With Brian / Andrew
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Can You Achieve 16y9 Ratio Without Using Wide Angle Lens
Brian Peterson: Hello, I’m Brian Peterson.
Andrew Burke: And I’m Andrew Burke.
Brian Peterson: And we’re here with Letters and Tips. And actually, as promised, last time we said that we’re going to give you first part of the four part series on how to make your vidcast. We’ll get to that somewhere in the mix of all the stuff we’re doing.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: The first, though, is a real basic question. It’s a really good one. So I think we’re going to talk a little bit more about this. This is from Norm van Heyes. He’s asking the question, hey, when you refer to shooting 16:9, can you achieve that by just using the camera setting alone, or would you need to actually apply a wide angle lens?
So, it sounds like he’s asking two questions. So, let’s talk about the first one.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: 16:9, what is it?
Andrew Burke: 16:9, it’s an aspect ratio that’s wider than the standard TV set. And you get, not a wider field of view so much, it’s just a ration. So, adding a wide angle lens would really change the field of view.
Brian Peterson: Right.
Andrew Burke: That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a wide screen, and wide screen doesn’t necessarily make it a wide field of view.
Brian Peterson: So, to even make that it more simplified, the wide screen just gives you more. And it would give you more, like you say, without stretching, or compressing, or even distorting things toward the edge like most of us who’ve tried wide angle lenses still cameras will find out.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: You know, you put Aunt Norma toward the end edge of the frame and we make that group shot. And her face looks like this. And she comes back at you really upset.
Andrew Burke: So, I could shoot fully zoomed in and be shooting 16:9 still.
Brian Peterson: Exactly.
Andrew Burke: Wide screen.
Brian Peterson: Right. Right.
Andrew Burke: So…
Brian Peterson: There’s the distinction. 16:9 is the ratio, 4:3 is a standard ratio that we are currently, most of us currently have on our television sets. A lot of folks I know who are big in the football and sports have those humongous 16:9 screen which I’m envious of, I don’t have that. Do you?
Andrew Burke: No.
Brian Peterson: No? Okay.
Andrew Burke: Actually, I do have a wide screen computer monitor. So, I actually have a 16:10 computer monitor, so it gives me just enough space for little icons, or the doc that pops up, and then I’ll be able to watch it or play back. Some video.
Brian Peterson: Okay. I think the simple thing that we wanted to stress here is that the ratio and the wide angle lens really don’t have much to do with each other, and that yes, it is as simple as using a setting on your camera. That means your camera has a chip that is either an oversized 4:3 chip that allows you to capture that whole 16:9 image without degrading the image. Or, it doesn’t, and you won’t see the setting as 16:9.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: So…
Andrew Burke: All right.
Brian Peterson: That’s pretty much it for this one.
Let’s see, what’s next. Why don’t we do that one?
Let’s see, this gentleman is asking, John Switzer from Gaithersburg, Maryland. Wow! We’re getting people from all over the place. This is great! He’s asking simply, he’s used Macromedia Flash for video, but it was a little bit clunky, I think, we all can say until recently, when actually very powerful way of compressing and getting video out there. He’s just wondering, are we going to be covering this?
Andrew Burke: I think we should.
Brian Peterson: I think we will. How about that for a short answer? Yes. Absolutely. Obviously this most recent iteration of Flash has been greatly enhanced, and we’d be fools not to cover it, so…
Andrew Burke: Yeah. I think they’re supporting Videomaker and so… I think we should be supporting them.
Brian Peterson: Absolutely. We will. So yes, look to us here and the magazine for feature issues.
This last one kind of brings us into our main part of what this segment is going to talk about, which is vidcasting. This is from Milt Watkins, and Milt’s saying that he’s looked at our website, and I’m interested in finding publishing software to help him getting his own vidcast out there. And I think we’ve received a lot of these kind of questions, and this is precisely why we’re putting our four part series together for you, so…
Why don’t we just jump into it? I think when we announced it originally, we said we’re going to try to tackle this in four parts. You know, it may go five. I don’t think we should have said we’ll do that.
The four part is, just to review real quickly, it’s firstly, and we found this out doing it ourselves. Planning is number one.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: It’s obviously, you’ve got to plan. Producing and then editing, and encoding really kind of come into the same lump. You’re doing a lot of this yourself, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. And then finally distributing and marketing. So those are the four areas we’re going to touch on.
