It’s apparent to the few who come here that content has been pretty stale for the past couple of months.

With having to pay the bills as a web designer on top of marketing my video work, I’ve not had much time to blog on solo vj’ism.  Having said that, I’ve been left with a nagging question:

Have I bitten off more than I can chew by moving to video when I was a successful and accomplished still photojournalist and commercial editorial shooter?

Lately it has seemed as such.

Having to not only shoot content, but come up with story ideas, move past the creative blocks, try to deal with the technology of editing video content into a cohesive piece, and do it all as a solo vj has had me at a point of wondering whether to just give up.

I did a google search for the phrase “Is Photography dead?” which lead to a website about “Is Photojournalism dead?”and came across a profound quote from Margaret Bourke-White, a photojournalist of great reknown who made the statement that :

“While it is not necessary to return to the photography of 25 years ago, I think students of photography should work for a while with the view camera and do their own lab work”

The case she makes here is critically important in my opinion. A photographer is more likely to be familiar with the whole process, from the split second when the shutter goes ‘click’ to the hours a print hangs to dry after its baths of developer and fix (remember - this was written in 1958).

Now translate this into the 21st century of working as a solo video journalist and one can begin to see the difficulties, and in the process, the skills that develop, when making a concerted effort to do it all in this profession.

Despite the fact that these words were written 50 years ago, they are still applicable to the field of being a one man band video shooter and editor.

The downside of this is that newspapers have looked at implementing video - rather poorly in the majority of instances - as a cost cutting move, trying to squeeze more from less - and there eventually comes a point where quality suffers.  With the threat of pink slips ever present in the minds of staff shooters, the pressure to perform typically results in creative block and vision, resulting in a mediocre final product.  This in turn gives the detractors ammunition to support their case that still shooters should just stick to what they know best.

While the technology has gotten better, the average quality of having to do both stills and video is deteriorating. Giving still photojournalists video cameras is no substitution for specialized video shooters, but the question remains: What can be done?

I think the bottom line here is that as hard as many try, few will succeed in both mediums when covering an assignment.  One will be forced to choose one or the other.  There is an over abundance of talented still shooters in the market - but the demand and compensation for their skills has diminished.  The profession of solo video journalism is still very much in its infancy - but those who choose to put down their still cameras and pick up a video camera may very well have the edge over trained TV shooters - for the seeing vision of a still shooter brings a wealth of perspective that can translate to video in a way TV shooters are not skilled in.

Only time will tell if this is truly the case or not.

The ground swell of solo video journalism is building - and the announcement that Pulitzer and YouTube are sponsoring a contest for this style of video journalism only adds to the credibility of this newly emerging profession.

Check out the video:

What does this say about our society and how we consume news media?

Wait for it….

Yup - the detractors don’t have much to say these days around the premise/content of this speech.

Michael Rosenblum removes the veil of secrecy behind the production of video and shows why the solo vj paradigm WILL work - not might, not maybe - but WILL

Prepare yourself for some rather blunt, even crude commentary - but anyone who’s looking to be a solo vj needs to watch this - it’s worth its weight in gold.

Update:  It appears this video is no longer available - I’m trying to find another copy to post

]]> http://www.solovj.com/michael-rosenblum-40-minute-vj-revolution-speech/feed http://www.solovj.com/appointment-tv-is-dying http://www.solovj.com/appointment-tv-is-dying#comments Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:35:56 +0000 Cliff Etzel http://www.solovj.com/?p=172

My cyber mentor David Dunkley-Gyimah as posted on his blog about two topics I write about about here on solovj.com - online content distribution and the business of solo video journalism.

I have been publicly ridiculed for my personal perspective of corporate news media - and the fallacy of objectivity in the news died decades ago.  This was also discussed at length on Michael Rosenblum’s blog and needless to say, it sparked an interesting dialog.

David is a maverick, he pushes the envlope in areas I can’t even wrap my head around - but the bottom line is, he has a better sense of what’s going on in this solo video journalist profession than many of the so called “broadcast tv journalists”.

Having said that - David has posted about an online broadcasting resource called Livestation.

