Five notes on video: if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly
by Vinay Gupta • May 26, 2008 • Hexayurt, Trivia and Media • 2 Comments
Word to Jonathan who’s been my video guru these many months.
Here are my five notes (most of which he won’t approve of 
)
1> The only thing that’s worse than bad video is no video at all.
2> Properly synchronizing sound and images is nearly bloody impossible, and, worse, even if it’s right on your computer, once it’s on youtube, it’ll be screwed up again, I don’t know why.
3> I have no idea how to manage all the files. It’s a mess. I guess it’s usually a separate job, like “archive manager.” I don’t even know what that person is called.
4> Audio is key. One of the great lessons Jon taught me was that the continuity of video is generated by the audio – if it would sound right as a radio piece, it’ll be fine. The images hang off the narrative thread of the audio. This was a considerable enlightenment.
5> It’s really fun to make films, even if they’re not technically great, because film is how serious people communicate. Films, and of course, books.
I might have to try the book thing next year.
But, for now, I’ve got two hour-long films compressing. Both of them are essentially unedited – straight shot discussions or monologs that would probably work fine as radio pieces, but for now, they’re video. Somehow just making those work seems to have taken forever, largely due to a massive mess of Little Things. But it’s close enough for now, and maybe later either I’ll get better at it (some formal training?) or somebody who knows what they’re doing will take over.
Video matters.
One will be up on STAR-TIDES and the other will be up on Global Swadeshi Network tomorrow.
Two hours long? Unedited? [shudder]
[backs away slowly]
You know, I think the only thing worse than no video is lots and lots of bad video. Frankly. The information density of bad video can be appallingly low. As the old maxim goes: ‘There’s no story that can be told in four minutes that can’t be told better in three.’
Yes, asset management is a nightmare. The main differences between consumer-grade and professional-grade software are (a.) adjustment tools – being able to tweak things in all the different permutations of ‘one frame earlier or later’, and (b.) media management tools. Even so, discipline and structure are key. The higher your shooting ratio, the harder it gets. So you start by deciding what you *need*, and shooting just that. (note that you *need* ‘shots you didn’t expect, but that may bail you out when it doesn’t quite go to plan’).
This is why audio is key. Once you know what you want your film to say, you work out what shots you need to illustrate that. You do this before picking up the camera. Then you cross off the things on your list as you go along.
Video and audio sync is largely a solved problem. Unfortunately, nobody told the Flash engineers at Adobe. Flash video is devilspawn, frankly.
But yeah, video is fun.
Arr. Yes, the next step is going to be learning how to make long video into short video. But just getting the basic crap on a screen is turning out to be Major Work…. still, that’s learning…
Cheers!