Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

Over the summer, desire for video in the newsroom has grown dramatically (I say one a day keeps the editor at bay). But as our Canon HV20 get more use, they are breaking at an alarming rate. We have three as pool gear and one is coming back from the shop (broken screen), and the other two are waiting to go (broken screen; broken firewire jack).

I’m going out of my way to remind the staff that we’re dealing with prosumer gear — they are simply not designed for the rigors of day-to-day journalism (and Canon admits as much). And given the current state of the industry we’re going to have to get by with less-than-pro gear for quite a while.

UPDATE: Repair confirmed water damage, though still fixed under warranty. Sent broken screen #2 in for repair yesterday. Current repair estimate is about $150.

I used my full compliment of multimedia gear while covering the Xterra Hammerman Triathlon this morning:

Nikon D200: 9 picture online gallery + three picture print package.

Canon HV20 with Sennheiser ew100 wireless mic: Video and ambient sound

M-Audio 24/96 with Beyerdynamic M58 mic: Interview recording.

I ended up spending too much time on the finished project trying to balance the audio levels between the tape and the M-Audio but I prefer that to shooting a lame stand up (probably a habit I should break — but not yet!).

Here’s the final video:

Another 4th of July, another holiday in Seward at the Mount Marathon race. Thousands turn out to cheer racers up the 3,022-foot peak and one lucky Anchorage Daily News photographer gets to climb the mountain to get pictures from the trail. Marc Lester always gets to go (I have to maintain race results on adn.com — honest!) and this year he shot some video with his Canon G9 to go with the video project I was working on.

I shot with a Canon HV20 and, despite some minor problems with the sizes, the clips blend fairly well. If the G9 had a a mic jack for my Sennheiser wireless, I don’t think I’d use anything else (some of Marc’s mountain clips suffered from wind noise — we’ll have to work out some sort of wind screen).

As part of our newsroom training effort at the Daily News I’ve created a handout on FCE for reporters and photographers. It’s a very surface treatment of a very complicated program but here are what I consider the highlights:

Inexperienced FCE users will often rewind their tape completely, which prevents the program from finding the camera in capture mode. Move forward on the tape 5 or 10 seconds so the timecode appears on the camera’s display and try launching the capture window again.

If you choose to use cross fades, make sure you have enough of the shot to blend. The program will make use of what it has — if there’s not enough material the cross fade will be short or one-sided.

You can control the length of the cross fade by double clicking on the cross fade icon. 1 = 1 second, 15 = 15 frames or .5 second.

If you’re importing audio into your project, FCE prefers .aif files. Double click on the audio track to bring it up in the editing window.

Learn the quick keys! They will save you time.

Apple has a very good series of video tutorials for FCE and the Knight Digital Media Center at the UC Berkeley has a great FC Pro tutorial.

My more superficial document (1.4 meg download) is available here: adnvideo.

Cyndy Green, a contributor at News Videographer, shared this technique for recording directly to the computer. I can definitely see a use for this in our day-to-day operations.