video anorak

This will be enough to make most eyes gloss over, but my conversion from inky-fingered print journalist to multimedia contender is requiring me to make a steep dive into a deep pool of technical gloop. Come on in, the water's lovely.
I'm spending my evenings lurking furtively around bizarre forums such as lifehacker or videohelp.com, the denizens of which have got me out of trouble a numer of times when my ambition has outstripped my technical knowledge. But with no in-house IT support (unless you count a 7-year-old who has already apparently mastered most bits of internet technology), there's no choice. My laptop is awash with bits of trial software and free downloads.


(By the way, listen to Eddie Izzard on that very subject in this clip - taken from an Amnesty podcast here).
I even find myself dreaming of video computer file formats, of which there are a baffling number - .avi, .wmp, .mpg, .mp4, .flv, .m4v...
Today's conundrum entailed working out how to convert a Flash file (.flv), which I need for a commission I'm working on, into a format I can use with Adobe Premiere - the editing software I've been using.
If you're still with me, I'll assume you're interested enough to want to know the solution:
After recording the clip using WMRecorder (a baffling-to-use but jolly useful bit of software, more of which another time), I was directed by the videohelp.com crew to RivaFLVEncoder. Its purpose is to convert video files into Flash format for the web, but tellingly it also works the other way round (even though it doesn't say so). For the main part of the solution, look here. I found I needed to do the process twice - the mpg conversion worked only for the video, not the audio. The avi conversion vice versa. The two tracks could then be reconciled in Premiere.

See? Beats counting sheep.

Newspapers bite back

In an important piece for New York magazine, Kurt Anderson argues that contrary to prevailing thought, newspaper brands are quietly but quickly gaining the upper hand over traditional broadcast media.
In You Must Be Streaming (note that quaintly bizarre American convention of Capping All Words In Headlines), Anderson picks out some great examples of innovation by mainstream print media journalists in the US, such as this from the New York Times's David Carr.
Or the brilliant Art Buchwald video, from the Times's superb Last Word project, opening with the unbeatable (indeed, immortal) line: "Hi - I'm Art Buchwald and I just died."
Part of the reason is that print hacks embracing this new world have less fear of treading all over those broadcast conventions that tv journalists have had ingrained in them since college. The result is that "minute for minute" the best newspaper video offerings are better than tv news, Anderson says:

"Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs
in the best old-fashioned sense."

What's more, Anderson adds:

"I can easily imagine newspapers’ Web-video portals becoming the TV-journalism destinations of choice for smart people—that is, in the 21st century, the dominant nineteenth-century journalistic institution, newspapers, might beat the dominant twentieth-century institution, TV, at the premium part of its own game."

Is that same spirit of innovation beginning to prevail in the UK? Probably not to the same extent. Yet. But there are certainly signs that a numer of willing volunteers are determined to enjoy being in front of the camera as much as behind a keyboard. I'd pick out fashion editor Hilary Alexander of the Telegraph and motoring journalist Jason Dawe of the Times as early adopters who are having fun in the new playground. There'll be plenty more out there.

Anderson signs off:

"This very moment, before anyone professes to know much more than anyone else, is probably the beginning of the new medium’s great golden age. Enjoy it while it lasts."

Catching up

Some of these links will be a little long in the tooth by now, but this first proper post is by way of a catch up of some of the reading I've been doing while setting up.

Robert Scoble's post from last September is a good place to start with a neat round-up of the pros and cons of videoblogging. As the vice-president (we should have more of those over here) of something or other at a company called Podtech, a company which exists to encourage people to make and share audio and videocasts, we might have slight doubts about his objectivity, but nonethless it's a good primer.

More recently, the mighty Adrian Monck, a former columnist of mine when I edited Press Gazette (for which he still writes), delivers some vital stone tablets for the video newcomer here. They're worth repeating, just so that I can tick Monck's Maxim's ® off as I break them in the various bits of video experimentation that will be appearing on this site:

1. No newscasters. News anchoring is a presentational trope borne of the complex organizational demands of analogue TV studios. The newscast is to online as Top of the Pops is to YouTube.
2. Make sense. Reporters need to deliver their own intros/lead-ins, to camera or over picture or graphics. Images and clips need labelling if they’re raw. The most important thing video clips online require is standalone coherence.
3. Stick to your part of the story. Reporters shouldn’t try and tell the tale in one giant wrap. Text, graphics and other sources can carry a lot of the extra context and narrative required.
4. Get graphics. Voice and video aren’t the only ways to skin the cat.

Meanwhile, Steve Bryant at the Online Journalism Review is asking: What works in online video news?

His answer is, well, a lot of things. After some eyewatering statistics showing how some traditional broadcasters have grown their online video offerings (CNN has gone from 4 million streams last year, to 11 million streams per week now), he suggests that it's not just breaking news stories that are pulling viewers in. "Evergreen" content - that is, not pegged to a particular news story - and in-depth exclusive interviews are also finding good audiences, as are the more quirky, viral video stories of the kind that do the rounds on YouTube.

At the New York Times, journalists are focusing on what they call "breaking analysis" - short contextual video packages that follow and explain the breaking news agenda.

Bryant concludes:

"Luckily for publishers, online video is in its nascent stages. The economics are still uncertain and the users still fickle. Unluckily, the challenge now is to be everywhere users want them to be ."

Then there's Kevin Anderson's piece, Rethinking video, rethinking journalism, rethinking priorities, which echoes points made by Paul Bradshaw. Both suggest that print journalists should stop thinking about the grammar of television news and start inventing their own rules of video engagement.

Finally Mark Hamilton, in his Notes from a Teacher blog, points out something that seems to be of encouragement to the nascent video-journalism-enthusiast-from-a-print-background:

"the conversation around newspaper use of video is one of the most vibrant corners of the media ‘net these days, which is rather astonishing when you think about it. And it seems to be starting to expand beyond the question of how do we use video to embrace the larger question: what, in an internet
age, is newspaper journalism?"

Video and journalism

This new blog sets out to explore the rapid developments taking place where journalism meets videosharing technology. It'll have a UK bias, but I'll hope to keep my eye on developments globally too. I also plan to be posting my own videoblogs as I go - for which I'll welcome both constructive feedback and unconstructive, vindictive assassination. The first will be up by the end of the week.