s do video!!!! The rush is on!
Someone on the internet said you can do video with a point and shoot! Let’s give our staffers the cheapest video cameras we can buy and send ’em out. We’ll be rich!
Well, folks, circle the wagons around the campfire here and lets have a little chat.
This video stuff ain’t easy nor cheap. No matter how many well-intentioned bloggers tell you all you need is a $89 camera and the will to do it, the reality is far different.
It takes good audio gear, reasonable video gear, modern computers, and most of all, time, to produce intelligible video for the web.
So many papers have staffers struggling along with antideluvian computers and too many assignments to ever cover in a day…. and now corporate says they have to do video, too! I feel for you, brothers….
Since newspaper people have apoplexy at the thought of TV budgets, where a camera costs $25,000 – not including lens or battery — I’ll try to make an analogy with something most newspapers are familiar with: photos.
Most newspapers have photographers with pro Canon or Nikon gear to shoot the majority of their display pictures. Sure, even the big papers use the reporter’s point-n-shoot mug shots when necessary. And when the plane crashes into the shopping mall, I guarantee the picture you’ll use will probably be some amateur’s coolpix shot — because they were there, and your photog was in south county for the garden league meeting.
But no respectable paper intentionally makes a habit of putting crappy pictures on their section fronts. They have staff photographers with $15,000 worth of still gear to go make an image out of something that’s news but not really visual. That’s a staff photographer’s job: make something visually interesting from nothing. You’re paying them to see things you don’t.
And the reason you pay them weekly weakly, is that readers value good images. Pictures rule. They’re what readers look at first. Photographers, for all their A.D.D. and dyslexic faults, draw readers. They’re worth it.
After decades of experience with photo departments and visual professionals, here’s the strange place we’ve landed:
The internet audience is growing and you want your staff — from the janitor all the way up to the M.E. — to contribute to the web product. Video! Let’s do lots of video! There was some guy at the publisher’s association meeting who said all you need is a point-n-shoot; let’s get ’em for everyone. How ’bout the photogs? Nahhh, they care about silly quality…. we won’t ask them about doing video… We’ll get the web people and reporters to do video.
So the reporters start doing video. All of a sudden the story they used to be able to write blindfolded, in five minutes while doing the office football pool, takes ’em six hours of work to get the video into their computers, figure out why Movie Maker keeps crashing — I’ve got 128 megs of ram, fer krissake! — and finally re-compress the file into the right size on the third try.
And the web people? Well, they don’t have a problem figuring out Movie Maker, but gee, maybe that video they just finished should have said something about the three dead or maybe included someone besides Crazy Joe who likes to pretend to be the mayor. Oh, wait, that was the managing editor’s video? Oh, no problem then….
A few months of this and the landscape starts to change at papers. Gee, why don’t our videos get as many hits as LonelyGirl15?
All of a sudden you’re moving someone over to edit video because it takes so long and gosh, the publisher says he can’t understand a word in any of those videos… maybe we need a better mic. But some corporate flunky type who was at the ANPA meeting with the boss has decided what gear you’re getting… after all, his cousin does dog show videos.
Sheesh, people, get a clue!
Ok, cowboys and cowgirls, here comes the sermon:
VIDEO IS MAGIC! It’s the most f’ing wonderful thing on the internet. YouTube feeds millions of videos per day to your former readers. Video is an emotional medium that grabs the viewers by the throat and makes ’em weep, laugh, and scream. Video appeals to an audience way beyond your literate readers in the 65+ demographic. The boss did say we need to capture younger readers, right?
Does your reporter video fit into that “magic” category? Does your ‘random’ video make you weep? (It makes me weep, but not because of the story…)
If you haven’t reached this point yet with your video program, here’s the important stuff you need to know:
Video storytelling is technically difficult; extremely time-consuming, and takes talented people and expensive gear. A good video story can appeal to a huge audience. And will keep appealing over time.
Video clips, on the other hand, can be done by almost anyone with a point-n-shoot. We’re talking the video equivalent of a page 4B traffic accident brief. A video clip appeals to the 17 people who were affected by the wreck (unless it’s a porn starlet).
Remember way up above when I was talking about your photogs doing the section front pictures while you used the reporter mug shots on page 6B? That’s a concept you should be able to wrap your minds around. Hey, maybe the same philosphy applies to video…. maybe you should have a core group of video pros to do the display stories and let the reporters and citizen journalists do the potholes and car wrecks.