First is planning.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So. What’s a first thing, what is the first thing we did?
The first thing we did actually was trying to get a sense of what is it going to look like? How long is it going to be?
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: I think the one that we kind of backed ended into ourselves a little bit was frequency. How often is it going to be? We went back and forth, did it need to be weekly, did it need to be monthly? We were thinking, hey, even quarterly maybe we can do something.
So I think for folks out there right now, just thinking about what is this whole frequency thing. Really, we needed to think about, one, how much can you sustain yourself? And then, the other is if you have just one or two products would you say that it’s even necessary to do, say, like a traditional vidcast or RSS? Because really, it’s not something that’s going to be updated.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. It’s, I think frequency is one thing that sets vidcasting apart from maybe video blogging, where, if I were video blogging, I would post videos up, and maybe people would subscribe to it, but it’s sporadic. And maybe I wouldn’t do it for a month, maybe I’d do a couple in the same week.
So, vidcasting, I think it lends itself sort of towards the schedule. And keeping that schedule, keeping your readers.
Brian Peterson: Right.
Andrew Burke: And watchers.
Brian Peterson: And that’s important too, for the aggregators, iTunes, FireAnt, they need to see some stuff kind of being refreshed once in a while. You did a little research on this. What did you find in terms of, let’s say we do it once every three months. What would that, what do you think that would do to our frequency?
Andrew Burke: Well, if you’re doing it that infrequent, we may actually have to reinstate ourselves with the, some aggregators of these... Yeah. We may even get dumped for not posting content. They really want you to, they really promote a lot of content.
Brian Peterson: Right. So, they want you to keep it fresh, and that’s why the idea is so… we can’t tell you whether weekly is too frequent or too infrequent, but certainly no less than monthly, I think we can say at this point, would probably be necessary to keep yourself fresh, to keep yourself updated.
And the other thing is if you have, like a three part series, probably RSS isn’t necessary. Again, RSS is designed to be updated on a regular schedule. If you just got three, maybe the vidcast as a pestilent model, isn’t for you.
All right. This brings us to length.
Andrew Burke: Length.
Brian Peterson: Well, this is kind of fun.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. There really isn’t much of a limit.
Brian Peterson: Yeah.
Andrew Burke: But we do have to think about how long viewers will want to wait do download it, or how much space they have allotted for your show, and our show.
Brian Peterson: Right.
Andrew Burke: So, there’s some sort of… but it’s a little intangible.
Brian Peterson: Well, that’s a neat thing, because TV, traditional TV, of course, you are at a 29 minutes, 29 frames, 30, you know, whatever. It was right, right there. You didn’t have a choice.
I think we started out first we’re at 22 minutes, is that right, Charlie? Somewhere around that?
Charlie Fulton: Sounds right.
Brian Peterson: And so, we’re averaging up around 40 right now. So, this is a wonderful part, is that we’re not locked into that. But like you said, length has something to do with, obviously, the bit budget, and some of the things that folks might be considering.
The other thing is, you really need to consider the related costs that go along with something that’s longer. You need to consider crew, are you going to have people standing by camera? Like we’ve got Morgan and Charlie here.
You know, they charge us an arm and a leg to hang out.
(loud laughing in the background)
So, you’ve got to figure those kinds of costs involved.
Even, we may have to roll tapes on these, too. So you’ve got to figure tape cost. It’s a little stuff like that starts adding up, so length becomes an issue.
Format. This is another part of the planning process. You’ve got to think about, first of all, who’s watching? Right?
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: Who’s the audience? We’re still trying to handle that one, frankly. We have an idea who our audience is. Primarily readers at the start, but we’re hoping new folks coming all the time.
Andrew Burke: We’re taking some cues from our viewers right now, so… Thank you.
Brian Peterson: Give us cues.
You know, you’ve got to look at places or other examples, Diggnation. They know who the market is, and they don’t need the table, you don’t need anything but holy couch, practically, to make it. So you really do need to consider that audience first, before you go much further than, you know, your initial planning stages.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: You need to consider whether you’re going to have a solo host, would it be just Andrew? Can you stand watching Andrew for the whole 40 minutes?
Andrew Burke: Probably not.