This is a major resource for those who want to take back the ability to report stories, news, features on their terms - not the corporate media’s gate keepers.

The second part of this equation is the detractors go to argument against solo vj’ism and online content distribution -  that online content has no means of generating revenue the way mainstream broadcast can.

Finding revenue to support such ventures is a challenge but it seems that this is being ironed out as well according Mark Glaser over at PBS’s Media Shift.

With these two recent findings, those who are like minded in working as content creators in the minimalist Zen like paradigm of solo vj’ism can now look at niche programming and develop one’s own unique branding, vision, what have you of what it means to broadcast those topics that are relevant to you and those who would also find the content important enough to view.

Add to this the ability of vj’s to create their own version of local news broadcasts and the flood gates are opened up - no longer is the public fed filtered news based upon corporate news media agendas - all news will have its unique viewpoint - and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Michael Rosemblum has posted on his blog some of his insights into the new economy of solo video journalists producing content in the realm of broadcast television.

Michael is expounding upon Mark Cuban’s blog posting that states “Are content producers prepared to reduced production costs….by 88%?”

I respect Michael’s experience and his forward thinking response to this question and why it makes sense for the 21st century digital media age.

He responds with an ever resounding yes to Mr. Cuban’s question.

Michael states :

Content producers are indeed prepared to reduce production costs by 88% (or I would rather say by as much as 88%). Just not the content producers that Mark Cuban knows.

This is where the detractors of the solo vj paradigm like to pontificate about how all their experience justifies the inflated expenses associated with shooting tv news and production content.

Michael further on states that:

When I started to produce cable shows for Discovery, they paid about $250,000 an hour per show. The show is 44 minutes. At $250 per 44 minutes, the rate then was $5681.81 per minute. If we take 12% of that, (call it the Cuban Conversion), we arrive at $681 per minute for video produced.

That’s a decent rate no matter what the detractors who have readers believe.  For anyone who produces content in the solo video journalist paradigm, a five minute piece, billed out at the “Mark Cuban Conversion Rate” comes to $3405.00.  Depending on the experience of the shooter, this could take anywhere from a few hours to a full day or two to produce content.  With 2-3 assignments a month at that rate produces quite a comfortable income for the solo vj.  And you get to see your hard earned work compensated more than fairly.

The traditional way of shooting a project amounted to inflated invoicing along with a lack of control of the final product along with expensive production crews, expensive equipment and delays due to needing to ingest to professional edit bays.

So what does this new economic formula mean for those shooting video content now - specifically as a solo video content producer?

Well, it doesn’t look to good for those who are tied to the old economy of production - one in which the act of producing video seemed some kind of magical, difficult, secret, complex and expensive process.

Rosenblum is secure in his assessment when he states “It isn’t” any of those facets for producing video content.

I thought it was quite succinct of Rosenblum to close out his blog posting with the following:

… at Mark Cuban’s numbers, a half hour of video would cost a network about $20,000. Anyone out there with a laptop edit and camcorder who wants to sign up to produce a cable half hour for $20,000? How about a series at that rate?

Hands Down.

The business end of this emerging profession has a ways to go yet, but from what I have deduced so far, Mr. Rosenblum is about as visionary as it gets for this profession - and a big thorn in the side of the detractors trying to make us believe otherwise.

I recently became aware of the ability of Adobe’s Flash Player having the capability of playing mpeg4 video’s.

Why, when there has been such great success with On2’s VP6 codec would Adobe make this feature available?

My conclusion is because mpeg4 is a superior format to native flv at the cost of slightly larger file sizes.

I’ve made it quite clear that I exclusively use SONY’s Vegas Pro 8 for editing my video content.  It is from my experience, the best NLE available for the solo video journalist paradigm for quickly and efficiently editing video and audio.

One of the great features of Vegas Pro 8 is it’s ability to encode to numerous file formats without having to jump through a bunch of hoops, as was plainly proven to me by a colleague who uses Premiere Pro - he’s limited to a handful of file formats when he wants to render out his timeline.

But I digress - back to the meat of this article.

