I’ve spent the evening with a series of videos I’ve meant to get to for a while — a panel discussion on newspaper video from the University of Florida’s Institute on Journalism and Media — and a great evening of learning and entertainment it was.
The video, in four parts, features Chuck Fadely, Regina McCombs and Chet Rhodes, along with a question-and-answer session. All three of the panelists have interesting tales to tell, but I was particularly engrossed in Rhodes’ description of the Washington Post system for training its print-side folk to shoot “reporter video.”
Mindy McAdams deserves great credit for putting this all online, and extending the storytelling that took place in the UF classroom out into the world for the rest of us to enjoy and learn from.
I only wish it hadn’t taken me so long to get to it.
Here’s the story: I have an oldish but hardly obsolete iBook G4. When I tried to watch the videos online, I got the audio fine, but was only getting a single frame of video every 10 or 15 seconds, making it all unwatchable. I downloaded the FLV files to my desktop, but the result was the same: there was too much data in the video/audio stream for my iBook to cope with, even after I quit all other apps.
In order to watch the videos, I re-encoded them, using Visual Hub, as 320×240 MPEGs, a process that took about an hour for each of the four segments. Once done, they played fine.
The time wasn’t wasted. The value of the videos was high and I was able to run the re-encoding while I worked on other projects. And I got a secondary lesson from the whole experience: I need to make sure, when putting my own, and eventually my students’, video on line, they’ll run well on as many computers as possible, not just the latest and greatest.
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, VIDEO