Brian Peterson: A girlfriend could.
Andrew Burke: Maybe.
Brian Peterson: Maybe. That’s your-?
Andrew Burke: I don’t know. She has a subscription.
Brian Peterson: She has a subscription? To you or vidcast?
Andrew Burke: Just for my segment.
Brian Peterson: All right.
Or, are you going to have multiple hosts, are you going to have interview people that would come in live, or you interview people by phone, or somehow remotely via … There’s a lot of other considerations.
Andrew Burke: Complexity.
Brian Peterson: Yeah.
Andrew Burke: I guess you can make it real simple or you get real big budget.
Brian Peterson: The other format, do you want to consider shooting it live? Or are you going to try to do some posting? Right now, we are doing posting. We try to do as much live as we can, with some of the mixing, but certainly that’s part of it.
How many cameras? We’ve got two. We had three. You know, we’re on the two now. So you have to consider how many cameras you want to put into the mix. Obviously, it’s doubling your tape cost, doubling the complexity and that sort of thing.
Andrew Burke: Doubling the time to log in and edit the tape.
Brian Peterson: Right. Yes. Of which you are a veteran of.
Then finally, one of our last pieces is quality. You want to think about how much quality you want to put to these… where did you say we’re at right now?
Andrew Burke: I think we are on a pretty darn high quality.
Brian Peterson: On a quality of 1 to 5, or…?
Andrew Burke: And that’s coming from an outside opinion.
Brian Peterson: How do we outside? Can’t keep it outside.
Andrew Burke: No, but we have a very large format, high resolution, wide screen version available, that has a nice audio and nice video characteristics, and we have pretty darn good production value going on here, too. So, I think we’re on the higher end.
Brian Peterson: I would agree. I agree.
Andrew Burke: You know, we cater to those who can’t even see us, offering the mp3 audio, also. So, you know, we try and be at the both ends of the specter.
Brian Peterson: Well, when considering your quality as we did initially, we were thinking there would be a significant amount of folks who probably, or at least eventually, we wanted to port this over to the 10ft, or 15ft experiences. We call it, in other words, sitting on your couch, watching your TV. So, as people get media centers, and IP converters, that may be more the experience.
So, consider again where your audience is going to view the vidcast. It’s another important part in assessing how much quality you need to put in to the vidcast at the very outset.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Of course, quality comes down to time and money. Right? How much time, how much money? The more of both you throw at it, usually, usually the higher the quality. But it comes back to planning, which is what we’re talking about right now.
Andrew Burke: Yes.
Brian Peterson: So, the more planning you do, usually the less time, and the less money you need to put into it. So, that’s why we’re doing this.
Getting into cost we won’t talk now too much because it really has a lot to do with actual production part that we’ll get into later, but we can talk just briefly about equipment, software, hosting.
So, equipment, are you going to be shooting with what you’ve got? Or are you going to try to acquire stuff? That would be one.
Andrew Burke: That’s one reason to think about your end user and end quality there.
Brian Peterson: Decent mikes. You obviously want to have decent mikes. We’re using wired mikes. A lot of you probably have wireless that you used for some of your even work or something. In studio you may find out because you have, like we do, computers and also other things that generate a lot of art interference, you may find that being wired just like that - in fact, it tangled to the table leg, I don’t know why that happened – is important to do.
Set design. We actually made the table, so we saved a little bit of money there.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: You also have to consider props. Swinging the TV.
Andrew Burke: We’re pretty lucky on our props and things, I think we may even be a little spoiled on the props and the things.
Brian Peterson: We’re very spoiled. Yeah.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, in other words, you can just bring everything you’ve got into it, or you can spend as much as you want. So we really can’t offer you too much of advice there.
Software, though. Now, we’re not using any proprietary software to put this together, like many of you, you probably have some experience putting together videos, so it would be fairly easy to replicate that process in the studio, and some of the changes will occur when we talk about compression and that sort of thing later.
But there are a couple of the software packages.
Andrew Burke: Yeah, and like Brian was saying, there are a lot of software that’s available that only do part of the task. There are some that edit your video, or allow you to edit your video, and there are some that allow you to post it up on the Internet.
But there’s not a lot that let you do both. And those are really the main ones. There are few. Vlogit, which is very new, this year.
