i-movie 08 review

Amongst the things going on I have found time to do a bit of playing around with the new imovie 08. Having seen the ad’s and a couple of the demo movies on the apple site I’d expressed a level of geeky impressed’ness so you can imagine I was keen to try it out.

The hype

Angela Grant had linked to my initial ‘geek love’ post, pointing out that quite a few people didn’t like the new package. I know that a number of features of the imovie HD are gone. Bakari Chavanu at MyMac pretty much covers pretty much all of them (some of his gripes are functional rather than features).

  • No audio extraction feature.
  • No chapter markers for DVD authoring.
  • No iMovie themes.
  • Lack of control over fade-in and out of audio.
  • You cannot open completed projects in older versions of iMovie in the newer ’08 version.
  • You can’t slow down or speed up the content of a clip!
  • No advance video editing controls. (by this he means audio and video fx)
  • No support for third-party plug-ins.
  • There’s no pause control for titles.

Looks like some serious ommisions here and people are noting more every day. But reading around it seems that the most common complaints seem to fall in to three main areas

  1. it won’t run on my old mac
  2. the themes have gone
  3. some of the tricks and bells and whistles have gone.

The first one is a serious point. Having just upgraded my mac to run bootcamp and one or two other apps I know a mac is requires a serious cash commitment if you find yourself needing new features (and I would say that this isn’t the bit of software that demands that commitment). But with my ‘newspaper/journalist’ friendly hat on I would say I have little time for the last two as serious complaints.

Themes are always going to be old hat before you open the box and a lot of the bells and whistles where making the program bloated and obtuse to use. Mark Hamilton rightly points out that imovieHD ‘was a competent (although limited) video editing program’. He is right, and it that sense it’s a same to see some of the stuff go. But it was getting very close to Final Cut Express (for not far off the price tag) and, as a result, was no where near as easy to use as FCE.

But enough about the debate. Given my focus is on multimedia video for journalists, what did I think?

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An (interesting take on) the impact of editing

I’m doing more training at the moment and whilst chatting about editing  I was reminded of a clip I had from Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe programme. As an intro to the impact editing has it’s pretty good and the reality show example is great. 

Someone else has uploaded it to Youtube so give it a watch (warning: there is a bit of bad language in this and a mention of Richard Madley)

If I had a hammer…

Catching up on more reading I had a trip over to Michael Rosenblum’s web site where, as VJ Cliff Etzel put it :

A lively dialog has developed over at Michael Rosenblum’s blog about how the so called “Lower class” VJ paradigm equates to those who learned to read and write back in the 1700’s, and as a result, saw the upper crust aristocracy for what it truly was and made rightful changes to their society.

Rosenblum’s post was a typically combatative view of old school TV vs. the VJ army through a comparison with the Peasants revolt.

The printing press unleashed a revolution unforeseen by Gutenberg.

The ‘people’ were suddenly in control of information.

And those who had until then complete power over information did not like this at all.

Of course VJ is the Guttenberg and, from what I can make out, Rosenblum is possibly Menocchio? Modern TV is the church, broadcast camera people the bishops etc. etc. I lost the thread of it after a while.

I have been struggling to put my finger on what makes me uneasy about Rosenblum’s approach but this post clarified it for me.

A colleague of mine has a great saying – “ everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer” – and Rosenblum is packing a very big hammer which he is using to demolish (or so he would have it) the old monoliths of TV.

My problem is that he occasionally stops battering away at the TV stations and tries to use his hammer on web video. With all the typical zeal of an evangelist, he sees his way of working as the solution to everything – no questions asked.

I agree that it seems a pretty good solution to the lazy hegemony of the broadcasters (although no where near as radical or abhorrent to the mainstream as he would like to think). But we are talking about TV here. To try and apply it to anything else isnt helpful. Keep the hammer away from web video please.

But whilst Rosenblum is working hard to dismantle the edifice, other parts of the industry seem to be working towards rebuilding it.

Recent discussion on the Newspaper video list prompted Davin McHenry to post details of how the Bakersfield Californian is handling the throughput of video

Our system has evolved. At first we thought reporters were going to edit their own videos, but we ended up with issues of quality and efficiency. It just came down to the fact that a seasoned video editor could turn out a video in half the time and it usually would be more polished.

A few people though this was a great idea. Angela Grant though it was the “only sane way to do it” and Mindy McAdams asks “Logical, isn’t it?”

I’m not sure.

In broadcast journalism there used to be a very clear divide between the journalists, camera people and editors. Then the journalists started shooting and eventually editing their own stuff. The old school editors even got renamed ‘Craft Editors’ to differentiate between their work and the work of VJ’s (yes Video journalists – those things the mainstream media invented).

If you search hard, you will still find craft editors in newsrooms but they are, unfortunately, a dying breed. Blame technology, money, loads of reasons why. But those that are there are used sparingly and often in isolation – a reporter will drop footage off, they will cut it and then the reporter comes back and adds a vo. Not very creative and probably the reason we see so much generic stuff on TV news.

