The video venture begins

The same reporter who served as an excuse to end my venture into multimedia self-education stepped up to my desk at the newspaper Friday and handed me a plausible excuse to reignite my interest: a Flip Video. This is a sleek little camcorder about the size and shape of an iPod. Frankly, I sneered at its lack of features and the likely quality of video it would produce, but this little gadget was being issued to our newspaper by the statewide webmaster who controlled our local website with the notion that "we" should start contributing videos for posting.

What I thought I knew about digital video production for newspapers was that it involved lots of complicated and expensive equipment and editing software which demanded even more expensive high-powered computers to run – none of which our little newspaper could afford.

Last November I bought my first digital camcorder just to record our only grandson living within range of weekly visits. I bought the Canon FS100 based upon its sole distinction of being the only point-and-shoot camcorder I could find equipped with an external audio jack. Soon after, I bought my first shotgun mic. Nearly six months later, however, I hadn't gotten past figuring out how to convert the Canon video files into viewable clips on a Mac. There never seemed to be enough time or energy left after work to scale yet another learning curve.

A couple of months ago my iMac died, leaving me at a crossroads on the issue of what direction to take in pursuing multimedia development. Should I simply replace my Mac with another budget computer and stick with the audio-slide show format, even though these seemed like more trouble than they were worth, or should I upgrade in order to give myself room to grow into video work? I upgraded with the best of intentions to new 20-inch 2.4 Mhz iMac with 2 Gig of RAM, but my camcorder has used very little, and the new shotgun mic not at all. 

I've managed to look over the tutorials on the iMovie '09 that came with the new computer, but the task of learning yet another software program just seems too daunting, given my work situation.

The unassuming little Flip Video, however, has prompted second thoughts in terms of the minimal equipment and software I used to teach myself the basics of audio-slide show production. Maybe my newspaper has given me a prime OJT learning tool.

I'm still here . . .

A lot has happened in the past seven months. It is time to consider whether to continue this blog, and if so, what purpose it might serve.

At the end of September, in the wake of steadily declining circulation and ad revenue, management at the newspaper made the inevitable cuts to its small staff: one from classified and two from editorial. Clearly there had not been enough editorial space over the past year to justify two full time staff photographers, but what I had expected was a reduction in hours for one or both of us, rather than outright elimination. Thankful as I am to be left fully employed, I am now left with a workload spanning six and seven days a week and the certainty that – given the grim turn in our national economy – the next shoe will land on me. When the newspaper's budget needs to be cut again, a seasoned community photojournalist will be viewed as a luxury in light of reporters with cameras and a steady supply of photos submitted from outside the staff that can fill editorial space so much more economically.

Like so many other community newspapers across the country, our newspaper is dying, and apparently management anticipates no future beyond newsprint. There appears to be no preparation in the works for a transition to a next life on the Internet, which is what most community newspapers are scrambling to achieve. I'm left to contemplate what future I have beyond this newspaper and what preparations I should be making for that inevitable transition.

I'm now working as long and hard as I did at my first newspaper job, but that only serves to remind me just how much I relish the role of community photojournalist and how much I will miss that work in the event I'm laid off or the newspaper closes. Apart from the prospect of finding another income, I need to develop a practical outlet for documenting my community. If this blog has taught me nothing else, it is that I don't want to devote the sheer production time and work necessary to produce decent audio slide shows. I'm not even sure I want to take the time and effort to write about my community. I'd rather be out in the community shooting.

Perhaps the blog can become such an outlet.

Like someone rolling a large stone uphill

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks stewing unhappily over the situation with my first production posted on our newspaper’s blog. In my view, a succinct audio-driven slide show that took a lot of work was given equal weight to an overly long, unedited and pointless piece of video shot YouTube-style and slapped together by a reporter. I even offered to incorporate some of the reporter’s video into the slide show if he would just remove his video. He said he’d be glad to swap my original slide show with one that included video, but adamantly refused to remove his own video because it was “fun” and had received a lot of hits on the blog. Never mind that most of those hits resulted from my posting our side-by-side slide show and video on three different forums devoted to multimedia production, inviting comments on the contrast between the two. Nor would it have made any difference to the reporter if I showed him some of the scathing remarks on the video.

