Friday 10 October 2008

Video - quantity vs. quality

Excellent post from Colin Mulvany on the bipolar arguments regarding quantity vs. quality in newspaper video production including an excellent set of questions to ask yourself about why you are doing video in the first place and what the value of it is.

I'd like to believe that one could choose which way you go based on the priorities of the story you are covering. But I haven't tried phrasing such flexible values. Answers on a postcard please.

1 comment:

Biofuelsimon said...

Maybe one compromise is to use a standard format for video in news stories.

We find for ICIS TV that if the print interview is over then the print journalist can ask three questions to get to three points in the story.

Tell the interviewee that you want the whole lot to last no more than two minutes. That way its controlled and there is little or no editing to do. If you could stand a little repetition, you could set the video camera up, put people on their marks and shoot.

You don't have to spend a lot of time setting the scene.

Get people to come to the camera to be interviewed. Video the interviews in the same place each time with the same set up.

If each interview is 2 min long then that's 2 minutes to digitise, 2 minutes to add the intro and ending and 10 minutes to post to the web. We have turned stories round on video like this much faster than text stories. It is a pretty efficient process.

It's not cinematic art, but then journalism isn't literature.

If you've got the time then paint a picture.