I found a straightforward way to take an HDV timeline in Vegas, and encode that timeline to a web ready mpeg4 video file to play back in Adobe’s Flash Player.

The Procedure:

1. First off, under your general project settings, make sure your audio bit rate is set to 44,kHz - I have experience anomalous audio problems when down converting 48kHz to 44kHz
   
2. Once you have your project ready to encode out, Select File->Render As->Then select the Mainconcept AVC/AAC (*.mp4) option.  Now, select the custom button, and let’s modify our video properties.
   
3. Under Project settings, I select either Good or Best.
4. Next, under Video, I drop down the Frame Size option and select (Custom frame size) - I then enter in a value of either 480×270, or 640×360 - these are standard wide screen dimensions for the web.
   

   Next, I select Frame Order as None (progressive scan) with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.000.  I then opt for Variable bit rate with the Max (bps) setting at 2,000,000 and the average set to 1,000,000.

5. Under Audio options, I select 44,000 Hz for my sample rate and a bit rate of 96,000 bps.
   
6. At this point you may want to save this as a new template - I would make the appropriate changes in the description of your new template and give it a name of your choice.
7. Now render out your video file.

Once you have your encoded Mpeg4 video file, you still have some additional post processing to perform on the video file.

Adobe released an application platform called AIR, which is based around their Flex application platform.  Adobe’s Media Player is devleoped using AIR, and one of the free tools needed requires having Adobe Air installed first.  You can download AIR from Adobe’s website.

Next, you need to download a post processing utility called QTIndexSwapper.  With the release of the Flash Player 9 Update that which now supports H.264, we now have the ability to play a subset of H.264 movie files. The problem is most of the H.264 files have the index at the end of the file which, for progressive download, means you have to download the whole file before you can start watching any of the video.

QTIndexSwapper basically moves the index file from the back of the file to the front - thus allowing the mp4 file to begin playing within the flash video player as it’s being downloaded.  The application is straight forward to install and use.

Now the last part is getting the actual file to play within the Flash Video Player.  This is going to depend on your mehtod of web page construction.  I use Wordpress, so it’s a simple matter of utilizing the Embed FLV plugin and specifying the path statement to the mp4 file on my websites. Click on the thumbnails below to see the process for adding an mp4 video with the embedded flv player in Wordpress.

For those creating web static web pages, the process is a little more involved.  It requires using the free JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER v3.16 and following the tutorial on the site on how to embed a flash video into a webpage.  The only difference is instead of specifying an FLV file, you use the mp4 file you encoded and converted.  There is even a discussion thread that talks about the detailed procedure for using mpeg4 files with the player.

My own testing has shown that the mp4 video files look much better at the expense of file sizes being slightly larger compared to native FLV files - but that is something I’m willing to give up for better image quality.  I’mn sure there are other NLE users out there wondering if they can do the same thing - Read the details surrounding how to embed the flash video player in a web page - there is a wealth of down to earth information surrounding how to do this.

As the jack of all trades mater of them all, we as solo video journalists need to keep abreast of the latest technologies that provide avenues of content distribution.  By utilizing this method, those who utilize the web for distributing their content online, have the ability to utilize technology to their advantage - and with higher quality results.

**Note - since publishing this article, Vegas Pro 8.0c has been released as well as Vegas Pro 8.1 64bit.  It appears that 8.0c introduced some sort of update to the Mainconcept MP4 encoder and it mangles the MP4 so that QTIndexSwapper can’t process the file correctly, although Vegas Pro 8.1 does produce an MP4 file correctly for QTIndexSwapper.  I have now found a way to fix this for those needing to work with Vegas Pro 8.0c - extract the files from the mcmp4plug.cab file from Vegas Pro 8.0b and after backing up the files, replace them with the files from the mcmp4plug.cab file from Vegas Pro 8.0b.  I have successfully rendered out an MP4 file with these files and QTIndexSwapper processes the file with no error messages.**

A recent discussion on the NewspaperVideo email list is touching on the flattening of the number of viewers watching video online - but the number of hours is increasing dramatically.