Brian Peterson: Vlogit, it’s magic.
Andrew Burke: And also iWeb, which is also very new, this year. Allows kind of end to end experience.
Brian Peterson: Right. Some of those web based ones, such as Broadcast Machine, are out there.
Andrew Burke: Yes.
Brian Peterson: But I’m sure there will be many of those become available. But again, you’re not locked into really needing any software whatsoever. If you’ve got your standard NL, your editor, you’re good to go for the most part.
Comes down to hosting and bandwidth.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. And that’s a big one. You know, when I started out posting web video, that’s where I hung up my very first attempts. I was trying to find a good web space host, something that’s fast, and reliable is also very good. But, you know, some, let’s see, some ISPs have a little bit of web space, maybe not. For a video, though.
Brian Peterson: And you need to check into that. If you have an ISP that’s, say, isn’t discount ISP, you may have very limited bandwidth. So you’ve got to check that. It’s not just how much space you have in your e-mail. This is a different function you’re looking that. You want to look at how much your monthly bandwidth is allocated.
Sometimes, many of view, or some people I know, have free services. So you can check how much you’ll be charged for this excess use of bandwidth that’s so-called free services.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, be careful before launching and getting something out that’s large in bit budget.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely. And that’s in vain. Some of these are Beta. So that means they can just vanish.
Brian Peterson: Right. Yeah. So look for one that will at least, if you’re going for a long term approach, just check back with the web site frequently.
Let’s wrap this up. The last, I think, is in planning you need to consider after going through all of these, the effort it’s going to take. I think just those points that we touched on, frequency, length, format, quality, cost, and finally effort. All need to be taken into account, because frankly, all you’ve got is one camera, so-so mike, a raggedy old couch and your grandma’s TV, maybe that’s enough. You know.
If you’ve got a passionate story, you have a really good set of content that you can repeat and renew on a weekly, monthly basis, whatever, maybe that’s all you need.
So, we gave a kind of a Cadillac version, at least in planning.
Join us next week, we’ll be talking about producing.
Andrew Burke: That we will.
Brian Peterson: All right. Coming up next, we’re going to look at one of our reader profiles. This one is for best documentary. And doing that is going to be Morgan and Charlie.
Brian Peterson: Hello, I’m Brian Peterson.
Andrew Burke: And I’m Andrew Burke.
Brian Peterson: And we’re here with Letters and Tips. And actually, as promised, last time we said that we’re going to give you first part of the four part series on how to make your vidcast. We’ll get to that somewhere in the mix of all the stuff we’re doing.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: The first, though, is a real basic question. It’s a really good one. So I think we’re going to talk a little bit more about this. This is from Norm van Heyes. He’s asking the question, hey, when you refer to shooting 16:9, can you achieve that by just using the camera setting alone, or would you need to actually apply a wide angle lens?
So, it sounds like he’s asking two questions. So, let’s talk about the first one.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: 16:9, what is it?
Andrew Burke: 16:9, it’s an aspect ratio that’s wider than the standard TV set. And you get, not a wider field of view so much, it’s just a ration. So, adding a wide angle lens would really change the field of view.
Brian Peterson: Right.
Andrew Burke: That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a wide screen, and wide screen doesn’t necessarily make it a wide field of view.
Brian Peterson: So, to even make that it more simplified, the wide screen just gives you more. And it would give you more, like you say, without stretching, or compressing, or even distorting things toward the edge like most of us who’ve tried wide angle lenses still cameras will find out.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: You know, you put Aunt Norma toward the end edge of the frame and we make that group shot. And her face looks like this. And she comes back at you really upset.
Andrew Burke: So, I could shoot fully zoomed in and be shooting 16:9 still.
Brian Peterson: Exactly.
Andrew Burke: Wide screen.
Brian Peterson: Right. Right.
Andrew Burke: So…
Brian Peterson: There’s the distinction. 16:9 is the ratio, 4:3 is a standard ratio that we are currently, most of us currently have on our television sets. A lot of folks I know who are big in the football and sports have those humongous 16:9 screen which I’m envious of, I don’t have that. Do you?
Andrew Burke: No.
Brian Peterson: No? Okay.
Andrew Burke: Actually, I do have a wide screen computer monitor. So, I actually have a 16:10 computer monitor, so it gives me just enough space for little icons, or the doc that pops up, and then I’ll be able to watch it or play back. Some video.