Quality control was not the issue. The issue was who held the territorial rights to the newspaper's blog.

This particular reporter was in charge of the newspaper’s blog. He initiated it and kept it alive. It was his baby and he had the final say on it. He was its editor. My greatest source of frustration with the whole business of producing newspapers, large and small, has stemmed from the clash between my professional ego and 'someone else in charge' – editors. The fire-bucket style of teamwork involved in newspaper production depends upon its editors serving as gatekeepers. The editors in charge set the standards for quality. All too often, more especially on smaller newspapers, the only thing that matters is being in charge.

I don’t know why I thought this paradigm would change with the transition from newsprint to Internet.

All this has left me very discouraged. Over the past year I've spent countless hours teaching myself the basics of audio slide show production, using somewhat less than basic means. I think I've accomplished what I set out to do with my own blog. If there is no meaningful future outlet for these efforts at my own newspaper – with no access to its website and no standards set for content on its blog – then there isn't much reason to continue.

The irony of success

One of my primary motivations for starting this blog last June was due to our newspaper’s website not allowing the display of anything but text – regurgitation of stories already published in newsprint. If I wanted an outlet for teaching myself how to produce multimedia stories, it would have to be on a blog of own or on someone elses website, someone who actually wanted to post one of my slide show productions.

The prospect of this symbiotic relationship with someone elses website has been in the back of my mind for each one of my story projects.

My first audio story on a garage band workshop was offered to the city parks & recreation department for use on their website. They loved the production but never posted it. My first audio-driven slide show about an annual chalk art festival was offered to the sponsoring art association for use on their website. Again, the slide show was praised, but the organization never actually got around to posting it. After finally completing a slide show last month on an elementary dual language program, one that I was ASKED to produce for use on the elementary school’s website, it has yet to be approved by the school district administration.

That made three for three of my slide shows that went unpublished outside of my own blog, so the irony was not lost on me that my first successful placement of a slide show was on the news blog at my own newspaper. That sense of success, however, was short-lived.

The blog at my newspaper was started last fall by a staff reporter out of his frustration over corporate restrictions placed on our newspaper’s website. He was instrumental in gaining approval to set up a blog from the newsroom for “breaking news” and bgan doing some interesting things with it that we weren't allowed to do on our own website: using photos, graphs and even short pieces of video – mostly all his stuff. Officially, it was the newsroom’s blog but he was the gatekeeper and practically the blog's sole contributor. My efforts to contribute to what had become essentially "his" blog didn’t get much response from him.

Not until I got assigned to shoot the photos for one of his pet stories and thought of a way to benefit our mutual interests.

His story was a somewhat whimsical outing to the Portland International Raceway in the company station wagon to see whether Oregon’s mandated E10 ethanol gas actually costs drivers only 3% more gas consumption than standard gasoline, as the state claimed. Our newspaper wanted to do an entire page on this “challenge” to the state’s claim. On the way out, I casually asked the reporter if he was interested in my doing a slide show on the challenge for use on the blog. Sure, he said.

I spent the next two hours documenting our excursion in audio and images without planning or preparation. That was on a Monday afternoon. Our next newspaper production day for the issue that would carry the full page on the challenge was Thursday, giving me only three days to complete the slide show production in order to have it ready for timely posting on the news blog – in stark contrast to the three months my last production took.

Production workflow had to be compressed, starting with the story line. The story to be told was simple: A reporter conducts a test to tell whether one type of gas gets significantly better mileage than another. Does it or doesn’t it?