That’s not the craft editors fault. The system is forcing them and their skills out of the loop.

So when I here about the ‘production line approach’ it seems like we may be at risk of rebuilding that system in reverse.

I’m not saying that Davin’s approach will drag us back in to a TV structure. They produce some great content and, as he points out:

We still have a few reporters edit their own stuff, but it always gets a final proof by one of our video editors.

But I do think we need to work hard to keep the journalist in all stages of the loop. The technology and the fluid nature of the medium means we can do that. We can make new rules here. Journalist can do it all. They need space and training to do it. But they can. Otherwise we are just rebuilding the old TV way of doing things and missing out on an BIG opportunity.

Worse still we may be in danger of building something Rosenblum can legitmatley take his hammer in to.

Go and play links

A few quick ‘go-and-play’ links:

  • A new version of soundslides is in Beta – Soundslides Plus
  • Google have introduced Streetlevel to their Google maps. It seems to serve no other purpose than to make you say ‘cool’ a lot. It allows you to interact with…I’m not going to explain it. Just go and have ago. You can see an overview of the features here. I’ll warn you know that you will have to brave the site of a man in an orange lycra body suit – wrong, just wrong.
  • Adobe labs have released a beta version of Visual Communicator 3. It works for 95 days and although the download and install process is a bit flakey its worth a look. Lot’s of other goodies to try there as well.

Have fun

New Final Cut studio = excited Andy

I’m in the middle of teaching more newspaper people the joys of video at the moment. They are out shooting and when they get back they will be gently introduced to Avid.

So,considering I’m a about to launch in to a day of how to use Avid, I feel a bit guilty (and not a little geeky) for posting about how excited I am by the new Final Cut Pro Studio package announced by Apple.

3d layers in Motion, fancy timeline stuff in FCP and an all new grading solution. Not that I’m not happy using Avid and I know After effects has had 3d for ever but it’s this kind of thing that made me buy a mac in the first place.
Sad I know. Normal service will now be resumed.

Pre-roll idents should go

Steve Outing talks about Newspapers in an unbundled world in an article over at Editor and Publisher

The whole article draws a number of parallels with the changing distribution and business the models the music industry deal with and the problems newspapers are facing.  Steve highlights ways that we can learn from the music biz’s move from a model that was based on buying a CD to a more open model of music shareing:

As many a music and tech industry pundit has pronounced lately, the CD is nearly dead.

Anybody notice the parallel with newspapers?

It’s Interesting stuff and a worthwhile take on trying to get people to understand the way the newspaper industry is changing (interestingly Howard Owens takes music as his theme for expanding on the development of online video.)

Outings main point seems to be get your content out there rather than expect people to come to you and you will benefit from this new consumption and distribution model.

He has specific advice for video:

If you’re going to the trouble and expense of getting into video news, then make sure you spread it around; don’t horde it on your own website and expect that to be enough.

Unlike some of the TV networks these days — which send out the lawyers when one of their clips gets uploaded to YouTube by zealous fans — newspaper companies should jump for joy that their video work can be distributed and seen by Youtube’s huge audience. Think about getting your video work on multiple video services (there are lots of them).

Important, of course, is effectively incorporating your branding onto the videos. In caption fields, include the URL to get viewers to your website. Include a watermark logo in the video, and an intro that covers who produced this video, and perhaps sponsors.

Just as with newsworthy photos and Flickr, major news video can attract a significant audience on Youtube, et al. Newspaper companies should take advantage of what these online video services can offer in terms of exposure. And don’t just tolerate your video work showing up on such services — actively encourage and promote it!

Radical stuff for an industry that still (for the majority) cant get beyond thinking that online is a way to get more people reading your newspaper rather than developing new audiences. Give our stuff away! Why would we do that?

But I’m not going there (not today) What piqued my interest was the idea of branding your content to get your name out there.

Pre-roll overload

I’ve been watching a lot of online video lately just to keep an eye in and as part of my training course with newspaper journo’s and the issue of branding became one of those things that bugged me.

A lot of the other video I watched had 3 sometime 10 second pre-roll idents. Little music and graphic stabs that told you, usually with a whooshing noise or an explosion, that you where watching video from the dailywherever.com. For an immediate medium I was waiting a long time to get the info I wanted – the actual video

We already know that users are pretty intolerant of pre-roll ads in video and no matter how much we kid ourselves, our indents are pre-roll ads. And before anyone says that users will live with that as the price for better quality video, let’s not forget where that debate gets us.

So a circle to be squared here.

How do we take advantage, as Outing suggests, of this brave new world and put our content out there whilst still making it work for us if the way we brand our content winds the user up?

On a practical level my view would be go post-roll and watermark the video with a small graphic in the corner.

But on a broader level maybe, if we are still hoping to leverage our brand ‘control’ our content and funnel users from these community spaces, we still don’t really ‘get’ how these spaces work.