Here’s the bottom line: to get good narrative video, with clean audio, that is engaging to the viewer, requires a full time video person, who has spent a year learning all the technical stuff about audio, cameras, and video editing programs. It takes about $10,000 in video and audio gear and another $10k in computer and software. And it takes a willingness to display that video far and wide over an extended period of time to get hits that build over time. Oh, and the technology is not stable, so you’ll need to replace everything before the depreciation’s done.
Who makes a good videographer? You’ve probably got a couple on staff. Great story-tellers with the timing of a comedian who are technically savvy, visually literate, and quick learners. Invest in them, they’re worth it.
And why should you go to all this expense and trouble? Because video is magic. Oh, and also because the local TV station is finally figuring out that you’re eating their lunch. They’re gonna kick your butt in video soon, along with 3,472 other outlets on the web who want to come steal your local advertisers from you. You better figure this video stuff out soon.
(A bit of video magic by Candace Barbot and Ricardo Lopez / the Miami Herald)
Change is in the air
Bill Gates in the Seattle PI:
“On television: “This is a subject I think about a lot, because it was actually about a little over 10 years ago that Microsoft first got involved in this idea of changing TV from being a simply broadcast medium to being a targeted medium (through its IPTV initiative). … In order to have this be targeted, you cannot send it over the airwaves. There’s just not enough capacity to broadcast thousands and thousands of different video feeds. And that’s where the Internet comes in. The Internet is now cheap enough that the idea of having every household in America watching a different video feed has become practical. There’s some infrastructure improvement that that implies. Actually, that’s very much under way. … It’s a dramatic change in TV. … Broadcast infrastructure over these next five years will not be viewed as competitive. The end-user experience and the creativity, the new content that will emerge using the capabilities of this environment will be so much dramatically better that broadcast TV will not be competitive. And in this environment, the ads will be targeted, not just targeted to the neighborhood level, but targeted to the viewer. … We’ll actually not just know the household that that viewing is taking place in, we’ll actually know who the viewers of that show are, and so it’s a very rich environment.”
Seattle PI: Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog
——
I lived through the linotype-to-typesetter revolution in newspapers. I watched the paste-up artists walk out the door the last time. That entire floor of our building, once an incredible beehive of frenzied activity, is still like a tomb, 20 years later — because the computer rooms that replaced hundreds of jobs are sealed off and refrigerated like the morgue.
That kind of paradigm change is happening again with video. As you TV guys argue big camera vs. small, professionalism vs amateur, penny pinching vs. quality, the world is bypassing you. YouTube is feeding 200 million videos a day. That’s 2 with eight zeros after it.
As we speak, probably a thousand photographers and reporters at newspapers across the country are figuring out how to use a video camera. Already newspapers outpace television in online video revenue.
But both newspapers and local tv depend on local advertising — and that revenue model is shifting even faster than camera technology. It ain’t about mass market anymore. It’s about targeted publication. And small targeted advertising to niche audiences won’t support my newsroom nor yours. Everything will change.
The question is, how fast?
News from NAB
I didn’t make it to NAB, the huge broadcast trade show, but am eagerly following the announcements from there.
Perhaps the biggest news for us online video folk were the competing announcements from Microsoft and Adobe. Microsoft is introducing a new media player, Silverlight, and Adobe is announcing the Adobe Media Player. Both are for web video and both will change our world.
From StreamingMedia.com, “Major announcements this morning at NAB 2007 from both Adobe and Microsoft find each one vying the lead in the ever-more-lucrative online video market. Adobe announced its Adobe Media Player, a standalone video player that gives Flash Video DRM for the first time, while Microsoft introduced Silverlight, a cross-platform, cross-browser media and application delivery plug-in.”
Also announced at NAB, the Associated Press Online Video Network, with the ability to upload local content to the AP player, is no longer a beta product. From their press release, via LostRemote.com,: “With its initial year growth reaching 45
million unduplicated unique visitors, AP has completed beta testing and
today announced the next phase of its Online Video Network (OVN), which is
based on MSN technology. The release of the local contribution module
enables AP OVN affiliates to leverage AP breaking news video and national
advertising sales managed by Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. In
addition, affiliates can add local video and generate revenue from local
advertisers.”
And from the Radio Television News Directors Association panel on News 2.0, Michael Rosenblum says to burn down the television stations:
If you’re a masochist, the whole 64 minute panel discussion, including Amanda Congdon, is on Blip.tv
The other big news is from Apple: Final Cut Studio 2.0. Mix formats on a single timeline. Pro color grading. Flash files output from Compressor. It’s awesome. So’s their trailer:
