Paula's Adventures In Multimedia

Adventures in Audio Slideshow Training

I spent last week as the coordinator of an audio slideshow training seminar for 18 members of our staff -- one traditional text person and one photographer per team -- from several states, gathered in Dallas.  Others more skilled and experienced than I did by far the bulk of the training, while I added some overall observations and a few tidbits from my Poynter training.

I have to say, it was just as tremendous to be on this side of the training -- watching and hearing the others learn -- as it was when I was starting to learn this myself.

All 18 of them plunged enthusiastically and whole-heartedly into the concept of marrying sound and photo.  They truly embraced it, and witnessing everyone go after all the good audio and photos was extraordinarily gratifying.  And, they produced some fabulous projects.

The simple act of the collaboration was something to behold, in itself -- especially because most of these teams hadn't previously worked together and weren't even from the same state.  They were just thrown together more or less willy-nilly.  So to see them working side by side and in close cooperation to get the most from their audio and photos, both in the gathering and the production stages, was really, really excellent.

We stressed from the start that this was all about teamwork, and these folks really came through.  And they had a great time doing it.

So ... I did a little slideshow myself to show some of this.  I'd asked each team to gather audio and photos of themselves while on the scenes of their stories.  Some of them did so; most, understandably, were too preoccupied with their own stories to want to spend time on my little project.

So, I resorted to going around the training room with my audio recorder, my little point-n-shoot, and my pathetic photographic skills do to part of it.  The lousy photos notwithstanding, I do kind of like the result.  It shows the collaboration and the thinking, which is exactly what I had in mind.

Of course, trying to cram 21 people (including trainers) into 2:30 requires some distinctly unartful work on the production end.  But this wasn't meant to be a thing of beauty ...

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/training/dallas_training060608/paula_project

Further Cycling and Video Adventures

Spent the weekend in the Berkshires with the bike (of course).  Did a video (of course).

A couple things slightly different about this one:

--In the past I've pieced the video clips together and then slapped the (egregiously copyright-violating) music on top of it.  In those past efforts I made some efforts to match up small pieces of the video and music, but the video always got laid down first.

This time I put in the (egregiously copyright-violating) music in first and then did what I could to match up the video. 

I'm not sure which way is preferred by those who know what they're doing.  Maybe it depends on the material?

My favorite is the video matched to the line "no one taught them etiquette" and "I will show another me."

I was saddened not to have footage of an eagle, or even a bird.  But as a friend said, "cows are the eagles of the ground."

--I engaged in the rather risky cycling maneuver of holding the Flip Video with one hand and the handlebar with the other for the cycling scenes.  That instead of using the helmet cam, because I wanted to see what I was shooting.

Unfortunately that caused some issues in the area of ability to brake, specifically, and the ability to control the bike in general.  And I couldn't do it in a group because the rest of the group would have felt that their safety was compromised. And they would have been right.

The things we do in the name of professional development.

More Adventures in Faking Videography

So, I haven't posted anything lately because I've been too busy with my new career as an amateur videographer.   Odd, huh?

I ended up in a compromise with the guy in the below post:  He found someone else to do the bulk of the piece he wanted, but I came along to do some supplemental material involving bike riding and a community garden.  Then for kicks I also filmed a lot on my own of him doing his job ... that won't make it into the project at hand (the guy who knows what he's doing is handling that part of it) but it does give me a whole lot of really cool material to experiment with on my own.

Unfortunately I can't at this point post any of it, since it's a private thing.  But maybe sometime in the future.

A key new skill that I need to master: How to break down all of the massive quantities of footage and distill it into one coherent piece that tells the story.  Yeah, that's a pretty basic need.  And it's one we writers and word editors are well familiar with.  But it's a whole new challenge in trying to master it in this somewhat complicated new (for me) format.  Until now I've been working with more limited quantities of footage and it hasn't been that hard to make it coherent.  But with this project, I've already assembled boatloads more than I'm used to.

Just trying to keep order in the clips is a challenge.  Right now I have clips scattered all over my iMovie clip chart, in  no order.  Most of them are edited down to some degree.  But now how shall I assemble them?  Such a dilemma.  It all depends on which version of the story I want to tell, and how I want to tell it. Again, much like a print story.  But with the added challenge of how to make the visual impact -- and then the time challenge of actually dealing with all these pesky little clips.

One problem that's good to have: There's so much cool material that I can, if I want, spin off some shorter pieces on little slices of the big picture.  Think of them as sidebars.  I've already done the rough cut of one little "sidebar" and shared it with the subject, who loved it.  This is so fun!!

I shall discourse more on the focus question once I have time to, well, focus on it.  But for now it's off to vacation for a few days. 

My Adventures in Fooling People about Video Skills!!

Oh my!

This absolutely is the highlight of my recent professional career.  It's both extremely gratifying and highly entertaining to me ...

I've posted the last couple of my cycling videos on the New York Cycle Club message board, since there's an audience there that's likely to be interested in the content, if not in the professional quality-or-lack-thereof.

Imagine my astonishment to get a note this morning from someone who saw my most recent video (the same one that's in the below post) on the NYCC board -- and wants me to shoot and edit a somewhat complicated-sounding video of him for entry into something that would get him on some sort of show.  (Details being withheld purposely here, but suffice it to say it sounds pretty cool.) (It's not about cycling, either.) (And I don't know this person. He just saw the goofy cycling video and came my way.)

I'm telling him no -- unless he gets REALLY desperate -- because, flattered though I might be, I have zero confidence that my skills at this point are anywhere near what would be needed for this little project.  I don't want to waste his time with something that I can't guarantee.

But still.  To have him THINK I could do this, by virtue of my little cycling fun video project, thrills me to no end.  And it certainly shows that, with some practice and work and perhaps a little good instinct and talent for storytelling and editing ... we all can do this.  Remember:  If *I* can, anyone can.

More cycling video

I've obviously been a bad little blogger.  But it's been a busy and distracting time with people leaving, preparing to leave, thinking about leaving, changing their minds about leaving, you name it.  Plus I did two Farewell Project videos that don't show up here.  And no I still haven't had time to deal with the audio issues therein.  Maybe I'll bring in the tripod for Mr. Danborn's, however.

I also spent time pulling four New York Cycle Club ride videos into one compilation.  It was a good exercise in editing.  And I was reminded of a key problem:  When copying and pasting clips from one project to another, iMovie project size absolutely explodes.  There are ways around it, sort of, but I forgot about the whole issue until it was too late.  So this morning I went out and bought a SECOND external hard drive.

(For those who might wonder ... no, I don't get reimbursed.  This is all a personal little set of projects. Which is to say ... if you want to try the same thing, be forewarned.)

Here's the NYCC combo:

Bird's Adventures in the Newsroom: The Video

Here's why it's helpful to have the camcorder at close hand (in this case, for the staff Farewell Project but it works for other creatures' hellos and goodbyes as well ...)

Bird's Adventures in the Newsroom

It's great that I had my video camera almost handy when the newsroom's Bird Event occurred this morning (and entertaining for the staff that they got to see me run across the newsroom to retrieve said camera ...)

But not so great that I can't do anything with the tape until I get home.  The camera requires a Firewire connection to transfer from tape to computer, and these PCs don't have such.  I suppose I could try to ask a Multimedia person to vacate his or her Mac-equipped workstation so I could play with my bird video, but that seems somehow not quite right.

I don't think I got anything of the bird flying. He moved too fast for me.  But he has some nice poses that will be entertaining once I get the transfer accomplished and can edit it ...

More Cycling, Flip, GoPro and for fun, a Crash

On Saturday we did the "Deep Westchester" ride, around 95 miles total for the day.  The ride was beautiful but glitch-filled, including a minor crash by your friendly videographer.  But it was worth it, since I got to kind of capture it with the camera on my head!

Once again I used a combination of Flip Video  for the non-riding scenes and GoPro for the ride.  I still can't get over how easy it is to just stash the Flip in my jersey pocket and pop it out whenever there seems to be an impending scene of interest.  Sure, its capabilities are limited. But so are mine, so we work well together.

I have a bit less control with the GoPro, mainly because I don't want to try to mess with it once it's on my helmet.  I COULD leave it on my helmet for the whole ride and try to start and stop it at appropriate points. But that seems problematic for a number of reasons.  Plus it increases the amount of time I'm subjected to stares and ridicule for having a camera on my head.  So instead I fire it up midway through the ride and then just let it run for its hour maximum.  Then I go through and try to extract the best parts from that limited period.

Some thoughts on the video below  ...

Once again, the music is an example of Don't Do This At Work.  But under the circumstances I just couldn't resist.  And the audience is so small, AND the Dead used to encourage taping at their live shows, AND with the jersey and all ... (you have to be something of a Dead fan to fully grasp the connections.  But even if you're not, the song really works for the video, I think).

But this, like some things I've mentioned previously, was an example of not being alert enough at the time to make the most of a situation.  I need to learn from that.  It's also an example of being saved by thinking at least a little:

The idea of using Richard's Deadhead jersey as the icon inspiring the musical choice didn't occur to me until I got home.  I wish I'd thought of it at the time, because I would have gotten more of him (instead, I actually had complained about having to ride for awhile with that thing staring at me!)  But at least I was alert enough to get a closeup of the jersey just because it was good detail.  Then I was able to work it into the video a couple times to try to reinforce the theme that belatedly occurred to me.

One purposeful thing I did in the editing:  Unvarnished, the crash was rather jarring in the midst of a cheery little ride video.  Of course, that's the way crashes are in real life. But still.  So I tried to set it up just a bit by doing the title frame in the beginning with a reference to crashes.  Then I matched it up with part of the song lyric that seemed to work ("What in the world ever became of Sweet Jane?  She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same ..."  (Crash)

I tried to do a little transition from the food stop to the resumption of the ride: from the closeup of Liz turning her head and looking up, right into the outside shot of the riders riding away, then to our group preparing to ride away.

And then I tried to synch music and shots of the end of the flat-fixing sequence and the resumption of the ride.  And there were a couple of similar efforts in other spots.  I wanted to do more, but there's a limit in time and ability.

A Quick Update: External Hard Drives

Here's an example of how every little thing can be an ordeal at times for the novice (but worth it in the end).

A couple of little cycling videos and a couple of little Farewell Project videos gobble up an amazing amount of disk space (even after I deleted all my previous projects.)  That combined with a weird idea I had as a workaround to the Flip Video/QuickTime issue caused me to buy an external hard drive to store all this stuff on.

The instructions (yes, I had to read the instructions) said basically: Just plug it in.  So I did, and began transferring. Bear in mind, this took some time that I didn't really have.

At any rate, half of the video files transferred fine. The other half didn't transfer and resulted in an Error 1309 message.  English, please.  Naturally the answer wasn't to be found in the Help files.  That's why we have Google.

Turns out I had to format the hard drive to make it receptive to larger files (and these aren't even very big files!)  Now, I suppose "most" people would have known this from the start.  Those who know what they're doing.  But since I'm not one of those people, I had to waste all this time and all these steps before I finally got it right.

I will say it was a thrill to achieve the proper formatting of my new drive.  I'm serious!

I also installed Perian in an effort to solve the Flip/QuickTime audio issue, but to no avail.  Possibly because I didn't remember to do it until after I'd already imported the files from Flip into iMovie.  I'll try again later with something started from scratch.

Doesn't matter at this point; I had an inspiration for the audio on Saturday's cycling video that I like a lot. It debuts tomorrow. The copyright police will have to stay at bay.  This was too good not to do.

Before long I have to start learning FinalCut Express.  But how do I carve out the time?

More Adventures in Flip and GoPro

So I, the non-technical non-genius, get to venture further into techy  worlds if I wish to have audio with my Flip after upgrading QuickTime to too much of an upgrade.

Below is part of the note from the Flip people, who are to be commended for their several communications on this question and their efforts to solve it.

I could upgrade to Leopard but I seem to recall possible issues with other of my programs.  Fusion maybe?  Or maybe I'm just too poor to pay for it.  There's SOME reason I haven't done it yet; I just am too overloaded to remember what it is!

Or I could take my chances with Perian as suggested below.  If only I could translate what "several customers" having "some success" means.  And the real key: possible effects on other applications.  Where oh where is my former personal technical guru when I need him??  The thought of delving into this on my own is not appealing to the non-techy me.

From Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the Flip:

We have recently become aware of an audio compatibility issue revolving

around Flip Video and the latest QuickTime 7.4.5 update running on the
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system.  Apple is aware of the issue and
is investigating it with Flip Video. 

This issue does not affect customers running the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
operating system.

We have heard from several customers that they have had some success
using an application from www.perian.org.  Please note that we cannot
officially recommend this as we have not fully tested the application,
nor do we have knowledge of what other applications may be affected.

On my other issue (my own ineptitude at aiming the helmet cam correctly) ... the very helpful folks at Digital Hero Camera , maker of the GoPro helmet cam, posted this comment on YouTube  in response to my video posted there:

For aiming on the helmet...aiming up about 10 degrees from your eyes looking straight forward is good. This is because your head is down more than you think...and your eyes look up. So...if you aim the camera 10 degrees up from the get-to...it will be looking ahead when your head is down in your riding position. It's almost always the best angle whether you are on a bike or motorcycle...thanks!

I noted that that's easier said than done since I'm adjusting the thing on the fly, or on the wheel.  But that's my issue, not theirs.  I'll keep trying ...