Shoddy! Which thesaurus did they drag that one up from!
This was paydirt for me as I talked to the class (a group of chinese students) about writing headlines, seo. Something that “Shoddy railway project closed down” fails at in every measure.
Worse still the story is really good:
The 74.1-kilometer railway project [Jingyu-Songjianghe Railway project in Changchun], with a total investment of 2.3 billion yuan ($360 million), was recently found to have illegally contracted a fake company and a couple of laymen who barely know anything of building bridges.
Two blokes stroll up and blag $360 million! Come on!
It’s an old story but for me it perfectly illustrates the way that video can enhance a story. This is clip video at its finest – the text tells the story and the video shows you the visceral experience. It enhances the story and works with the text in a combination of media that’s unique to the web.
When I play this in a class I know that one minute in I will get a reaction, a big ooooh that underlines what video is great at. Watch and see what I mean.
I thought about the title of this post as I was reading around how the recent update to twitter has caused a flurry of posts outlining what it will mean for journalists.
The Twitter.com of today, as compared to the Twitter.com of yesterday, is much more about information that’s meaningful and contextual and impactful. Which is to say, it’s much more about journalism.
You could take a view that she means Twitter has now become more useful to journalism. But I have to ask how much journalism is ready to take advantage of what it has to offer.
I can also see clever journalists using the embedded feature to tease stories with video snippets and by giving their Twitter audience more content encourage those followers to visit a news site and engage there too
I love that idea. But how many newsrooms are ready to take advantage of it?
It’s easy to dismiss putting time in to getting your multimedia on twitter as a waste of time. Like the ipad, it’s easy to dismiss things like twitters new features as gadgets and technology that get in the way of proper journalism.
But experimenting with getting a video on to twitter is not about video on twitter. That’s the easy (now easier bit). It’s about exploring if you have the capacity to do video at all. Just like exploring delivery of content to the ipad is a way to experiment with html5. Hell, if nothing else it’s a convenient excuse to try.
If you don’t take the opportunity to experiment then you will find that you have less of a capacity to produce the content your audience will want and no ability to chase them as they migrate to platforms that do.
When they come to you, you may as well have the newsroom fail whale up: “Sorry we are over capacity”
Real capacity
Maybe we should be more honest about what we can and can’t do. Be more bullish about what we do well. Perhaps we should get over wanting to chase them everywhere (or corral them in one place behind a paywall).
Or maybe we should take advantage of the free, open and engaged platforms to see just what capacity we really have.
News reaches me via the newspaper video group about me about an excellent new project called Findingtheframe by Colin Mulvany, multimedia producer at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington.
According to Colin the site was set up as a website
for the sole purpose of connecting those who need feedback on their multimedia, to professionals willing to share some time and knowledge.
It came off the back of a post on his (excellent) blog Mastering Multimedia where he voiced his disappointment at the quality of the video being submitted to the NPPA Best of Photojournalism Multimedia Contest
The plan is to have onboard as many “expert” volunteers as possible that have solid foundations in video storytelling, audio slide shows or Flash projects. This pool of reviewers will peruse the submitted links of multimedia in the “Story Pool”. If they decide to comment on a story, it will then become public on theFinding the Frame home page where anyone else is free to give added feedback.
The site has already drawn in some great content and some lively debate. Well worth a look and if you are in that game then sign up to help review.
I’m getting back to my roots this week with lots of video stuff including my Newspaper video survey. So it was nice to get an email from James Cuff at the South Wales Echo who gave me the heads up for a video he produced as a promo for their re-design:
How did he do it. In a nice piece of cross-promotion for the video James told Walesonline.co.uk
“I filmed several of our journalists, who feature both in print and online, in our new green-screen studio before animating the elements in After Effects and editing the final video to a soundtrack.”
Green screen! After effects! Well, James does have a multimedia degree. But to have that kind of production skill in house is a coup for the paper. It shows through in James’ other video work.
Now my advice would be to take advantage of the advertising downspend and get some prime TV space for the ad whilst it’s cheap. Really get that disruptive strategy working
Newspaper produced video is at a crossroads. As many U.S. publications turn inward to focus on their traditional print products, many online producers are wondering if they should continue to invest the extra time it takes to shoot and edit video. It’s such a crazy time to be a visual journalist. Newspaper photo staffs are being slashed and devalued, as publishers try to protect what’s left of their bottom lines.
If anyone is qualified to ask if video will survive it’s Colin. But I’m interested to find out whether video is still on the agenda and how it’s being done.
I’ve asked this question before when I conducted a survey of the who, what and how of video in 2007. The results of that little survey are still up and, according to my stats, get a regular look. So I thought I would try the survey again and see how things have changed.
So if you are involved with producing video for the web, I’d really appreciate you taking the time to complete the survey. It’s short and easy so won’t take too much time and I’ll share the results as I did last time.
I’ve been doing a bit of ‘multimedia’ with students including maps and the wonders of Dipity timelines. Whilst picking through the backlog of posts in my reader I came across a few posts with defining moments for online journalism. So, as a bit of fun, I thought I would add them to dipity as an example to use.
