Today and Thursday I’ll be in San Jose, Calif., at the first Web Video Summit put on by Jupitermedia. I helped put on one of the tracks, and I’ll be moderating two panels:
Making News News, with Brian Conley of Alive in Baghdad, Steve Grove of YouTube, Brian Gruber of fora.tv and Josh Wolf of the Rise Up Network.
The Power of Collaboration, with Kent Bye, John Furrier, Adriana Gascoigne, and Dave Toole.
Update: Had a good time at today’s sessions: about 50 people at the first, 75 at the second. I’ll post an interview with Josh Wolf in the next week.
A few snippets from today:
Web video editing panel
At Shooting for the Web: Making Sure it Works Compressed, Small and Everywhere, Jessica Kizorek, head of Two Parrot Productions, had some good suggestions for those starting out shooting video:
"Get up close and personal with your subjects" to compensate for the small size of Web video (generally 320×240 pixels, though that’s now changing). Use dramatic lighting.
"Viewers like to watch human faces. We will seek out human faces first."
"Avoid the talking head effect" by shooting from different angles.
"Have your subject speak directly into the camera" rather than the passive to-the-side angle seen in most television interviews. It involves the viewer emotionally.
Clue people in. They want to see the behind-the-scenes challenges of how you did it.
Says Kizorek: "The Internet is not about technique or technologies, it’s about providing people wilth the access to communicate and impact one another. We’re making those kinds of interactions possible. It’s easy to get caught up in the gadgets but keep an eye on the human element."
Joel Heller, Producer/Editor for Docs That Inspire, suggested that video producers use a shotgun mike. It doesn’t pick up motor noise of camera. Also, if you turn the camera away to follow something being discussed, the sound doesn’t drop away if the speaker continues talking.
He also advises: "Don’t sterilize your setting." Some amount of ambient noise is good. Subjects look more natural if they’re doing something meaningful in the context of the story while they’re talking with you.
Adds Heller: "Emotion trumps everything. If people don’t feel laughter or joy, what have you accomplished? The substance, the meaning is all that matters in the end."
An editing tip: "I oversaturate the colors and brighten it on the Mac to make it look better on the PC because the Mac screen is naturally brighter," Heller says. He also creates at least two versions, one at a 200 to 300 kilobits per second transfer rate in Flash, and a high-quality 1,100 kbs rate in h.264 MPEG-4.
iPhone panel
Christopher Allen had some interesting metrics to share on the panel about video on the iPhone. In tests announced yesterday, it took 50 seconds for CNN.com to load on an iPhone, and 2 minutes for YouTube to load. "So it’s still going to be a hybrid experience" between a traditional mobile experience and a full Web experience.
Allen recently created iPhoneWebDev, which already has 122 members, all creating web apps for the iPhone.
And iPhoneDevCamp is happening July 6-8, barcamp style, at Adobe HQ in San Jose. Admission is free.
More Allen: "The iPhone will have an interface for video that will be different from what people are expecting," that is, not the usual Flash video seen on YouTube. But YouTube says it’ll transcode all new videos into the H.264 format for use on the iPhone. I asked whether that meant YouTube will now be supporting downloads, something that only a tiny minority of visitors have been able to do until now. Panel consensus: Probably, and they’ll continue to use the DMCA take-down provisions as a defense.
See what they’re planning over at m.youtube.com.
A former Web mapping company exec said, "The iPhone’s implementation of Google Maps is the best I’ve seen to date."
Also, Josh Wolf has a report on the conference on CNET.
Day 2
Just a couple of brief updates from Thursday:
Enric Teller showed off Showinabox.tv, a fairly complete solution for videobloggers. It’s a plug-in for WordPress blog users. Enric called it "the ultimate videoblogging tool."
Dina Kaplan, COO of Blip.tv, was a highlight of the conference, per usual. Blip doesn’t run advertising on its free grassroots video hosting service. Instead, it splits licensing revenues 50-50 by lining up sponsors of its Internet TV shows, like Ze Frank with Dewars, Amanda Congdon with Dove, and AliveinBaghdad.com with Personal News Network. "We are bringing in sponsors for independent media creators," she said.
She had a word of advice for video producers who want to make money but who blow off their chances at earning revenues through adolescent (my word) antics: "It’s cool to be artsy,but don’t provoke the grownups writing the checks."
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
[…] “generally 320×240 pixels, though that's now changing”
:
in hoeverre do you think this change have to do with the fact that people is now bringing videos to the big screen; and not only thus with the fact that it's better to use more pixels in order to watch videos on a full screen mode, in the computer?
thanks in advance for your attention.
cheers.
[…] “generally 320×240 pixels, though that’s now changing”
:
in hoeverre do you think this change have to do with the fact that people is now bringing videos to the big screen; and not only thus with the fact that it’s better to use more pixels in order to watch videos on a full screen mode, in the computer?
thanks in advance for your attention.
cheers.
Thanks so much, JD, and it was terrific to see you at the conference! Look forward to the next time, Dina