I’m loving the Fujifilm X100 for image making. It has a great sized sensor in a beautifully well made, retro-styled body.
It does have its issues though. It is sluggish when taking multiple raw photos and its manual focusing is fiddly. They are not really issues that concern my use though, and I feel most of the niggles so far reported can be fixed with a firmware update. For me its good points far outweigh the bad. Great image quality, a hybrid viewfinder, a lovely fast lens and near silent operation to name a few.
That said, for the X100 to be my every day workhorse, the camera I always have by my side, it also to be useable for video blogging. This is my first real test shooting video and although the lens delivers a great quality image, even in low light, a couple of clips appeared to have a buzzing on the audio and then for no reason.. it went. I didn’t do anything to make it go and can’t seem to get it to happen again. Nevertheless, it was weird and I can see myself doing a few more tests before trusting the camera to deliver both stunning video and acceptable audio. Even if just for video blogging.
(I recorded my initial impression of the camera here on audioboo should you want to hear more.)
One is just to get some content onto my OurManInside.com blog as it has sat dorment for a few months. The other is to pose the question in the title. How easy to use is your blogging platform?
I’ve found myself in a dilemma. I have had the theme Revolution Pro on this WordPress blog for a long time now. I love the way the front page displays a variety of content from throughout the blog and when I update my flickr photos the feed on the front of my blog also changes. I also have a video that’s easy to change. When I remember.
It’s also is hosted & managed by Nik Butler AKA @Loudmouthman so i never have to think about it falling down or needing updating. He is the invisible being that makes this corner of my internet just work.
After seeing Loudmouthman dabbling in Flavors.me I set up my own at flavors.me/documentally. It’s handy to have certain online places aggregate to one page and really simple to set up. That said it does not do everything I am after and sometimes has a strange idea of how content should be formatted.
This is not a new idea.. Over two years ago myself and @Philcampbell used his creation Rezpondr which did very much the same but with more timeline customization and made realtime projects across multimedia platform easy to view in one place.
This year I finally found a fast posting platform I am truly comfortable with in not only it’s simplicity but the way it grows. It is listening to it’s users and growing with them. Posterous has truly revolutionised the way I blog as it’s auto embedding of content with cross posting ability makes it the easiest platform I have yet used. My Documental.ly Posterous blog (themed by @RichardMackney) has almost entirely taken over from this wordpress blog.
It’s all about ease of use and that’s mostly down to links being auto embedded, video and audio being hosted & embedded and all this seemlessly working from an email. All it really needs now is a decent back-up system for the masses of content I am pumping into it.
Richard Mackney also made me a hub page at Documentally.com If you are to mention my online places to anyone. please start with www.Documentally.com I am hoping it will always link to a few of my online places.
Bushte.ch, Paynestake.com and Oapedia.org are just a few of my posterous blogs all linked into the same backend content management system.
I haven’t done it yet but apparently I can easily import all my wordpress posts into posterous and was looking to turn my wordpress theme into a content aggregation system for all my other places. Either this or turn off wordpress altogether. This is a really hard decision as wordpress has been really good to me. Possible because of Nik’s seamless support and that google keeps sending a large number of people here.
This is a small dilemma in the grand scheme of things. Whatever happens I will have to change the theme. I now have to sort out a separately formatted photo (unless i recycle an old one) that will appear on the front page link as well as go through flickr to find a photo to break up this body of text. It is so much more work than is needed compared to the other platforms cropping up at the moment.
I guess I could just post to fewer places to save time.. I would, but Storyfi.com has now made it even easier to filter and feed all the content we sew across our web spaces. Another game changing platform waiting to take off.
Anyway. For the time being I will be mostly at http://Documental.ly until i decide what to do. Unless the Libyans decide to unplug me.
UPDATE:
Actually, not technically an update as I had not yet posted all these questions and ponderings when I called @Loudmouthman who it seems has once again given me all the solutions to my musings. I knew i shouldn’t have Skyped him before I posted. He has almost voided this post with all his answers.
