Soon after our launch, we owed Philip Anselmo a vacation (he transferred from another GateHouse paper), so I got to be The Batavian‘s reporter for four of five days (Ryan Sholin filled in for a day, too).
During that week, there were two fire in Genesee County — one was a fatal.
The first fire was in Corfu and no people were harmed, but three cats died. I had the Canon HV20 and a Tripod with me, but no lav mic. Time on scene was about 45 minutes (mostly waiting for the fire chief to grant an interview, during which I shot my B-roll). Editing time was also about 45 minutes (I shot way more B-roll than I needed)
NOTE: I can’t get the embed code to work right in this version of WP and I don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out (eventually, I’ll convert this blog to Drupal), so I’m just linking to the video.
The very next day, a teen-age boy was killed in a fire. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to the scene in the morning because of meetings at our corporate office. I didn’t get there until about 3 p.m. It was looking dismal for getting a worthwhile video. Plus, stupidly, I had forgotten to recharge the battery for the HV20 and discovered it was dead. I had to use the Flip Ultra. The result is below (on scene for 30 minutes (mostly BS’ing with film crews from local TV stations, which is how I got the high school photo of the deceased) and less than 30 minutes to edit).
I’m proud of this video. Check the comments on YouTube. I think it shows you can do something worthwhile if all you have is a $150 camera.
Not directly related to Batavia, but we did a train-the-trainers video course recently, and I like this video I did about my hometown dairy (half a mile from my house).
You can check out the videos Philip has been shooting for The Batavian on our YouTube channel.
I can’t seen any quality difference between the Canon and Flip videos. In fact, the Flip looks a bit better because you see the whole frame. That says a lot more about the compression and resolution used by YouTube than the quality of the cameras, but it’s an eye-opener to me.
I imagine if I were better at compression, I could get as nice or nicer image out of the Canon, but the Flip just seems to be “out-of-the-box” optimized for the best quality web video.
[…] Howard has provided us with some examples of what he’s got in mind for his one-hour videos. I’d like to take a look, and then compare them to some similar videos that exemplify what […]
[…] news videos as an example of the quality vs. quantity debate. The good enough approach valued by online gurus like Howard Owens basically puts production time on a fast track for news video. Quality of storytelling, visuals, […]