Brian Peterson: Okay. I think the simple thing that we wanted to stress here is that the ratio and the wide angle lens really don’t have much to do with each other, and that yes, it is as simple as using a setting on your camera. That means your camera has a chip that is either an oversized 4:3 chip that allows you to capture that whole 16:9 image without degrading the image. Or, it doesn’t, and you won’t see the setting as 16:9.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: So…
Andrew Burke: All right.
Brian Peterson: That’s pretty much it for this one.
Let’s see, what’s next. Why don’t we do that one?
Let’s see, this gentleman is asking, John Switzer from Gaithersburg, Maryland. Wow! We’re getting people from all over the place. This is great! He’s asking simply, he’s used Macromedia Flash for video, but it was a little bit clunky, I think, we all can say until recently, when actually very powerful way of compressing and getting video out there. He’s just wondering, are we going to be covering this?
Andrew Burke: I think we should.
Brian Peterson: I think we will. How about that for a short answer? Yes. Absolutely. Obviously this most recent iteration of Flash has been greatly enhanced, and we’d be fools not to cover it, so…
Andrew Burke: Yeah. I think they’re supporting Videomaker and so… I think we should be supporting them.
Brian Peterson: Absolutely. We will. So yes, look to us here and the magazine for feature issues.
This last one kind of brings us into our main part of what this segment is going to talk about, which is vidcasting. This is from Milt Watkins, and Milt’s saying that he’s looked at our website, and I’m interested in finding publishing software to help him getting his own vidcast out there. And I think we’ve received a lot of these kind of questions, and this is precisely why we’re putting our four part series together for you, so…
Why don’t we just jump into it? I think when we announced it originally, we said we’re going to try to tackle this in four parts. You know, it may go five. I don’t think we should have said we’ll do that.
The four part is, just to review real quickly, it’s firstly, and we found this out doing it ourselves. Planning is number one.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: It’s obviously, you’ve got to plan. Producing and then editing, and encoding really kind of come into the same lump. You’re doing a lot of this yourself, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. And then finally distributing and marketing. So those are the four areas we’re going to touch on.
First is planning.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So. What’s a first thing, what is the first thing we did?
The first thing we did actually was trying to get a sense of what is it going to look like? How long is it going to be?
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: I think the one that we kind of backed ended into ourselves a little bit was frequency. How often is it going to be? We went back and forth, did it need to be weekly, did it need to be monthly? We were thinking, hey, even quarterly maybe we can do something.
So I think for folks out there right now, just thinking about what is this whole frequency thing. Really, we needed to think about, one, how much can you sustain yourself? And then, the other is if you have just one or two products would you say that it’s even necessary to do, say, like a traditional vidcast or RSS? Because really, it’s not something that’s going to be updated.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. It’s, I think frequency is one thing that sets vidcasting apart from maybe video blogging, where, if I were video blogging, I would post videos up, and maybe people would subscribe to it, but it’s sporadic. And maybe I wouldn’t do it for a month, maybe I’d do a couple in the same week.
So, vidcasting, I think it lends itself sort of towards the schedule. And keeping that schedule, keeping your readers.
Brian Peterson: Right.
Andrew Burke: And watchers.
Brian Peterson: And that’s important too, for the aggregators, iTunes, FireAnt, they need to see some stuff kind of being refreshed once in a while. You did a little research on this. What did you find in terms of, let’s say we do it once every three months. What would that, what do you think that would do to our frequency?
Andrew Burke: Well, if you’re doing it that infrequent, we may actually have to reinstate ourselves with the, some aggregators of these... Yeah. We may even get dumped for not posting content. They really want you to, they really promote a lot of content.
Brian Peterson: Right. So, they want you to keep it fresh, and that’s why the idea is so… we can’t tell you whether weekly is too frequent or too infrequent, but certainly no less than monthly, I think we can say at this point, would probably be necessary to keep yourself fresh, to keep yourself updated.
And the other thing is if you have, like a three part series, probably RSS isn’t necessary. Again, RSS is designed to be updated on a regular schedule. If you just got three, maybe the vidcast as a pestilent model, isn’t for you.
All right. This brings us to length.
Andrew Burke: Length.