So.. For me to pump life back into the great platform of WordPress, (Nik reminded me of the many benefits Wordpress has over other platforms and I hope he can list a few in the comments below) I need to find a simple two column wordpress theme that will allow my flickr and video content to be featured via widgets. That way i get to keep all the great content that’s archived here and all going well I can cross post from my easy to use posterous into my wordpress pages. So, as Nik has done with Loudmouthman.com (no www.) linking to his blog only and with the www’s is goes to his flavor.me account he has all bases covered.
Phew. I am going to have a lie down in order to formulate a plan of action.
Cheers Nik.. No need to frown.. I got there in the end.
[Another Update]
Woot!.. As you may have noticed I’ve made the switch to a simpler theme and as a result in two days my stats have tripled. Of course an increase in stats if i were selling something would mean more customers but in my case it means more people reading and that less is in fact more when it comes to formatting blogs to help with accessibility.
Thanks again to Nik for the ongoing tweaks to my back-end. *sounds wrong*
Advertising revenue is down, newspapers are struggling and as the economy takes a downturn production costs are up, at the same time online readership and revenue continue to rise. So what’s the answer? Go where the eyes are. Whether you are writing, taking pictures, shooting video or recording audio you can build communities with your content. But only if you take it online.
Three years ago online video was something I mostly only viewed. I’d played around with recording and uploading video but this was a long winded haphazard affair involving hand coded xml files every time I wanted to add a video to my podcast. Then if I wanted to share it further afield I’d upload it to YouTube giving me the option to embed on a website or link to it in an email or forum.
Now it’s just as easy as sending an email. Many of the sites I visit today are either video conversational platforms or at the very least places where video is being shared and commented on. Video is now a medium of conversation.
Recently I have been asked more and more by companies “Do we really need to get involved in video?”
The short answer is “Yes.”
For me, engaging with online video is a no brainer.
The easiest way for me to explain why this shift from old analogue methods of communication to online ones is so important is to compare online video with TV. The buzzword for a while now has been Social Media, Social Media does exactly what it says on the tin, it allows people to have conversations on a new level of engagement, be it from an entertainment or marketing perspective. TV could not be further away from this world. The most interactive thing TV can offer us is the red button. Nowadays people expect a conversation with their content.
TV advertising is also fleeting and expensive. After the cost of creating your media, you pay for your slot and when it’s gone it’s gone. Online video on the other hand, can be made at a fraction of the cost, and if you spread it intelligently it’s viewable forever. Not only that but the viewer can comment on, respond to, and share it for you. This conversation around your content keeps it alive, relevant, and in the public eye way beyond other forms of old analogue media.
Online video is also instantly global, searchable, on demand and with viewing stats that are easily measured.
It really is a no brainer.
Whether you want content for your website, to launch a brand or product, produce video news releases, or just show the human side of your organisation, you need to have a presence in the digital world, you need to be using online video. I can show you how to do produce content cheaply and effectively. I cover the kit, how-to shooting tips, file compression, uploading and aggregation, how to make your video visible, and loads more. Whether you wish to use some of the free solutions out there like Twitvid, Tokbox or Qik, or shoot HD on a hand held device, I can be there to guide you through selecting suitable equipment to shoot, edit and distribute your video effectively.
For a little while now I’ve offered one to one consultation and informal training sessions on all aspects of social media and video making for the web. Now, for the first time, in conjunction with Econsultancy, I’m going to be able to offer a formal workshop (snappily titled) ‘Video For The Web‘.
4.7 billion videos are watched online in the UK every year. Make one of them yours.
So here is what the fuss is all about. Finally a low cost hand held HD video camera with a microphone input. I’m yet to get my hands on a Kodak Zi8 for a proper test but I had a quick fondle for a couple of minutes behind the Kodak stand with Jenny Cisney at NYC 140 Conference.
In the dark shadowy corner I shot this very quick video in 720p as the SD card I had to hand was not high speed and couldn’t cope with the fat data rate of the 1080p setting. The camera feels good in the hand. Well made and similar in form to the Zi6.
Already I can see the low light ability is better than that of the previous two models but more importantly I am looking forward to plugging in an external mic and seeing what kind of audio quality is possible.
