DoingMedia

(This three part post is the content of my presentation at DocTrain West on May 5, 2008 in Vancouver, BC. You can view the presentation here.)

You: Media Expert

That sounds like a lot to know and remember. You should keep in mind that you know a great deal about how good media is made. And you how bad media is made. Use your common sense and try to remain objective or at least put yourself in the audiences’ shoes. It’s ultimately about them. And if you agree that you know a lot about good media your audience likely knows more. The audience for your media has likely never experienced black and white television or vinyl records or rabbit ear antennas. They are rich media natives and have strong opinions about how media should be. Pay attention be successful.

Creating good rich media is not brain surgery but it does require attention to detail and attention to people.

People have been making movies since before the turn of the Twentieth Century. So, like many mature industries there are certain disciplines and processes taht are standard. Treatment of subject may vary but the production techniques used have been used for decades. When you first start don’t try to invent the process. Find the best processes and techniques you can and steal them!

The Toolbox

What gear will you need? You can break it down into two cartegories: shooting and editing. Start with a camera. It can use tape or DVDs or hard drives or flash memory to record on. Get what you can afford and what will provide the best picture for your situation. Don’t cheap out; get a high definition camera. These will be described as recording either HD or HDV or AVCHD format. With your camera buy well made tripod.

Small cameras are lightweight and easy to hold…unless you’re holding it for hours on end. There’s a place for handheld shooting. Bit don’t allow camera movement distract form the main subject.

If sound is important get a small shotgun microphone. This picks up sound from directly in front of it and is good for both sound on location or narration recording later. Cables to connect the microphone to your camera and headphones to monitor the sound recording should be part of your production gear.

Virtually any current computer will work to edit what you shoot. The computer can be desktop or laptop but laptops allow you to take your entire production “studio” anywhere you may need to go. If you go the laptop route an external monitor is useful to expand you workspace. Last but not least in the hardware department are hard drives. Get the fastest, largest hard drive you can afford. Speed is more important that storage size when editing media. A disc burner, either standard DVD or BlueRay DVD, will be useful to store or present finished media.

The software you’ll need often comes delivered on computer systems out of the box. Many computers come with video editing software pre-installed. Apple, Sony, Pinnacle, Ulead, Adobe and Avid are names to look for in editing software.

Showtime!

There are more distribution options than ever before. The old standbys like tapes and discs have been joined by online and wireless streaming. Let’s look at your options and talk about the good and bad of each.

Tape and disc (DVD) are widely accepted and viewable by almost anyone on any continent as long as you use the right format (NTSC or PAL). Blue-Ray High Definition

DVD will slowly replace standard DVD over the next few years. the video rental stores are unloading their VHS tapes as quickly as they can and the same will be seen for standard definition DVD. If you need to have a frozen in time version of your material and you have a choice lean toward DVD and Blue-Ray DVD over tape for distribution.

Online distribution is your most flexible option, although in many cases it can’t deliver the picture quality that DVD or sometimes even tape can. By delivering your rich media as a downloadable or streaming file though you’ll save on distribution and dubbing costs. You’ll still have costs for disk storage space. Streaming files have an advantage over downloadable files in that you have greater control of who has a copy of your content. The other advantage of streaming rich media files is that you can place links to the files, in a player, on your site and other sites, making the material more widely available. For even wider distribution you can upload your rich media to sites like YouTube.

Streamed rich media can be made even more effective using RSS for subscription and syndication. this is essentially how podcasting works. People “subscribe’ to audio or video podcast “feeds” and then when a new file is uploaded by the author the subscribers are notified and the new file can be automatically downloaded to their player. So in a documentation or training scenario you create a piece of rich media documentation and your users “subscribe” to the media’s “feed” using RSS. A few days or weeks or months later the procedure described in the media changes. You make the change and upload the new file and your user is notified about the new file or the new file is automatically downloaded. the next time your audience needs to see the file they will see the latest version. RSS can act like an automatic updating service.

(Well? You’ve come this far. You may as well read Part 3!)