There is so much great multimedia coverage of the US election out there. But The Washington Post’s TimeSpace beta caught my eye. Fun to navigate and explore and it includes tweets.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything directly video related. Something that will be remedied over the next few weeks. In the meantime I wanted to point you to a PC only, free video editor called VideoSpin from Avid. Well technically it’s from Pinnacle, who are now owned by Avid.
It offers an impressive little feature set including titles, sound effects and an easy export to YouTube. But it does have some flaws. oh,and it’s only PC)
At a glance:
Only one video track
Great for hard disk cameras but no control for tape based camcorders.
Three audio track. One for the video and two that will take any file.
Rubber band editing for audio]
A great title tool
MPEG2/4 capacity limited to 15 days then you need to buy the codec pack (Less than 10 pounds)
A great (nearly free) editor that is a big step up from Windows movie maker.
Did I mention it’s only available for the PC
In more depth.
The interface
Videospin has a nice clean interface which should be an easy transition for people used to Windows Movie Maker. As nothing is really free these days the screen is dominated by the ad in the middle of the screen. You can’t get rid of it but it isnt as intrusive as you may think.
Import
Here is one of the areas where Videospin falls down a little for some. There is no camera control so tape based capture straight in is out of the question. You could use one of the advertised Pinnacle apps or just use windows movie maker to create the files.
It’s pretty obvious that this is aimed at the hard-disk/removable media mob and it’s no worse off for that. I tried a drag and drop import of a 1080i M2ts file for the demo movie below and it worked fine.
According to the FAQ it will deal with a number of different formats through its import settings:
Video: (.avi, mpg, .mpeg, .mod, .mp2, .mp4, .wmv)
AVI (DV AVI)
MJPEG
MPEG-1
MPEG-2 (optional) MPEG-4 (optional)
DivX (optional)
WMV
Audio: (.Wav, .mp3, .mpa, .m4a, .wma, .AVI)
Dolby 2ch (optional)
MPEG-1 Layer 2
MP3 Audio
But notice the optional. The software has a 15 day grace period and then it will no longer handle MPEG-2/4 and DivX. That’s a clear problem for people editing off hard disk cameras as the M2TS files are MPEG 2. To get that MPEG functioanlity back you need to buy the Spinpac codec bundle. But it’s only £6.99 (11 bucks) so not a budget busting hobble.
Through the import you have all the usual scene detect options which display as a neat thumbnail. In a nice touch you can scroll automatically through the scenes using the play bar in the playback window.
Editing
It may be limited to one track but Video editing is a straighforward drag and drop effort. Drag a clip from the clip album and all the trimming is done on the timeline. This is done with the standard dragging of the in or out or you can split a clip with a Razor blade function. Clips can also be dragged around to re-order a movie with any gaps closed up behind you as you go.
Audio editing is one of the features that Videospin has over WIndows Movie Maker. Essentially you have 3 audio tracks to play with; sound from the video clip, a music track and a second audio track although the music and audio tracks are interchangeable. You can also take a video clip and lay it on the audio track and it will just take the video, effectively splitting the sound and picture, which gets you more than a way to getting over the lack of a B-roll video track.
Another great audio feature is the rubber band editing for all tracks. Mixing your audio is not just a one shot thing any more. A high quality feature for free software.
Bells and whistles
The FX are pretty limited even by Movie Maker standards, but useable. The more interesting part is the Title generator. Behind the ‘okay’ set of presets is actually a pretty powerful title tool that allows you add pics and has some snazzy text effects. Definitley worth a play with. The effects can also be added to the titles to.
Export
The list of export formats in Videospin is equally impressive, nearly identical, and equally limited by the 15 day thing as the import option.As well as being able to save to a standard file on your desktop they also offer an ‘Upload to Youtube’ option which will compress, login and upload a file to an account of your choice. This is also available for Yahoo video as well but this requires the extra MPEG 2/4 codec.
But beware. It says in the Faq that it will do Flash Video but I couldn’t find the option for exporting anywhere. Maybe it’s because I was working on XP not Vista or maybe they are passing the YouTube export off as flash encoding.
Overall
Here’s a little demo of what I played around with:
A number of people have commented on Videospin’s limited feature set but praised it’s stability. And I’m still disappointed that Avid got rid of Free DV, its try avid product, and this won’t fill that gap. But I have to get over the fact that it isn’t meant to. It’s clear that the app is a marketing tool for getting people to upgrade to Pinnacle Studio – and app with a less of a reputation for stability. Its also aimed to sit between other products like Video Transfer and Instant DVD recorder. But in reality, who cares.
Being strict it’s not a free app as most of us will want the MPEG2/4 capcity. But even costing in the cost of the codec pack, Videospin is an absolute bargin at less than 10 pounds.
If Windows movie maker is looking limited but the budget just won’t stretch then this is a must have for PC based video people.