This is a serious issue facing solo vj’s as they look to new distribution methods for their content and one of the issues raised was the “micro-formatting”, or in essence, reducing the size of video content to fit portable devices like iPhones, web enabled PDA’s and other smaller hand held devices.

In April, a PEW study found that 75% of American adults used a mobile phone or web enabled pda and that 10% watched video on that device - that equates to some 9 million viewers of content on mobile devices.  That’s not a number to take lightly - especially for solo video journalists looking to find viable venues for distribution of their content.

With recent price cut’s announced on the iPhone to an affordable $199, that can only mean that consumption of video content will increase dramatically.

The question is - who’s ready as a solo vj to make their content available to those potential viewers?

We have all the tools right now to create compelling content - and it doesn’t require mortgaging your life away in order to do so.  A high quality camera, shotgun mic, wireless lav, recording media and a way to edit your content - the rest is up to your creativity.

This is but one of the delivery methods that is the credo of the Solo VJ paradigm:

Working as a Solo Vj is an entirely new paradigm for independent television and video production for an entirely new world of video content on demand: broadcast, cable, broadband, wireless, cellphone and beyond.

Michael Rosenblum posted this on his blog.  Pretty straight forward.

Detractors deride his solo vj training as being too little.  His training techniques produces quality that is supposedly less than professional - according to the detractors.

Yet, only three weeks after training the Newark Star Ledger’s Photographer’s in his VJ boot camp, the quality of content already being produced meets and in many instances, exceeds the content being produced by corporate network news media shooters.

For this video story, newly trained solo vj John O’Boyle of the Newark Star Ledger shot it, wrote it, voiced it, produced it, and edited it - alone.

And has proven my perspective on the solo vj paradigm - less IS more.

For all apparent purposes, web video should be working - especially for those venues that are in a prime position to provide longer form type video stories - Mainstream magazines.

Print magazines have always been the go to for longer in depth print articles, yet these very same entities don’t know what to do with video equivalents - yet.

Why is that?

As Solo VJ’s, we could be leveraging the very monolithic entrenchment that bogs down large scale publishing and using the zen like paradigm and agility of solo video journalism and creating content that isn’t constrained by print deadlines - the web is open 24/7.

There needs to be a sense of fearlessness - that is what Tammy Haddad, former MSNBC executive producer and current Newsweek video consultant, tried to convey to a group of magazine executives in an article published on Folio’s website.  She went on to say that “producing compelling content isn’t an expensive proposition”.

The solo vj detractors would have us believe otherwise.

She also went on to say that publishers should try not to replicate cable news. “We’re not trying to be TV,” Haddad said. “That’s the biggest mistake you can make.”  But there should be a striving for the best possible quality out of the content being produced with in the realm of solo video journalism.  A new way of shooting and editing will be required by those who take up the mantle of Solo VJ’ism.

Publishing as we have known it has literally had its world turned inside out and upside down.  Content distribution, business models for generating revenue - all those typical formulaic paradigms are burning down to the ground and those entrenched media outlets are trying to figure out what to do now.

The playing field has been leveled.

Web video has a big potential of driving business in directions for solo vj’s unheard of until this time.  How do we as Solo VJ’s bring that to our advantage?

By learning, improving, and refining our skills and becoming more agile in other areas that make us more valuable as content creators.  Web video doesn’t require huge production crews, expensive video equipment, and years of formal education - this is about changing the rules of convention and showing those entrenched in the traditional way of creating video content that they no longer are the gate keepers to the craft.

Solo VJ Training can be accomplished in shorter time frames, equipment has become affordable, story ideas abound that are begging to be produced.  It only requires the courage to make all of this come together.

Those who refuse to accept these changes will go the way of the DoDo bird.  Those who adapt - will reap the rewards of their efforts.

If one no longer has to invest several thousands of dollars in equipment, then one can produce content for a lower cost - and yet maintain high production values - something the detractors refuse to believe can happen.  This new way of working could very well produce more consistent revenue streams for those willing to work in the new paradigm of solo video journalism.

The Solo VJ paradigm is changing the profession - and is past the point of stopping those changes that are happening.

Now it requires of us to raise the bar for quality and do so at a competitive price.  That is the business side of this profession.