The specs are as follows:
• Full HD 1080p video
• Built-in image stabilization
• 2.5” color LCD
• Swing out the USB arm to upload, share, and charge
• 5 MP 16:9 widescreen HD still pictures
• Built-in software for editing and uploading
• Compatible with PC and Mac
• Record up to 10 hrs of HD video (20 min per 1 GB at 720p HD at 30 fps) with SD/SDHC card up to 32 GB
• Face tracking technology
• External stereo microphone
• HDMI cable included
I’m thinking that finally camera producers are beginning to understand the importance of decent audio.. more important than picture quality in my opinion. It’s too soon for me to express anything other than relief at the mic input with the Kodak Zi8, but I feel with devices like the Zoom Q3 on the horizon (which is effectively a high quality audio recorder with a camera on it), I feel the goal posts have been moved and video blogging devices are entering a whole new era.
Fair enough I thought, but when I met him he was just frank and very funny.
The video of the panel we did at the #140conf is floating around somewhere in the ether. I may even drop it in a blog soon.
What I have here in the mean time is a brief conversation with Paul at the end of the day. We were on the way out the door and both of us had cold beer on our minds. That’s probably why this is not so much an interview as a chat in a corridor over a conference when what we really wanted (and had later) was a chat over a beer.. well away from the conference.
Jeff Pulver, the chairman and founder of Pulver.com was the main man behind the 140 characters conference in New York that brought together Twitter users from all over the world.
New york was the first of the 140 Characters conference and others are planned in both London and Los Angeles. Originally the event was to explore the effects of twitter on: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising and Politics”. These topics were covered, as well as many more. As ever many of the conversations happened outside the main auditoriums..
I was asked by The Open University in England to grab some interviews with the assistance of Matt (@Barnstormed) and in the corridor we caught up with Jeff and asked how the conference had come about..
It’s been ages since I was the proud owner of a decent HD camcorder. The last one I had was a 3ccd Panasonic that took DV tapes. At the time it was way too good for what I needed, so I sold it to upgrade my stills camera.
Ever since then I’ve been dabbling with pocket HD video recorders, in particular the Kodak Zi6. The Zi6 is a great little device for blogging and with it’s combination of AA batteries and additional SDHC memory, I always have one at the ready. Recently I was given a Kodak Zx1 to review but I’m thinking/hoping it is broken as there are some major issues when recording low frequency sound. Anyway.. the less said about that the better. The sooner manufacturers realise that decent audio is far more important than the video, the sooner we will have great devices we can really use.
With pocket HD cameras the market leader seems to be the Flip Mino HD.. I think this is because every blogger and his dog (apart from me) seemed to get one to try out and talk about. Not wanting internal memory or a weird battery, I opted for the Kodak Zi6..
The same seems to be with HD Camcorders.. Canon really seems to be on top of blogger advocacy and made sure a few decent video bloggers had access to their kit.. Once again, I missed out on these trials and although I know camcorders like the Canon Legria HF S10 are damn fine bits of kit.. when it came to go out and find one for myself I decided to enter the web with an open mind.
For me, any highly spec’d image capturing device has to have decent optics. This goes without saying. I know Canon have really proved themselves over the years but I have always been drawn to the fact Panasonic pride themselves in their electronics and partnered with perhaps one of the finest glass manufacturers in operation today. Leica make great lenses. Fact. I still have my Leica M6 and a selection of lenses even though i rarely shoot film.. I am yet to see optics as good as those that fit on my old M6.
So when i first saw Panasonic’s Leica lensed HDC-TM300 early this year.. I had a feeling this could be the camera for me. There is always lots of talk online around the HD format AVCHD, but I see it being used more and more to get as much data as possible into smaller memory space and to be honest.. I just can’t be bothered with any type of magnetic tape now, even if the quality is still better.
While saving up enough funds to purchase something decent I read more and more about different cameras and could see that the HDC-TM300 is a serious camcorder aimed at enthusiasts. It has more features that I will ever get round to using and with its twin flash-memory capability, it should be robust enough to rattle around in the bottom of my backpack with all my other gadgets.
