[Via Reinventing College Media]
After the intense, occasionally 23-hour, days at AAJALink, basically a multimedia workshop, I have a soft spot in my heart for journalists who are trying out video and photo and audio. It’s a rush when you realize it’s such a different, intriguing way of approaching stories that makes readers feel and hear and see what’s going on. So I like following what’s happening in the multimedia world.
Some of the latest buzz: High-definition video cameras produce better photos than, well, digital cameras. Thanks to the extremely high resolution of HD, it’s possible to get a quality frame that’s as good as any picture… and still take 24 pictures a second. Teacher Mindy McAdams has a delicious quote from a San Jose Mercury News photojournalist (now videojournalist?):
“With high-definition video, you can literally take the feed and go frame-by-frame and pick whatever still you want. Don’t gasp — I know that’s horrible for still photographers! And you feel dirty doing it. You always get the ball in the right spot. You always get the person walking through the light at the right moment. It does feel dirty.”
Possibilities with video-as-photos: Take an HD camera to shoot a story, put a compressed video clip on the Web and a superb still frame in the paper, and maybe some sound in a podcast – all with one person. Or for complex sequences – perhaps a military attack – break down clips. Work with the video to pull out the best 10-15 images that really distill and explain what’s going on and turn it into a slideshow.
A side note is that, with technology, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Video is great, but it’s not always the best way of telling a story.
Meanwhile, Reinventing College Media points to Cade White, a professor who’s documenting how the Dallas Morning News is adopting video journalism and trying out new techniques. On his first post, which has a video clip, he shows how HD cameras are used to take photos… sort of. We see the guy shooting the footage, but it’s never really shown in the end how much better the video image is than the camera image.
Still, the post is just the beginning of what promises to be a pretty neat look at how a major daily paper is adapting to digital journalism.
While I find all this inherently interesting, I think the important point is to be open to trying out new things. No one’s got multimedia and online journalism figured out yet, but people are making their best guesses and they’re turning out pretty cool.