Start to finish, my first video and lessons learned
It won’t win any Oscars, but I, and my newsroom, learned quite a bit from this experience.
One of my editors asked for a volunteer to go to the fair and “find a story.” I love the fair, and I like open-ended assignments like this. The first thing I did was grab a video camera and checked the charge on it. Another editor flagged me down as I was walking out the door. My video assignment: I was to use only the newsroom’s computer to edit and produce the video.
Let me explain. All of the video we’ve run on the site so far has been produced on home computers, usually by our interns or one of our editors. The reason they’ve done so is because our work computers aren’t as great. They have iMovie on them, which I learned is not a terrible program. Like anything else there is a learning curve to using it. I’ll admit my total ignorance here and say I’ve never in my life edited video, but I have read about best practices in producing video.
This video was fun to produce, but I shot way too little B-roll for it. I groan when I watch this, but I think the girls (and the adorable calf) make up for it. If I would’ve spent even five minutes getting better B-roll it would have been 100 times better.
We ran into some snags in the production process. I didn’t know it would take 20 minutes to import a five-minute clip into iMovie (most of my clips were in the 10 second to 3 minute range). The computer will not recognize the camera, so we have to remove the SD card from the camera and use a reader to get the video, and we cannot capture portions of the video from the card, so it has to render it whole-hog.
I’m not sure if that’s normal, but I think next time I’ll set the computer up to render video while I’m writing. Even if it takes an hour, I can at least work on other things while the video is rendering.
At least we know our setup is doable, but why is this an issue?
I’m sure you can guess. Like almost every paper in the country we are strapped for cash. We have a $1,000 equipment budget this year, and the only reason we have that is because we won a company-wide contest. So one of our editors wants to buy a dv-tape camera and a Macbook with that money, because we desperately need both. If we are going to get both then we have to make iMovie work. I think it can work, we just have to stick with it and focus on the good things the program can do.