Feel
The camera looks and feels like many other in the range. Smooth lines and solid in the hand. It has an EVF (electronic viewfinder) as well as a large flip out LCD touchscreen, an attachable accessory shoe and a great little manual focusing ring round it’s Leica lens.
It’s sister, the HDC-HS300 comes with a 120GB HDD (hard disc drive) and an SD/SDHC slot but I really wanted to put the moving parts aside and go for 32GB internal solid state and a removeable SD/SDHC memory card slot. It will take a Class 6 card up to 32GB but at the moment I am using a Class 6 16GB card bought for about £25.
Features
So what’s it got..? Like said.. more than i’m ever likely to use. To be honest i had to read up on what it’s three MOS image sensors (“3MOS”) were capable of. Each sensor is dedicated to one of the red, green and blue primary colours. The total number of pixels available on each MOS image sensor is 2.07 million pixels (Full HD) for both video and stills. The sensor itself is a little bigger than normal at 1/4″. There is always a worry that camera upgrades include more pixels but less light gathering capability as these pixels are squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces. Not so here.
Amongst some of the many features these are a few that interest me:
~ Image Stabilisation
~ 3 second Pre-REC
~ 2.07 million pixels per video shot and 10.6 mega pixels when shooting stills
~ Leica Dicomer 12x optical zoom lens, with surrounding manual focus ring
~ Interval Recording – time lapse recording from 1 second through to 120 seconds
~ External Microphone input with manual level control (a must for any serious camera)
~ Face Detection – (scary but works really well. Even on the dog!)
~ 12x optical zoom (30x and 700x digital but i never turn this on for obvious reasons)
~ Touch Screen LCD (inc ‘Target Frame’ – Set a target ie face, focal point or object to lock on to even when it moves)
~ Headphone (as well as an AV output port)
~ iA Intelligent Auto – (kind of an idiotmode for when you have been drinking and don’t want to miss a shot)
~ Relay Recording – record seamlessly from the internal memory to the SDHC memory card
These are just a few that jumped out at me.. There are loads more that I could list.. (if i understood them
Reading from the manual I can tell you the camera uses MPEG-4/AVC H.264 high definition video compression, saving 1920×1080 movies to either the internal solid state memory or the SDHC memory at the following sizes:
~ HA: 17 Mbps (1920 x 1080 VBR)
~ HG: 13 Mbps (1920 x 1080 VBR)
~ HX: 9 Mbps (1920 x 1080 VBR)
~ HE: 6 Mbps (1440 x 1080 VBR)
I know that the Canon cameras can capture data at 24Mbps but I like to be able to edit while mobile from a laptop using iMovie. I think files larger than the ones I already have to deal with may well crash my brain, not only my hardware/software. Besides I would happily offset the data rate and take the 2 extra MOS sensors that Panasonic has over the Canon’s one large one. I may change my mind when I get an 8 core laptop.
My 16GB SDHC Class 6 memory card records just over 2 hours at the highest quality (AVCHD at the HA setting). It is possible to copy the clips from internal memory to external and visa versa. There is even limited editing available should you want to chop stuff up while traveling to save space.
Conclusion
In my opinion this is the perfect all round consumer level camcorder. It ticks all of the boxes I had in mind when I was looking for a camera for shooting video for web at the best quality costing under a grand. Saying that, playing it through my HDTV via HDMI, blew me away. The quality of picture and richness of colour was way beyond what I have previously experienced. I may need a little more practice exporting video for web (and a bigger home bandwidth) to get close to the quality I know this camera is capable of, but it is compact and feature packed. It has some really innovative use of it’s touchscreen and has all the inputs/outputs I could possibly need. With the options of manual control and of course it’s funky time lapse feature, I feel it is a camera I can grow into and learn from.
Just to force a gripe and pick on something.. Although I love it’s 5.1 built-in mic, it’s positioning on the top makes it prone to my heavy breathing and wind noise. Still I plan to upgrade the sound with a more directional mic for interview purposes.
Also at £800-£1000 It’s probably a little expensive for the average consumer but this is still a new camera and I imagine the price will come down soon enough.. When it does.. buy it. Or if you can afford it now.. buy it now.. I’m certainly glad I did.