Production workflow was further simplified, inadvertently, due to my under reporting in both images and audio. I should have gotten a wider variety of driver shots instead of shooting only from the back seat. I could have traded places with the second reporter and shot side views of the driver and even grabbed a few shots from immediately in front of the driver. I should have miked the driver and conducted a running interview rather than settling for the casual banter between the two reporters – audio that was mostly unusable due to background engine noise. I should have had more specific coverage – audio and visual – of the test’s methodology and the switch between the two types of gas. As for the post challenge interview, I should have thought through my interview questions instead of letting the reporter do his own stand-up routine.

In short, my lack of planning limited the amount of material available for the production. Nonetheless, I decided to go ahead with what I had on hand and set the priority of expediency over quality, just to see whether I could meet a three-day deadline. Constructing the audio storyline took more than half the time, starting and ending with some of the stand-up monologue from the reporter. The rest was ambient audio of gas being poured into the tank, external engine audio of the car pulling away, audio of the car passing by on a sharp curve, and brief-but-relevant excerpts between the two reporters from inside the car. I had to develop info slides to explain the testing process and to conclude the storyline, due to the fact I that I had neither the audio nor the images to do this efficiently.

At one point, the reporter offered to let me include video he took with his point-and-shoot camera through the windshield from the front passenger seat. I explained to him that the slide show production software I used – Soundslides – couldn’t include video clips. Actually, I knew video clips could be incorporated with video editing software, QuickTime Pro, after converting the Soundslides production to video, but the reporter’s video was pointless and uniformly poor in quality – a shaky, handheld record of lap driving and incidental conversation between the reporter and another reporter assisting him with the driving. I didn't give it another thought.

Three days later, the ethanol slide show [click to view] was complete. It ran just under two minutes long and received rave reviews in the newsroom. That was very satisfying even though I knew it wasn’t my best work. It was a newspaper assignment converted to multimedia and completed on schedule, and I was proud to have my slide show placed on the newspaper’s blog.

Imagine my dismay the next morning to discover that the reporter added a production of his own – more than four and a half minutes of essentially unedited video right next to my slide show.

Mountain biking – Part II

The four-week class introducing kids to mountain biking culminated in a group outing to our county's only state park, 1,650 acres of rolling forest perched on the eastern margin of Oregon's Coastal Range. The trails there were not particularly formidable, but before the trek was over, it was clear that I'd put a lot more thought and preparation into my equipment than into the logistics of my coverage, much less my own conditioning.

If I had thought through the project like a producer instead of a newspaper photographer, I would have foreseen the value of scouting the trail ahead of time. The class instructor mentioned in our phone conversation the night before that he and a park ranger had ridden the trail that morning just to be sure it was suitable for the kids. I hadn't been invited along because I hadn't mentioned that such knowledge of the trail would help me plan my coverage – knowledge such as only the first mile of the five-mile trek would actually involve anything resembling a steep, rugged mountain trail. The other four miles of the trek would be spent on a smooth, asphalted path that was once a railroad bed.

For a slide show on mountain biking, I needed the mountain trail images, and not so much the smooth, nearly flat images of the fortest path.

What I also failed to impress upon the instructor was the necessity of my getting ahead of the group – frequently – in order to shoot them riding toward the camera and across the frame, rather than mostly away from the camera. To do this, I had to find a suitable site ahead of the group to stake out for photographing and audio recording as they rolled by, then get ahead of the group again and do the same thing. The instructor didn't seem to get this at all. Once they swept past the initial site of my coverage at the top of the mountain trail, the group only stopped once to rest during the initial one-mile descent. That gave me a chance to catch up, but I had to skip the breather they were taking and keep riding to find the next site of coverage.

This went on for the next four miles. I knew I didn't have enough images of kids riding on an actual mountain trail, but figured I'd have a second chance on the way back up – and the climbing shots would be even more crucial to the slide show than images of their breezy descent.

