Why Vine is like Twitter is like Facebook is like Instagram

Ron Faris of Virgin Mobile on NPR's All Things Considered:

"Vine is no different than Twitter, is no different from Facebook, is no different from Instagram. They're all water coolers. The more you're able to contribute to that community, the more that community will learn to consider your products and services especially if they've never heard of you before."

Why Instagram is clueless about video

Jenna Wortham at NYTimes.com:

Instagram is a yearbook of our most memorable moments, not because they’re the moments worth remembering, but because they’re the moments worth projecting and sharing. And that’s part of the reason the service is the success that it is today, with 130 million users who have uploaded more than six billion photos to the service in less than three years. 

Video, at least the amateurish footage I shot, is the antithesis of that fantasy. And as much as I think we’re getting more comfortable being ourselves online, there’s still a difference between the self you’re willing to share publicly and the self you’re willing to share when only a handful of people are watching. 

This is a distinction that Facebook — and now, by association, Instagram — has never seemed to understand.

How Instagram and Vine are changing how we report and consume news

TechNewsDaily's Leslie Meredith reports at Mashable:

Photojournalist Ben Lowy even used his iPhone and Instagram to cover turmoil in Libya last summer. He wrote that using a phone, rather than an intimidating DSLR camera, allowed him to get closer to subjects. He believes Instagram photos get more attention because viewers feel as if they are looking at a friend's photos. 

Filters have also come to Getty Images, which offers high-end stock photography. Percolate, a startup that provides a social media publishing service for brands, announced a new service that lets its clients select photos from Getty Images, add their logo and apply filters from Aviary, the photo-editing app that powers Twitter's in-app photo editor. 

But filters are just the beginning. Vine, Twitter's 6-second video app, is also changing the way news is shown. For instance, Vine's looping format can heighten emotion as viewers see a video clip repeated over and over again.

Video will boost your client's search engine optimization

Matthew McKenzie at Content4Demand says:

• Video is more than 50 times as likely than a plain text page to appear on a first page of search rankings. That’s some pretty heavy-duty SEO mojo.

• Video can double your landing page conversion rates.

There is more than one way to be a journalist these days

That's a central theme in this brief video from PBS Off Book:

How to create content by staging a stunt -- and covering it as news

What is Red Bull? Really, nothing more than a can of extremely caffeinated soda. How do you create content about that?

Red Bull brilliantly solves the problem by staging stunts and then covering them as if they were news. This stunt-driven content works for the Red Bull audience because it reflects the brand's soul: extreme, cool, irreverent, and sometimes just fall-down funny.

For example, here is a video based upon a simple idea: What happens if you build a massive Rube Goldberg machine (that is, a very complex contraption designed to accomplish a very simple task), and populate it with athletes from the world of extreme sports?

You get this:




OK, so not every brand has the budget to create something this grand. But stunt-driven content can work on the small scale as well. For example, this video in the "Will It Blend?" series from Blendtec:



Again, this works because it fits into the Blendtec ethos: Our blender can blend just about anything, and here's proof. This is a throwback to the old Timex commercials from the 1960s:



How much could it have cost to make that one?

The point is: You can create entertaining content with a can of soda, a blender or a wristwatch. All you need is to dream up an imaginative stunt that includes a touch of humor.

Panel discussion: Best practices for creating online video

From Troy Dreier at OnlineVideo.net:

Today’s video workflows are moving to the cloud, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solutions that works best for all companies. Cloud video workflows vary widely in both cost and features.

At a Streaming Media East panel discussion on cloud video workflows, three experts helped attendees understand the different solutions available and choose the right one for their needs.

The panelists also gave out plenty of practical advice on related topics such as attracting an audience to online video.

5 basics to shooting great video

From Allison King at Ragan's

When planning and shooting your video, these production basics will help you look like a pro and prevent potential disaster.

• Use the "rules of thirds." Divide the shot into thirds horizontally and thirds vertically (so you have 9 imaginary equal sections). The points of interest should occur at 1/3 or 2/3 of the way up or across the frame.
• Pay attention to lighting; it can make or break your video. Don't, for example, shoot video of someone indoors who is backlit by a window.
• Bad audio is worse than bad video. More people will tolerate a poor quality image in a video. But bad audio, says Wolcott, makes the video unviewable.
• Get a lot of close-ups. Use the 80:20 rule: 80 percent close-ups and 20 percent wide shots. Close-ups is how you are able to convey action and emotion.
• Test across devices, including mobile devices.

Capturing the story with time-lapse photography: Sandy slams into NYC

Here's a time-lapse sequence from photographer Silas Maniatis that demonstrates the power of the form to tell a story simply but effectively. Here, he captures Hurricane Sandy as it passes through New York City.



Interested in learning how to shoot time-lapse? There are plenty of resources online. Here are a few:

• Timelapse Photography: A Complete Guide for Beginners
• Timelapse Photography Tutorial: An Overview of Shooting, Processing and Rendering Timelapse Movies
• The Ultimate Guide to Time-Lapse Photography

3 simple steps to buying (and using) your first DSLR camera

For many folks, the hardest step in learning to shoot photos is deciding on a camera. Here's some
great advice from Chaz Curry at PhotographyBlogger:

1. Buy the cheapest Canon or Nikon DSLR (body only).
2. Buy a 50mm 1.8 lens.
3. Start shooting immediately.

For details, follow the link.