UPDATE: Here are a few of the accessories I have found useful.
I’m writing this on my last few minutes of battery power, about 38,000ft above sea level, with six and a half hours left on my flight from London to Los Angles.
I am traveling in a group of thirteen after being asked by Digital Outlook, in association with Xbox, to blog the E3 Gaming Expo. Not only blog in the normal text based sense but to use some of the tools I normally use that feed into twitter.. AudioBoo, flickr, 12 seconds etc.
I guess they are after a non serious gamer with a different perspective to give their take on the event. And i shall. There’s loads of new tech and game releases for me to get my teeth into so there should me more than enough content to get me excited..
So why then am I writing a blog post before anything has happened?
I chose WordPress as a basis for my blog a while back and have been happy with it ever since. Me being me though means I have to try and be a little bit different.. a little css adjusted here an over sized graphic here.. As a result I have had to ask Derek (@Delboydare) to assist me in upgrading my wordpress version and he has done a great job. Tapping away behind the scenes, he has ensured my transition to the latest version of wordpress has happened without a hitch.
Then there’s Nik, @loudmouthman. It seems he has been hosting/managing a couple of well known blogs recently and as I’ve been wanting to make the switch from my former hosting company NXS.nl, I thought I’d take him up on his offer. I know that with Nik being on the other end of the tweet almost 24/7 i could not wish for better hosting support.
The changeover itself happened almost too fast for me to notice.. All I had to do my end was insert the new name servers and it was done. I had to check three or four times because I did not think it could really be that easy. But no.. it was done and i was up and running on my new server with no visible downtime.
The conversation with Nik that followed informed me that my security had increased substantially and some extra plug-ins had been installed into my wordpress blog that would on the whole make my life more easier when it came to posting anything on my blog.
I spend a good portion of my working life recommending tools sites and apps that i think worth using.. Derek has shown me how valuable our networks are when it comes to sourcing the skill sets outside of our own and Nik has shown me that I can love a platform without knowing it’s full potential and that there are some people out there that don’t just talk the talk and really know their game.
So.. here i am re-enthused, reinvigorated, reminded on how good a platform wordpress is and stuck in the air unable to post this to the web till I return to terra firma.
I should be in the hotel about 8 hours from this sentence. There are about 12 people in the team that headed out from the UK.. Many had come in from other cities in other countries.. Spain, France, Italy and Germany to name a few. Some host gaming forums/sites like www.XboxWay.com and www.Xboxdynasty.com Some are PR.. One guy Sean Geer calls him self ‘old media’ but i think he is much more than that.. Anyone that packs A Nikon D90, Lumix LX3 and an Eye-Fi card is ok in my book.. Especially as I have the same in my bag.
I also am packing two laptops.. two Kodak HD recorders, solar chargers with extra lithium-ion cels.. and so on.. My back is already having a go at me. I really need to make a point of using everything that I have brought just so as this pain isn’t in vain.
All going well and I can jump through the security hoops stateside, I’ll be tagging all of my content with the hashtag #E3. you can listen to my Audioboos on www.audioboo.net or through Buddhamagnet‘s BooBase.
If you want to see everything on one Page then Documentally.Rezpondr.com is the place to be (thanks to @Philcampbell for creating/setting that up) and no doubt everything will go through my Twitter account as normal… Documentally
If you start watching/engaging now you will hopefully see the transition from bumbling ignorance to slightly clued up. I will be filling in all the spaces in my gaming knowledge through regular contact with Nik Butler but please feel free to drop a comment on this blog if you would like me to cover anything in particular in the world of XBox..
Thanks for all the tips on what i should go to see out in LA but i feel i may be too busy channeling all of my Expo observations into www.xbox.com/e309
Still, i hope there will be a few hours off here and there so if you get the chance.. ping me on twitter and maybe we can grab a beer.
The other week while on assignment at Reuters with @sizemore, I was talking to @ilicco about how the more kit i try to juggle the more diluted the content can become.
