Digital Video Production Handbook

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1. Project Description

     Do we really need another video book? Aren’t there enough books about this topic on the market already? Yes, there are excellent books about videography available. However, most of them are totally amateurish, some are too technical, and others are really outdated.

If you are not an engineer or a technician – and if you want to break out of the boring amateur video status, you need a new How To book for video-makers with professional ambitions.

Most photographers are not pure still-photographers anymore. Many journalists no longer work with words only. Advertising, marketing, public relations and communications people work nowadays more with video than ever before—in addition to workers in education, training and all kinds of instructional areas.

And then there are colleges and universities teaching students who want to become professional media experts. Journalists, reporters, editors, camera operators, photographers and others belong to them.

The digital explosion requires a new kind of thinking, a new style of presentation, and a new format of books. In the digital age, you can’t teach video the same way you did it ten, twenty or thirty years ago.

This is a didactically new, learning-focused approach to present all standard knowledge you need to know in order to write, produce, shoot and direct digital video. In addition to all technical and theoretical aspects of How To, the most important thing is the creator’s ability to tell a story. This starts with a verbal version – and ends with the final video product. If you can’t tell your story – you can’t do a convincing and impressive video (of your story).

After teaching Filmmaking and Television fourteen semesters at a German college, my Textbook of Filmmaking (MediaBook Publishing) was first published 1978 and became—with the 7th edition on the market—the most successful textbook of its kind. The success of my book – after thirty years still used at European Film Schools—taught me what is most important for your and what is not.

This is not to want you to do everything, not to be too technical and too detailed, not to want to impress people what you know.

What I learned through my teaching and this book, such a book must contain everything you need for your job—but not more. If you want dig deeper into this matter, I offer you the literature they need. See chapter Recommended literature.

This is especially true for most technical aspects of filmmaking with digital video. Digital technology changes virtually every six months, and so do gadgets in use. Therefore, I am not introducing specific camera models or post-production equipment. Manufacturers can do this job. This handbook introduces a general technology on the basis of specific equipment currently in use.

As important the technical equipment is for the actual quality of the digital video product, it is just a tool in the creative process of a film or video. You must be able to use it to the last extent, but it is never the journey, it’s just the vehicle to bring you where you want to go. Period.

You may be able to know how to use all the state-of-the-art digital video equipment there is, this doesn’t mean much—unless you are able to comprehend the entire creative process of the production: Writing, producing, shooting, editing, directing. This is the primary focus of this handbook.

I want to lead you from the very first stage of your idea – to a Hollywood style movie. Please follow me . . . .

2. Approach plan

    The learning approach of our topic depends on a number of factors. First of all, it depends on the factor whether you are learning just by yourself – or in a group. Secondly, it matters in which form or with which medium you intend to learn.

Conventional book learning

Learning from a CD or DVD

Seminar-like teacher-students presentation

Online webinar

   In each case, it is recommended to follow the information flow as it occurs. Of course, you may glance through the chapters at any time if you want to, but it is more advantageous for your learning process to learn the material systematically.

If you are learning in a group – with a teacher our without a teacher – you should invest some considerable time to discuss each aspect and to evaluate the progress informally. Of course, each teacher is going to use own methods of interaction, and it is recommended to follow this process. No good teacher is going to refuse your suggestions or discussing specific points not mentioned in this course if this makes sense and improves our objectives.

3. Why using video as a storyteller?

     Do you remember who do you love listen to and who always is able to bring the topic to the point everybody is supposed to get? Yes, somebody who is able to tell a story. A storyteller. For thousands of years, royalties and other wealthy people hired talents who were able to entertain them. Often, these people were just regular people with one exception – they were able to tell their story in an interesting and sometimes funny way.

The ability to tell a story is a natural gift, but in many ways it is learnable too. Do you still remember some school buddies who wrote the most interesting stories the entire school emphatically listened to?

Writing an interesting story is something you should have learned in your English class. We cannot accomplish this in this course. If you don’t feel very comfortable, it is strongly recommended to brush up some of these skills before writing a video script.

Let’s now tackle the aspect why using video to tell your story. First of all, video – a sub-form of movie or television—is much more powerful than written word. It adds several highly important components to the written information. Here are some most often used ones:

Picture

Color

Visual effects

Movement

Spoken word/Dialogues

Sound atmosphere

Music

Sound effects

Inserts

     Especially because of these advantages versus some other forms of presentation, the use of video formally exploded during the last few years. The ease of use of camcorders and distribution capabilities such as youtube.com lead to virtually endless use of this audio-visual presentation form.

Digital video became a very important segment of corporate PR, marketing and advertising communications. Producing corporate videos of any kind has practically become a must for many companies around the world. In addition to television and DVD or CD distribution, increasingly important is nowadays Internet distribution. Some Internet videos reach sometimes millions of online viewers in just a few days.

Since there are no more real clear differences between digital video and digital television, video has also become an entry-level stage for people who want to break into the television business. This is partially true even for the movie industry where more and more digital technology replaces the classic film as recording and postproduction medium

4. Video Journalism

    The video explosion on the Internet and many other areas of public life and media presentation opened a series of new avenues for the digital video technology. Most blogosphere videos as purely amateurish, but nevertheless they are some kind of rudimentary expression with the means of this relatively new, easy to use technology. They surely prove the urge of many people to tell their story with video. However, calling this Video Journalism would stretch the word too much.