How to create a video-editing station with an iPad

From Adam Dachis at Lifehacker:

Tablets are so popular that we've supposedly entered a "post-PC era," signifying the death of the personal computer. While we don't think that's happening quite yet, many people are actually getting things done on tablets. Well, at least Flickr user Matthew Pearce is, and he's got a tiny little workspace to prove it.

How to choose the right microphone for videography

Once you start working with video, you learn something early. While the quality of the video is important, the quality of the audio is absolutely vital.

An audience will put up with crappy video, but not crappy audio. It's just too annoying. Folks will just skip your video for the next one.

That's why you don't want to depend on your camera's built-in mic to capture audio. Instead, you will want to work with lapel mics, handheld wireless mics and shotgun mics. That can get expensive, but it's worth it.

I think it's fair to say that, if you have to choose between a top-of-the-line camera or first-rate audio equipment, you should put your money into the audio. (Unless you plan to never conduct an on-camera interview or to capture ambient sound.) It's that important.

With that in mind, here's a solid guide to selecting microphone from Videomaker.com

The Flip Cam gets new life as an iPhone app (what else?)

Don't know about you, but I really loved the FlipCam. It was elegantly designed, easy to use, and produced amazing HD video. The audio was lacking, but the next generation would have improved on that. Then Cisco bought it up, hyped it, then dumped it. But what can you expect from short-sighted greedy SOBs?

But now the Flip is reborn as an app for iPhone. All I can say is ... cool!

The science of brand journalism

Brand journalism tells stories. And that, Fast Company reports on its blog, is a powerful strategy:

Stories affect us on both on an incredibly deep intellectual and emotional level that we are just beginning to understand.

That quest began when scientists discovered that fictional stories affected the same region of the brain that reacts when we ourselves are engaged in real-life drama. Stories create a bonding empathy which causes us to strongly identify with the made-up protagonist, as if we were, in fact, that person. In other words, stories have such impact because our brains actually get a little mixed up as to what’s real and what’s not. ...

Scientists have also determined why stories are so important to our intellectual activity: Our brains use them to process different strands of information and make sense of it all. It’s no secret that our early ancestors created elaborate stories about various mythological gods to explain various natural phenomena they couldn’t understand. Frankly, all of us are always after an explanation for why things are the way they are.

Video: How to build a swivel adaptor for the GoPro Hero 2

From Randy Werner's YouTube channel:

The better choice for driving video? Facebook or Twitter?

Chris Johnson at Brightcove has a strong opinion. He says the winner is Facebook, largely due to its built-in video player and its ability to embed the video into a newsfeed when shared. See what you think. Does his argument hold water? Is there a choice better than Facebook ... perhaps YouTube, Google+ or Vimeo?

• Beet.TV: Facebook Beats Twitter in Driving Video Views, Brightcove's Chris Johnston

Storytelling: How 1 and 1 makes 3 -- a lesson from Ken Burns

From video journalist Adam Westbrook: 

(Documentary filmmaker Ken) Burns has a difficult job: make stories from the past compelling on screen. It’s tough because your characters are dead and the action you want to film has long since happened. You are left with interviews with historians, still photographs and empty buildings. As a former historian myself it’s a genre I’ve long thought needs a fresh approach – but I’ve been looking at it in the wrong way.

Watch this short film (itself superbly produced by Tom Mason and Sarah Klein) and you’ll see the Ken Burns approach isn’t so concerned with what we see. For him it’s all about crafting a compelling story.

A down-and-dirty approach to time-lapse photography

Time-lapse photography can provide a very cool change of pace for your videos. In this presentation, Chris Jarvis demonstrates four time-lapse set-ups featuring a Nikon D3S, a Nikon D7000, and two GoPro Hero2s. The results are intriguing:



Instead of shooting a landscape, imagine using the same technique to capture time-lapse of a demonstration, or a process, or even an office in motion. There's a lot you can do with this technique.

Of course, there's more to this technique than just capturing the images. If you are working with a DSLR, here's a good place to start: http://www.lightstalking.com/timelapse

If you are working with a GoPro, start here: http://www.all-things-photography.com/gopro-hd-hero-time-lapse.html

There are plenty of other sources online, some for free, some for pay.

3 ways to create a YouTube page that grabs attention

From the Content Strategist blog:

According to company statistics, there are more than 800 million unique visits to YouTube with 4 billions hours of video are watched each month. A whopping 72 hours of video are uploaded onto the site every minute — that’s a lot of competition.

With so much content available, owners of YouTube pages need to make sure that they give people a reason to visit.

Here are some tips on how to make a YouTube page attractive and worthy of people’s attention.

How to tell a story like a photojournalist

From the Phoblographer:

Photojournalism is the process of documenting the happenings of life on camera through photography. These days, it tends to extend into videography but the main elements of the practice still hold their roots in still image capture. Photojournalism can still be a tough job as far as getting work and images that are different than other photojournalists but that is still a story that would hold an audience captive.

There are many factors that go into photojournalism. Many of them are ethically related and others are just how the industry works. But to tell a good story there are certain shots that are essential.