That descent was deceptively breezy. Retracing the gradual four-mile incline of smooth path back toward our starting point soon left me panting. It got much harder to catch up with the group as I fell further and further behind. I knew the group was scheduled to stop and rest at the base of the final one-mile stretch of mountain trail. I planned to confront the instructor there and convince him that unless he gave me a better chance of getting ahead of the group frequently enough on this last leg of the climb, I wouldn't have enough images for a slide show.

Imagine my disappointment to find no group of kids waiting at the base of the mountain trail. They had gone on without me. Instead, another adult was waiting to tell me that I could either chase them up the mountain trail or take the park road – a "short cut" – back to our starting point and try to head them off near the top of the trail. The road was probably only a half mile, I was told. I chose the road and began peddling hard to salvage the slide show.

The road back wasn't a half mile. It was 1.25 miles of steady incline that rose more than 400 feet, and I didn't really have a good understanding of how to work the 15 gears in order to cope with that. I finally reached our trailhead – gasping for air – only to see the last of the kids coming off the trail.

I had enough material to produce a full-page feature for the newspaper (finessing the fact that I didn't have any decent mountain trail shots), but I had missed the main point for a slide show about mountain biking!

Taking another crack at a slide show

In the past two weeks I’ve managed to crack the screen on my little camera – again, solve a persistent wind noise problem on my ersatz shotgun mic, and fail at yet another slide show project.

After such a long production time spent on the DLP Learning project, I wanted to try to complete the next slide show as fast as possible from scratch. The next subject to catch my attention was a new city parks and recreation class about mountain biking for kids. All that remained of the class was one session of instruction before the the group of kids ventured onto a real mountain trail to test their new skills. One class and the outing would be all the material I’d need for a slide show.

Participation in that one class taught me three things. For openers, 1) Riding a mountain bike is considerably more complicated than riding my vintage 1979 street bike – not just the additional gears, but the whole body language involved in negotiating uneven terrain. Of more immediate concern, however, 2) You shouldn’t try to operate a camera while riding a bike over uneven terrain. I nearly lost my balance going over a hillock and smacked the camera against the handlebar in the lunge to recover. The same camera that just come back from repair for a cracked screen last week, now had its screen cracked again, and I had to shoot the rest of the class without a viewfinder.

The third revelation from the outdoor class came when I sat down to review my audio: 3) Wind noise that may not sound so bad in the field on ear buds, sounds a lot worse in production. Nearly all of the class audio was tainted with the scratchy rumble of wind noise. Something had to be done to improve the wind screening.

I knew from reading about audio quality control that fluffy “dead cat” windscreens were considered the most effective defense against wind, so I bought a small patch of fake fur from a fabric shop and improvised. Starting with a new Swiffer duster handle to get the benefit of its full extension, I used a heavy rubber band to secure the cabled mic head to the end of the handle extension, then Velcroed the furry ‘sock’ over that.

It worked beautifully – no more wind noise!

Unfortunately, lavender was the only color of fake fur I could find that didn’t have a scratchy glue base that might rub against the mic head. Consequently, my primary piece of outdoor audio equipment was now a fluffy, lavender eight-inch sock at the end of a corded, purple three-foot-long Swiffer handle.

So much for looking inconspicuous.

As for the other two problems, I’d have to separate my bike riding and equipment operations, and I’d have to devise a way to access and secure both microphone and camera as quickly as possible. The camera was simple enough. I used the same Lowepro REZO 15 camera case that attached to my belt with Velcro and a snap, reattaching that to a wrist sweatband on my left hand. With the camera strap already around my wrist, I could simply pull out the camera in one movement and be ready to shoot left-handed.

The audio equipment was another matter. I had to pack and unpack a three-foot shotgun mic at the end of a six-foot cord for each recording session. This is where the Swiffer handle’s combined folding and telescoping design came in handy. The cord could be wrapped around the collapsed handle which could then be attached to a belt loop with a snap ring added to the end of the handle, and Velcro-strapped to my right thigh. I could strap down and unstrap my audio equipment within seconds.

