Help With Video
January 6th, 2010
With the first decade of the 21st Century safely out of the way, I figure it’s time to start learning how to do this video stuff I keep seeing on the interweb. Two items I’ve found very useful so far are:
- Dan Meyer’s “Professional Conference Video With Semi-Professional Equipment“. Producing something watchable will always take a lot of work, but these shortcuts will reduce the pain.
- “A Pattern Language for Screencasting” by Nicholas Chen and Maurice Rabb. Lots of good ideas here, nicely organized.
I hope you will keep text-blogging! Videos are harder to navigate than text: as a viewer, you need much more time to understand that a given section of the video is of little interest to you; texts allow you to efficiently skip to the parts of interest, or to quickly browse their contents. That’s why I’m a fan of blogs, but not of vlogs.
In any case, good luck with your exploration of video techniques!
Just go with Mark Pilgrim’s Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding (http://diveintomark.org/tag/give), should give you all the tools you need to get started.
One of the things that PyCon has been developing is a portable, amateur video production framework. Using a relatively small team (one person per camera, plus about three more that focus on post production) we get relatively good-looking video of PyCon that can be available as soon as the next day after a talk. See pycon.blip.tv.