Brian Peterson: Well, this is kind of fun.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. There really isn’t much of a limit.
Brian Peterson: Yeah.
Andrew Burke: But we do have to think about how long viewers will want to wait do download it, or how much space they have allotted for your show, and our show.
Brian Peterson: Right.
Andrew Burke: So, there’s some sort of… but it’s a little intangible.
Brian Peterson: Well, that’s a neat thing, because TV, traditional TV, of course, you are at a 29 minutes, 29 frames, 30, you know, whatever. It was right, right there. You didn’t have a choice.
I think we started out first we’re at 22 minutes, is that right, Charlie? Somewhere around that?
Charlie Fulton: Sounds right.
Brian Peterson: And so, we’re averaging up around 40 right now. So, this is a wonderful part, is that we’re not locked into that. But like you said, length has something to do with, obviously, the bit budget, and some of the things that folks might be considering.
The other thing is, you really need to consider the related costs that go along with something that’s longer. You need to consider crew, are you going to have people standing by camera? Like we’ve got Morgan and Charlie here.
You know, they charge us an arm and a leg to hang out.
(loud laughing in the background)
So, you’ve got to figure those kinds of costs involved.
Even, we may have to roll tapes on these, too. So you’ve got to figure tape cost. It’s a little stuff like that starts adding up, so length becomes an issue.
Format. This is another part of the planning process. You’ve got to think about, first of all, who’s watching? Right?
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: Who’s the audience? We’re still trying to handle that one, frankly. We have an idea who our audience is. Primarily readers at the start, but we’re hoping new folks coming all the time.
Andrew Burke: We’re taking some cues from our viewers right now, so… Thank you.
Brian Peterson: Give us cues.
You know, you’ve got to look at places or other examples, Diggnation. They know who the market is, and they don’t need the table, you don’t need anything but holy couch, practically, to make it. So you really do need to consider that audience first, before you go much further than, you know, your initial planning stages.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: You need to consider whether you’re going to have a solo host, would it be just Andrew? Can you stand watching Andrew for the whole 40 minutes?
Andrew Burke: Probably not.
Brian Peterson: A girlfriend could.
Andrew Burke: Maybe.
Brian Peterson: Maybe. That’s your-?
Andrew Burke: I don’t know. She has a subscription.
Brian Peterson: She has a subscription? To you or vidcast?
Andrew Burke: Just for my segment.
Brian Peterson: All right.
Or, are you going to have multiple hosts, are you going to have interview people that would come in live, or you interview people by phone, or somehow remotely via … There’s a lot of other considerations.
Andrew Burke: Complexity.
Brian Peterson: Yeah.
Andrew Burke: I guess you can make it real simple or you get real big budget.
Brian Peterson: The other format, do you want to consider shooting it live? Or are you going to try to do some posting? Right now, we are doing posting. We try to do as much live as we can, with some of the mixing, but certainly that’s part of it.
How many cameras? We’ve got two. We had three. You know, we’re on the two now. So you have to consider how many cameras you want to put into the mix. Obviously, it’s doubling your tape cost, doubling the complexity and that sort of thing.
Andrew Burke: Doubling the time to log in and edit the tape.
Brian Peterson: Right. Yes. Of which you are a veteran of.
Then finally, one of our last pieces is quality. You want to think about how much quality you want to put to these… where did you say we’re at right now?
Andrew Burke: I think we are on a pretty darn high quality.
Brian Peterson: On a quality of 1 to 5, or…?
Andrew Burke: And that’s coming from an outside opinion.
Brian Peterson: How do we outside? Can’t keep it outside.
Andrew Burke: No, but we have a very large format, high resolution, wide screen version available, that has a nice audio and nice video characteristics, and we have pretty darn good production value going on here, too. So, I think we’re on the higher end.
Brian Peterson: I would agree. I agree.
Andrew Burke: You know, we cater to those who can’t even see us, offering the mp3 audio, also. So, you know, we try and be at the both ends of the specter.
Brian Peterson: Well, when considering your quality as we did initially, we were thinking there would be a significant amount of folks who probably, or at least eventually, we wanted to port this over to the 10ft, or 15ft experiences. We call it, in other words, sitting on your couch, watching your TV. So, as people get media centers, and IP converters, that may be more the experience.
