This cat can fetch (or when multimedia training catches on)

Posted on September 7, 2007

A few weeks ago I wrote about how teaching your newsroom to create Web content may feel like training a cat to play fetch. Another way to get your newsroom excited about multimedia: Let a convert preach its benefits.

Steve Echeverria, Jr., a features reporter at the Herald-Tribune, gets it. He sees how multimedia can build upon his storytelling and better serve the reader.

And he’s sharing his knowledge with colleagues. A couple of weeks ago, he attended the NABJ 2007 annual convention and was a panelist in the session “Podcasting Your Way to 1A: Enhancing Print News with Podcasts.”

The session’ summary:

As newspaper circulation continues to fall nationwide and the news hole shrinks, newspapers are faced with an issue: how do they compete with the immediacy of television news while continuing to offer the depth of print journalism? The answer lies in audio and video technology.

Steve has been proactive in his multimedia storytelling and was among the first to record audio and video podcasts for HeraldTribune.com. And despite a lack of time and resources, he was the first to edit on his own, rolling up his sleeves and learning Audacity and iMovie. And he consistently sees these storytelling tools as part of his journalist’s toolkit.

I briefly spoke with him this week about how his presentation went, and how attendees responded. When he showed them samples of what we and other papers have done, their jaws dropped, he said. And they couldn’t wait to try it out themselves.

Love it. A multimedia producer can’t ask for much more than that.

You can watch a summary of Steve’s presentation here:

‘If I don’t update my skills, I’m going to be obsolete’

Posted on September 5, 2007

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jennifer Lin has been in the business for 25 years. In this video, she talks about her experience learning and producing video for her paper.

About two to three years ago, her managing editor mentioned that when young people applied for jobs, they talked about their video skills.

“It occurred to me that if I don’t update my skills, I’m going to be obsolete,” she said. So she spent a semester at University of Pennsylvania and learned how to shoot and edit video with Final Cut Pro.

Training is important, she stresses, but she finds the lack of classes offered and time available to be an obstacle. Regardless, you shouldn’t let that deter you because if you want to remain competitive in the marketplace as a journalist, she says, you should know how to use a video camera.

And her advice to students is the same: “If you want to be a journalist, if you want to be a newspaper reporter, you need to know not only how to write stories, but tell stories visually … this is the future.”

The importance of audio

Posted on September 2, 2007

We interrupt this holiday weekend to bring your attention to a post by Cliff Etzel ~~Angela Grant~~ (on Angela Grant’s blog) on how audio can make (or break) your video (I was determined to take the weekend off for some much needed R&R, but this post needs to be shared).

She offers these tips (and more, so be sure to check out her post and comments):

* The use of audio editing applications for editing voice overs such as SONY’s Sound Forge, Adobe’s Audition and other similar applications will help to provide a professionally edited voice over that imparts information to viewers about what they are watching. Training materials exist that can provide the basis of audio for video for Sound Forge and Adobe Audition. You can bring your video clips into your audio editing application, compose your script while reviewing your footage, and then read a written audio narrative script according to scene, transitions, etc. Plugins allow the cleaning up of audio tracks in our video footage. All it requires is the willingness to learn how to edit audio. Learn to use these applications, for they will become a part of the credo of the Solo Video journalist.

* Do your voice overs in a silent area, preferably with sound absorbing material on the walls nearby to reduce possible room echo. Building a simple voice box out of egg crate foam and foam core and using this as a simple sound booth will greatly enhance the sound of your audio narrations.

* Utilize a separate mic if possible, such as your shotgun mic or use a voice recorder and then import your audio narrative into your audio editing application to tweak and render out a final clip to import into your video project.

* When on location, and I have to go back to my motel room, I utilize my Rode shotgun VideoMic on a table top tripod attached to my Laptop, and then utilize blankets, towels, etc in a semicircular pattern around the mic to help deaden the noise and echo in the room and this creates a makeshift sound booth when reading a script. It actually does a pretty respectable job in a pinch when editing on location and you don’t have access to a sound booth.

And this is a BIG one:

As our work is seen by more and more people, the legalities of music in a video has to be addressed. The use of copyrighted music and/or sampling of said music is ILLEGAL without proper licensing. Again, being informed of the various tools available for scoring music for video is a key to C.Y.A. If you want to add music, musical scoring can now be accomplished with little or no experience with such applications as SONY’s Cinescore, Adobe’s Soundbooth and Smartsound’s Sonicfire Pro. These applications, with a little hands-on training, allow you to produce royalty free musical scoring to your video projects without worry of copyright infringement.

OK. That’s all for today. Get back to your holiday. I’m headed to the beach!