video 2 zero

AOL, current.tv. Brightcove and Youtube jump ship. Continue Reading »

A month ago I seemed to be almost alone in expressing a distinct lack of excitement over the video capabilities of the new DSLRs from Canon and Sony. Stu Maschwitz nails it: Continue Reading »

David Eun VP of Google/YouTube  talking yesterday  at the VideoNuze breakfast panel in NYC

“…about the “head” and the “tail” of Chris Anderson’s “long tail” model. He said that in between the two (basically, between big hits and narrowly-focused content that appeals to a tiny audience), there’s a “torso”: high-quality specialty niche programming. “That’s what drove cable TV,” Eun said, “and that will be a sweet spot for Internet video.”

- Eun urged the audience to try not to define what “good” is. Viewers don’t care what professional programmers and cable execs think is good; sometimes they’re happy to watch dogs on skateboards. Thinking narrowly about what “good” programming is can be limiting.” cinematech

Following up on the Context is King follow-up:

Further proof that with 25c and killer content, you’re only $3 short of the price of a tall latte. This time from the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference: Continue Reading »

Jessica Guff, executive producer of ABC News Now and a veteran of ABC News, explains the new paradigm to PR honcho Richard Edelman:

PR people must pitch stories differently. Specifically, she said we need to offer fully formed four minute segments, with visuals, spokespeople and news hook all conceived. “Don’t just send me a pitch letter or a book which requires me to put together the piece. Economic pressures mean we are short staffed so we will respond better to something that is fully formed.” 6 a.m

Great news for commercial video producers. 

Following up on Context is King below - this from Philip Trippenbach’s Three Rules for Online Video:

The 3 rules: Simplicity, Authenticity, Currency.

And the greatest of these is Authenticity: The BBC know this, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to be reminded.

Continue Reading »

A propos of nothing at all, two quotes. The first from Fran Leibowitz:

“The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting”

The second from me:

“If they don’t like the message, change the medium.”

Close-ups work well in web video. But they also work well in television, movies and photography.

More bandwidth, faster connections are obsoleting the 320×240 frame - so the original justification for more close-ups on the web is disappearing. But the close-ups are not.

This has nothing to do with aesthetics - Videographers are become lazy! (Joyce).

Close-ups are easier to shoot: auto-exposure, auto-focus, AWB are all you need when the subject fills the frame. The effects of camera shake are minimized (Big Issue for the anti-tripod brigade), and all but the most basic rules of composition can be ignored.

Close-ups are easier to edit: you can switch back and forth between close-ups with abandon -  wide shots you require careful sequencing so as to avoid disconcerting jump cuts.

Close-ups create the visual impact, wide-shots tell the visual story.

There are two Tripod Rules. The first - Never Shoot with a Tripod, and the second Always Shoot with a Tripod - may seem to contradict one another.

Ignore them unless you are entering a competition of some sort. For everyone else just go with whatever improves your confidence, flexibility, confidence, efficiency and confidence.

- Number 3 in 7 things Videojournalists can learn from Musicians: never allow hesitation, indecision or lack of preparation to affect your performance.

This is the flipside of Connect Emotionally. Talking Heads don’t make for riveting movies or TV - but they work just fine on the web. Gary Vaynerchuck, Andy Plesser (beet.tv) and Michael Tomasky (guardian.co.uk) prove the point across a wide spectrum.

washingtonpost.com has extended the Talking Heads gestalt with its Voices series. The subjects featured in Voices don’t answer questions, they don’t respond to comments, they justsit in front of a white background and talk directly to camera.

Basically it’s a series of infomercials promoting various corporations/causes by allowing the principals to pontificate without interruption or comment. “What are these types of video doing on a newspaper website?” You may ask. That’s simple: they are generating a lot of hits. Wapo claims a huge increase in web videos watched since the series appeared in June: 1.4 million video views in September.

The videos (several dozen in all) are advertised heavily on the WaPo front page - four large link boxes on today’s wapo.com lead to the series. The only other video linked on the front page is a clip featuring Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

Associated with avoid talking heads is the notion that videographers should avoid information-intensive presentations. Information is more efficiently conveyed in text and pictures - it doesn’t need video.

But many thousands of viewers would rather watch David Pogue than crack a manual….

As the information density goes up, and the age of the target audience goes down - the preference for video over text increases exponentially. Absorbing even mildly technical detail from a book is a chore. That same information repackaged as visual media is digested effortlessly.

Emotional video works. True in movies, true on TV - not true on the web. People don’t click on emotional videos.
When you take an emotional story and edit it down to 2 or 3 minutes you transform  emotion into sentimentality. When you don’t edit it down then you better have an engaged audience if you expect anyone to watch it. Continue Reading »

Context is king. It’s not the content of the video that generates the return, it’s the ability to integrate the video into a larger information loop where value feeds back to the producers. And that involves getting a commitment to more than 3 minutes. Without appropriate context the content has limited value.

[UPDATE  10/26]   “The New York Times has broken ground by creating a sort of “contextual” video player which displays multiple clips related to the subject of the story, on the page where the text article appears.  This is one of the most notable aspects of the implementation of a new video content management system from Brightcove introduced last week”. beet.tv