The setup made me feel like Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter with the sawed-off shotgun strapped to his hip in the old “Wanted: Dead or Alive” TV series . . . except maybe for my color scheme.

DLP slide show completed + minimal gear reaffirmed

Image sequencing for the Dual Language Program production went smoothly enough, but for the frustration of having shot hundreds of images and still coming up short on key shots for points made in the audio track. How could I cover three DLP classes and not shoot more images of Hispanic and non-Hispanic students working together? I wound up relying heavily on informational slides. That was a disappointment, but then again, the production was meant to be expository rather than tell a story. What was surprising was how much time it took to write and rewrite the copy for those information slides. I had to keep the flow of written material supplemental to the audio track without being too wordy or redundant.

For the entire four-minute production, I wound up using only 42 slides due to holding the info slides on screen a bit longer to provide reading time. For this production, I shot everything horizontally and matched the info slides in size to give the entire image sequence a consistent flow. I don’t know if there is an optimal file size for use on the Internet, since Soundslides automatically resizes everything, but I standardized on a 6x4.5-inch frame at 200 dpi.

As for the Soundslides process, I wasted a lot of time adjusting the image intervals, then making changes in the sequence, and then having to readjust the subsequent changes in image intervals. I should have nailed down a final sequence before fine-tuning the timing. What helped with recalibrating after each image shuffle was my project spreadsheet. I wound up using the numbered sequence for images in the first column (a pain to have to renumber with every change, but ultimately useful), then listing the time lapse for each transition, then transcribing each audio segment, and finally, noting the duration of each audio segment.

Here’s my final project spreadsheet in Excel.

Even so, it only took a week to finish the first edition of the slide show, from image sequencing to final image timing. I spent another week incorporating suggestions made by several key people who viewed the initial production, and delivered the final edition of my DLP slide show on March 14: “Learning en dos lenguas.”

A few follow-up thoughts on equipment and quality control . . .

During the lengthy process of repairing auto-leveled audio, I lamented over not having a more professional digital recorder. I even went shopping for the next step-up in audio gear, one that would justify an investment in a decent shotgun mic. I came up with three good candidates: the Zoom H-2 retailing for $200, the Edirol R-09 for $300 and the M-Audio MicroTrack II for $350. Any one of these might be worthy of attaching an Audio-Technica AT897 shotgun mic (another $275).

But then I looked at the quality of images produced with my little Fujifilm Finepix F30 and thought of the sharp, full-toned images I see in most of the slide show entries for the NPPA Monthly Multimedia Contest.

It makes no sense trying to optimize my audio quality when I marginalize the quality of my images with a point-and-shoot camera. I decided to stick with the minimalist gear.

My choice in gear may seem like reverse snobbery, but using equipment with such a low profile in the field is liberating. Rather than entering a story project laden with the heavy-duty slr and totebag of accouterments common to all media photographers, I can walk through a crowded room wearing all my equipment for a slide show project, and not even draw a glance. I can certainly work a room full of kindergarteners or fourth graders without disruption. Imagine trying to shoot with a 35mm camera only inches away from the ear of a five-year-old. The point-and-shoot is silent and the child doesn’t even look up. My “listening stick” draws more attention (Swiffer-mounted microphone – see Oct. 5 blog), and even that doesn’t hold much interest for long among kids.

No, the sense my minimalist gear makes is that all of this – equipment, software, early morning hours and even this blog – is for the sole purpose of providing an alternative to my work for the newspaper. It isn’t practice for freelance work because I don’t expect to earn any extra income from it. It isn’t self-development for the prospect of professional advancement – not at my newspaper, not at my age. It is simply for the hands-on challenge of teaching myself something new about a rapidly changing profession.

Okay, maybe there's just a little genuine snobbery in trying to get the most out of the least amount of “professional” gear.