Confessions of a video novice

You would think I knew more about video than I do. I can fake my way through, like the time my kids were working on a video for a film festival at school. My two younger sons and a few of their friends were working on an entry for the comedy category of the school's first film festival. They had shot a lot of scenes (it was a documentary on tools, and it won first place), but they found they didn't have the proper software to get it off the video camera and onto my son's computer. I came home from work to find them frustrated and worried that they weren't going to be able to pull this whole film-making thing off. When I walked in the door, they all came running up the stairs spouting all the problems they were having. All I said was, "I'm not sure how to fix this, but I have a Mac in my backpack." We plugged the video camera into my Mac, iMovie opened, and the rest is history. I looked like a genius, but I didn't really have to do anything.

Fast-forward about a year. As I said in a previous post, I finally joined the smartphone brigade, and I didn't mess around. I got an HTC EVO 4G, and I have to say that this phone is rockin'. I considered the slightly smaller version, but the bigger screen was a draw for my aging eyes, and the 8 megapixel camera intrigued me. I just took about a minute and a half of video (lovely footage of my garden, don't you know), dumped it onto my computer, imported it into iMovie, and all I can say is Wow! That is one heck of a camera on that phone. If I ever thought I might want to buy a video camera, I'm done with that idea. I've got one.

For me, once again, a lot of my interest is academic. I'm working with plenty of people who need video to teach their classes - intro videos for online classes, videos of people solving problems, videos of lab techniques - you name it. Figuring out the workflow for posting these kinds of things still isn't easy at a lot of institutions unless you want to use YouTube, and many universities and faculty members are uncomfortable posting videos that are part of course work on YouTube. There are some possibilities on the horizon (Kaltura, for instance), but for some reason at IU, it has taken a lot of time for people to come around to an easy video solution for course-related video. Considering the quality of video that you can produce at any moment, we've got to do something about that.

Well, at least we can stop buying video cameras for people to check out. Just about everyone has a pretty decent one in their pocket. Now what do I do with it? I'm not sure, but watch out. I'm going to go get a YouTube account...