So, consider again where your audience is going to view the vidcast. It’s another important part in assessing how much quality you need to put in to the vidcast at the very outset.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Of course, quality comes down to time and money. Right? How much time, how much money? The more of both you throw at it, usually, usually the higher the quality. But it comes back to planning, which is what we’re talking about right now.
Andrew Burke: Yes.
Brian Peterson: So, the more planning you do, usually the less time, and the less money you need to put into it. So, that’s why we’re doing this.
Getting into cost we won’t talk now too much because it really has a lot to do with actual production part that we’ll get into later, but we can talk just briefly about equipment, software, hosting.
So, equipment, are you going to be shooting with what you’ve got? Or are you going to try to acquire stuff? That would be one.
Andrew Burke: That’s one reason to think about your end user and end quality there.
Brian Peterson: Decent mikes. You obviously want to have decent mikes. We’re using wired mikes. A lot of you probably have wireless that you used for some of your even work or something. In studio you may find out because you have, like we do, computers and also other things that generate a lot of art interference, you may find that being wired just like that - in fact, it tangled to the table leg, I don’t know why that happened – is important to do.
Set design. We actually made the table, so we saved a little bit of money there.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: You also have to consider props. Swinging the TV.
Andrew Burke: We’re pretty lucky on our props and things, I think we may even be a little spoiled on the props and the things.
Brian Peterson: We’re very spoiled. Yeah.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, in other words, you can just bring everything you’ve got into it, or you can spend as much as you want. So we really can’t offer you too much of advice there.
Software, though. Now, we’re not using any proprietary software to put this together, like many of you, you probably have some experience putting together videos, so it would be fairly easy to replicate that process in the studio, and some of the changes will occur when we talk about compression and that sort of thing later.
But there are a couple of the software packages.
Andrew Burke: Yeah, and like Brian was saying, there are a lot of software that’s available that only do part of the task. There are some that edit your video, or allow you to edit your video, and there are some that allow you to post it up on the Internet.
But there’s not a lot that let you do both. And those are really the main ones. There are few. Vlogit, which is very new, this year.
Brian Peterson: Vlogit, it’s magic.
Andrew Burke: And also iWeb, which is also very new, this year. Allows kind of end to end experience.
Brian Peterson: Right. Some of those web based ones, such as Broadcast Machine, are out there.
Andrew Burke: Yes.
Brian Peterson: But I’m sure there will be many of those become available. But again, you’re not locked into really needing any software whatsoever. If you’ve got your standard NL, your editor, you’re good to go for the most part.
Comes down to hosting and bandwidth.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. And that’s a big one. You know, when I started out posting web video, that’s where I hung up my very first attempts. I was trying to find a good web space host, something that’s fast, and reliable is also very good. But, you know, some, let’s see, some ISPs have a little bit of web space, maybe not. For a video, though.
Brian Peterson: And you need to check into that. If you have an ISP that’s, say, isn’t discount ISP, you may have very limited bandwidth. So you’ve got to check that. It’s not just how much space you have in your e-mail. This is a different function you’re looking that. You want to look at how much your monthly bandwidth is allocated.
Sometimes, many of view, or some people I know, have free services. So you can check how much you’ll be charged for this excess use of bandwidth that’s so-called free services.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, be careful before launching and getting something out that’s large in bit budget.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely. And that’s in vain. Some of these are Beta. So that means they can just vanish.
Brian Peterson: Right. Yeah. So look for one that will at least, if you’re going for a long term approach, just check back with the web site frequently.
Let’s wrap this up. The last, I think, is in planning you need to consider after going through all of these, the effort it’s going to take. I think just those points that we touched on, frequency, length, format, quality, cost, and finally effort. All need to be taken into account, because frankly, all you’ve got is one camera, so-so mike, a raggedy old couch and your grandma’s TV, maybe that’s enough. You know.
If you’ve got a passionate story, you have a really good set of content that you can repeat and renew on a weekly, monthly basis, whatever, maybe that’s all you need.
So, we gave a kind of a Cadillac version, at least in planning.
Join us next week, we’ll be talking about producing.
Andrew Burke: That we will.
Brian Peterson: All right. Coming up next, we’re going to look at one of our reader profiles. This one is for best documentary. And doing that is going to be Morgan and Charlie.
