Documenting Life is Time Consuming
Technology is awesome. It gives us ways to share our thoughts with lots of people very easily and cheaply. However, I’ve realized over the last few years that documenting events in your life can be really time consuming.
My Mom recently asked me why there hasn’t been any activity over at Emma’s website lately? I didn’t have a good answer except to say that I’d been busy. It was a cop-out and I immediately felt bad about it. After all, my family is 3000 miles away from me and the only thing they ask from me is to send some pictures from my iPhone and put up the occassional video on Emma’s website. Too much to ask? I think not.
This got me thinking about how I’m going to cover this week’s SXSW Interactive conference. For those of you that follow my professional career, you know that I shoot a video program called Relevantly Speaking for MediaTrust.
I travel all over the U.S and shoot anywhere from 10-15 interviews per event with industry leaders and other interesting people. During this trip to Austin, I’m changing my content strategy a bit. Instead of spending 4 days hauling around a massive production rig, I’m traveling lighter and doing more blog posts, attending more sessions and shooting more diary style videos. That said, I’ve been researching the best way to bring professional timely content to the masses.
It’s starts off easy enough – how hard is it to shoot a 3 minute daily video clip from Austin and publish it on the company’s blog? In theory, not hard at all. Then I started to remember events I’d tried approach with in the past. I’d shoot it on the large production setup, then break that rig down, head back to the hotel and proceed to pull the content off the flash media – or in the old days, the tape. From there I’d have to edit it and add titles. Then it all had to be exported and encoded. For those that have never worked with HD video, it takes anywhere from 40 minutes to 2 hours to encode and export a 3 minute video clip, depending on the speed and robustness of your laptop. Just when you think that ride on the Pain Train is over, you realize that uploading that finished clip to a content delivery network (the place that video and audio files are stored and optimized for consumption) takes another 30 minutes to 4 hours depending on how bad the hotel’s internet connection is. Keep in mind I travel to mostly tech events where everyone else in that hotel is using that same connection, so it’s usually really slow.
At this point, what started out as quick 3 minute daily update has turned into 7-8 hour project. That’s just not a good use of my time or the company’s dollars that they spent to send me there. So, I’ve spent the last two weeks researching an alternative approach.
Because this is a daily-update-diary-sort-of-thing, most people expect it to be more raw and I’m hoping that brings a bit of forgiveness around the rough edges. I’ve looked using a Flip HD and uploading directly to YouTube and I’ve tried using my Sanyo Xacti, skipping the editing and just uploading the raw content to Blip.tv (our usual content service). In the end, I think I’m going to use the only camera that I carry around me with every day – my iPhone.
In good light, the iPhone actually shoots pretty decent video. I’ve also added a unit from OWLE that adds a wide angle adapter to the lens and a better quality microphone. From there, I’m able to edit the video in an iPhone app called Reel Director. This means that I can keep everything on the phone and that the “post-production” process takes minutes instead of hours.
Once I’m done editing the video diary, I have a bunch of services I can choose to upload to. After much research, I’ve chosen Qik. In addition to their great functionality and clean video player design, they also offer the option for me to stream live video from my phone should any sort of breaking event occur that warrants coverage. To top it off, I can have Qik publish a link to my video across my social networks automatically including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
All told, the whole process of shooting a daily diary this way should take me less than hour. Obviously, things will go wrong and I could run into snags, especially if AT&T can’t handle the crush of iPhone users attending SXSW as in year’s past.
Is this the best approach? For all you video enthusiasts, what would you do?
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