4.1 Online video presentation forms

There are several types of video presentations online developing at this time. Here are some of the most visible examples:

a.        "Moving picture is adding a video component to an online text. This type of basic video is usually very short and replaces a static photo with a moving" one.

b.        Personal video blog is mostly a basic shot of a person talking into camera and telling their story with video.

c.        Enhanced video blog is normally showing a person shot by a third person. Sometimes, additional multimedia components are added to this form.

d.        TV documentary replica is usually an edited and narrated video in the style of TV documentary or TV report. However, the video is much shorter than TV programs they are emulating.

e.        Internet TV show always replicates broadcast production techniques. Some of them are done very professionally and are virtually identical with the original broadcast program. Some corporations, political advocacy and media organizations produce such Internet TV shows on a daily or weekly basis in order to gain additional advertising revenues.

f.        Video email is a basically simple email tool adding video clips of any kind to its content. Video email became more and more an important part of video marketing which practically erases virtually all substantial differences in their approach between conventional media and advertising, marketing, Public Relations and public information.

g.        VOD is an abbreviation of the wording video on demand and one of the most promising growth businesses on the web.

        Highly interesting also is the professional use of video journalism in the conventional as well as new media:

4.2 Video journalism on TV

For years, smaller television stations and audio-visual production companies are experimenting with several kinds of low-budget video production forms. Following the working style of the filmmaker who does virtually everything by himself, video journalism was born out of a desperate need to cut cost.

Video journalists or VJs are sometimes called one-man-bands or do-it-all reporters, photographers and video editors. In any case, they work on a shoestring budget, but still expand their reporting flexibilities and reporting options for their media organizations.

In an ideal situation, a video journalist is able to research, write, shoot, edit, narrate and on-camera present a story just by himself. He is usually equipped with a camcorder and a laptop computer. He shoots the footage, uploads it to his laptop, edits and narrates it at the location. Usually, he transmits the final video piece to the station via a broadband cellular modem. VJs rarely use a traditional, expensive microwave truck to transmit the story to the station.

As limited video journalists are in their capability to cover complex events or stories, they definitely contribute dramatically to cost-saving efforts especially smaller broadcast stations cannot avoid.

However, video journalism also is able to add an interesting and sometimes quite artful new presentation form. Some VJs are very creative and compensate their limited technical capabilities with fresh presentation ideas.

Whenever extensive travel is required, the budget often allows only one person to do the job. Remote video travel guides or expeditions are a perfect example. Sometimes, some political, space, or general travel restrictions—for people like war correspondents—mandate such limitations too. In all such cases the uniqueness of the footage is much more important than the picture or sound quality.

Video journalists are definitely not going to replace conventional TV reporters, but they are surely going to dominate many budget-stricken local newscasts. Experts predict that video journalism in general is going to grow for years to come.

4.3 Video in print media

Utilizing video by a your local newspaper? It doesn’t make much sense, does it? Print is print, and video is video. You can’t combine them, you might be implied to say. The reality is, exactly that is happening at newspapers all over the world. How come?

First of all, newspapers are losing ground to their electronic competition. Print media organizations must be competitive and innovative in order to survive. Of course, you cannot print a video on the front page of your favorite newspaper, but they all have their web sites nowadays, and they are exploiting the new media market extensively.

Print media’s web sites are pretty much the only major survival kit they believe in. They are poised to make these web sites as attractive as possible for their readers and advertisers. And what’s better than some attractive video clips as an addition to the printed story in the hard copy of the paper delivered to you at your breakfast table?

They usually embed small video clips into their printed text on their web sites, and by simply clicking on the underlined key word you see and hear a video! Some people still consider this a gimmick, but in reality it is a fully integrated and extremely user-friendly, interactive multi-media presentation.

Many photo journalists working for print media see video as a part of the natural evolution of video, similar to the addition of color to the formerly just black and white newspaper photos.

How do they do this practically? Many newspaper publishers as well as photo journalists think that a professional news photographer should be able to shoot video and collect audio in addition to taking still pictures. To a particular extent, this is already happening at many conventional, non-electronic media corporations.

Many news photographers carry today not just their usual still cameras, but also a mostly fully automated, camcorder-style digital video camera also their employers bought for less than one thousand dollars. The investment factor is minimal. The picture quality of the uploaded video clips is mostly acceptable. However, the quality of the sound is not the primary focus of this video news gathering technique and is mostly still sub-standard.

The workload of these multimedia photographers increased dramatically. They must shoot twice, and they must upload and edit their footage twice. This is often too much to demand from a busy newspaper photographer who is normally already very busy catching up from one assignment to another.

The high-definition video technology, however, offers meanwhile such a good quality that many newspapers decided to go just with digital HD video and just to extract single-frame pictures from the video for their print edition. The quality is not excellent, but good enough for many newspapers. Of course, the quality of HD video is going to increase further, making single-frame pictures at least as good as an average digital still camera today.

Several high-end, professional digital cameras many news photographers use today also offer a video clip mode with an excellent quality. If the newspapers continue just to use short clips, this is probably going to be the way to go. Even an old-style editorial office of a newspaper is slowly but surely becoming more and more a multimedia place.

4.4. Chapter review questions

a.        Why is video particularly