I was sat at the front of an almost exciting talk from the FSA with laptop, iPhone, N95, Kodak Zi6 and a pocket camera. Back in my bag was a pro Nikon SLR, an audio recorder and yet another laptop.
This is the burden of the blogger. We tend to move faster than the tech can keep up and the convergence of our various gadgets still only gives us one device that does lots of things in a mediocre fashion.. and then only for as long as it’s over stretched battery holds out.
I joked about buying Shiva Media. I thought a multi-armed kit wielding blogger would make a great logo. Apart from the fact this may be insulting the top Hindu God of Gods.. the name has already been taken anyway.
Here’s a guy who looks like he has found a happy medium. Adam is a radio journalist dabbling in video. Using a compact camera, a HD video camera and an audio recorder he may have to juggle a little but by not choosing to live update through twitter, ping gps, and live stream he still has time to script his interviews and get the job done.
Maybe Multi Media does not have to be Multi-multi-media..
In an ideal world, if I were going back into a warzone, or tackling something I only had one shot at, I’d want to work in a team. Much as I prefer traveling alone, I do find a more superior batch of content comes from using a team, who like super heroes, all have their own individual strengths.
Along with Stills, HD video and audio, I also like to (where possible) live stream, micro blog (Twitter, Audioboo) and gps tag as i go. I find so much more value in logging the live progress as ‘news’ which preempts the final edit. This not only raises awareness of the project as it is happening but opens up all sorts of real time resources & conversations, as connections are made as you document.
At the moment to do a multimedia job well you’d need a snapper and a videographer, perhaps an audio guy too but you may be able to manage this between two at a stretch. Both people must also be able to live blog, capture, edit, archive and back up their own content and on top of this, write and do stuff to camera.
When I mean ‘do it well’, I mean suck up and absorb as much of the surrounding content/story/information in high quality for the later edit and lo-fi for live blogging.
As I have never been embedded, a team also offers a certain amount of safety and security. Depending on where you are, sometimes it can just draw attention. Although mainly traveling alone for ease, I’ve often worked with a friend. Someone I would trust with my life.
In Iraq I didn’t really know what I was going to do. There was little planning. I just went to see for myself and apart from moving fast and laying low, I was just taking photos and logging my GPS position, either pinging it back via sat phone or texting when there was GSM. The photos I took went to accompany a couple of news stories my friend was writing and finally to make my first real video podcast.
On assignment in Jordan for the UNHCR I had more experience but limited time. I decided against video and just worked with stills and audio. Much of what I was going to do was arranged in advance by a friend who knew the area well and acted as a fixer. With a simple hand held Zoom H2 on the floor i could record the stories of the refugees and use my Nikon D300 to take pictures in the pauses, editing out the shutter sound later. During the live video blogging of the project I was contacted by Bill Cammack who ended up editing the final stills and interviews into a film.
I guess when there is less at stake.. Back in the UK, either covering a geek conference or on a job for a corporate client, you can experiment and test new methods of data capture and transmission. This is when we can get silly with our tech. Finding out what works and what is a waste of time and resources. What medium has the greatest reach for the least amount of effort.
If I had a tech lab at my disposal, something similar to what Ironman or Batman had in their gargantuan basements.. I would not hesitate to create the ultimate journalists tool. Some single device that once and for all did everything a blogger/journalist needed.
It only exists in my head right now but would have the video capture qualities of RED.. A 15-200mm f1.4 lens with an integral Binaural auto zooming microphone. High definition stills could be extracted from the film and edited in camera. All the GPS and audio to text tagged footage could be separated into audio, video and stills onto solid state cards or streamed via wifi, wimax, or compressed for GSM, or satellite enabling it to be sent all over the world but also to a sister pod situated within the same city retrieving the footage and archiving live.
Oh.. and it tweets.
Failing that.. I’d be happy for the iPhone to have a decent battery, shoot 5 mega pixel photos even in low light and shoot reasonable video from two decent front and back cameras.
This I feel would be far easier to achieve and may even be with us next year. In the meantime I, along with many bloggers and tech lovers will be carting around small to medium backpacks clanking with lensed gadgets. Always on the look out for an unused plug socket so we can recharge and ultimately.. reconnect.
