And here’s a ridiculously awesome hack of the idea. I wish I’d thought of this.

Still, watching the video, made by the folks at the social media marketing online magazine, Social Media Examiner, it occurred to me that one thing I do know a thing or two about is film & video production. This thought occurred to me because I found myself rolling my eyes and making some snarky judgments about the video I was watching. Then it occurred to me that if was so smart I should stop muttering judgmental comments at my monitor and use that energy for an entertaining (doubtful) and useful (hopefully) post about something I actually know about.

So here’s the video:

Darren Rowse Interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

First off, let’s talk about what’s right about the video. Technically speaking, there are two main things that are good about this particular production and they’re both biggies: The picture is clear (decent exposure, in focus, not back-lit, etc.) and the audio is excellent. I tell my students this all the time and even though I’m more of a cinematography nerd than an audiophile it’s true: the secret to good web video is good audio. Viewers will forgive all kinds of bad picture before they’ll suffer through bad, muffled or echo-y audio. The other kind words I have to say about this video are content-related. Social Media Examiner has interviewed some big names in web content and social media, and while I haven’t watched all of their videos, if this one is any indication, the content is actually fairly useful — in other words, they’ve taken Darren Rowse’s advice to heart and are delivering content that their readers and viewers want.

Okay, now onto my nitpicks (and for the Social Media Examiner folks who will inevitably read this post [nobody can trackback like a social media blogger], I intend these remarks to be constructive and useful, not just snark-filled rants filled with invective):

*First off, there’s :34 of lead-in before any content starts. That’s even long for TV these days, let alone the web. Get to the content, we’re busy web surfers out here.

*Secondly, the title of this piece is “How Bloggers Should Use Twitter.” The length of the entire video is 12:27 but it’s minute five before Twitter is even mentioned and minute seven before anything resembling the subject of the title enters the conversation. If this was a written blog post I’d accuse the writer of burying the lede.

The basic problem here is that the interview is simply unedited. It’s a 12-minute talking head without a single cut, which is fine as an archival document of the conversation, but it leaves the work of finding the relevant bits of the interview entirely in the viewers’ hands. Imagine if this was a text post containing the same interview, but written out instead of being a video. You’d expect the writer/editor to provide some context, highlight the relevant parts and get rid of the deadwood — that’s what editors do. You might even expect the questions to be re-ordered so that the really meaty, interesting stuff is up front. There’s a reason video editors and text editors share a verb — they’re very similar jobs.

*Another issue is the on-screen graphics. It’s a good idea to use on-screen graphics to add meta-information to the video you’re making, but in this case, all we get is an occasional standard lower third identifier, telling us who it is we’re looking at. But this information is already available to us. This isn’t TV. There’s a contextualizing web page that the video is embedded in that almost certainly contains the same info in multiple places. In the case of a Vimeo embed like this, it’s right under the video frame! So use the lower third convention to give us useful info at points in the video where it makes sense. For example, when Rowse (finally) talks about getting addicted to Twitter, throw his twitter ID up on the screen! Maybe we want to start following him.

*As long as we’re talking about visual content, I’ll point out that video is a visual medium. I know it seems obvious, but when you produce a video for the web (or anywhere else) it’s a good idea to consider how the content is enhanced by having a picture rather than just being an audio track of someone talking. If all you’re giving us is a talking head for twelve minutes, there’s not much purpose in me continuing to look at the picture. The video frame is a different medium of information into which you can channel all sorts of useful stuff without breaking up the flow of the audio content. Ideally, the picture and sound complement each other — like showing cutaways to images that relate to the content being discussed. Without leveraging the visual part of the medium, all you’ve really done is made a podcast that won’t play very well in iTunes.

Of course, all of these issues take time to correct. Video editing is nothing if not time consuming.

To be fair, Social Media Examiner is not a video blog, per se. The video content is added value to an otherwise list-heavy social media magazine. I’ll also add that the issues I’m discussing here are not unique to SME — they can be found in video all over the web. This just happened to be the video I was watching when I decided to write about web video dos and don’ts (thanks, Darren Rowse!).

My first (minor) frustration so far has been with the delivery company for the plasma set — Pilot. According to their own website, they have “left a message” with me and that they are waiting for the customer to “take action.” They left no such message. I did indeed take action and called them. The dispatch person told me yesterday that the set had arrived in Boston and that they would call me to arrange delivery “in a day or two”. I double checked the phone number that they had on file and it was right. She didn’t know why the note said they’d left a message, but was confident they would call me to arrange the appointment. There’s been no call yet, so we’ll see.

The reason I’ll have to deal with Comcast is that the TiVo I ordered requires a CableCARD in order to function. A CableCARD is basically an HD set top box without the box. The TiVo becomes the converter, and the cable package I purchase through Comcast is decoded by Comcast’s CableCARD. Doing research, I read scads of horror stories (like this one!) from people doing essentially exactly the thing I’ll be doing over the next week. I did find one BTVer (@macaddict89 on Twitter) who has a TiVo HD with a multi-tuner CableCARD from Comcast and everything seems to have worked for him without a hitch. Here’s hoping.

Stay tuned.

We here in the Stoneking/Simmon household have had an HDTV for a little over three years, when my brother got us a 32″ Samsung 720p (16:9) CRT (cathode ray tube) as a wedding present, upgrading us from a standard def 27″ (4:3) Sony Wega CRT.

I quite like our Sammy CRT. LCDs and plasmas (and LEDs) are all the rage now, but for rich blacks and the best contrast, CRTs still kick their butts. The problem is that CRTs are expensive to make and incredibly heavy and there’s a limit to how big a screen you can get with picture tube technology.

And honestly, I’ve been hesitant to jump into the plasma world because so much of what we watch is still standard definition TV. We have a series 2 TiVo, which only records in SD, and we only recently got a Blu-Ray player (PS3) and even now that we have one, the vast majority of our disks are still SD DVDs. The thing is, SD video just looks better on a CRT than on any of the flat panel sets — even the really expensive amazing ones.

Still, we can feel this tide turning. We have an XBOX360 and a PS3, both of which feature 1080p HD gaming, and the PS3, as I mentioned, has a Blu-Ray player. We also recently hooked up a Mac Mini to the TV so we can enjoy some good online content on something other than our laptops (as well as manage our shared iTunes library and growing media center, etc.). It’s with these peripherals where I’m starting to notice that my HD experience isn’t all it can be. The games and Blu-Ray disks look good — but not jaw droppingly so — like I have seen on some of the HD displays at Best Buy and at friends’ homes — but where I really notice the difference is on the Mac. The 720p CRT just doesn’t render the Mac interface well at all. The words are fuzzy on the screen and the underscan cuts into the image. I know there are better options available, but there are so many, how do I go about choosing the right set?

Fortunately for me, my pal AlexW just went through a major A/V upgrade and did all of the research for me! Alex recently got a 12th generation Panasonic plasma set — the G10 — and he told me all about it, in great detail, as he was feeling his way through the decision process. I won’t belabor the pros and cons of plasma vs. LCD or bore you with details about the G10 vs. the V10 or other competing sets. Simply know that for its price range, there isn’t a a better set on the market. In fact, the price has come down enough on this puppy that I actually opted for the 50″ model instead of the 42″ I was all set to buy.

Great, except now, because SD video looks worse on plasma sets than CRTs, and because we still watch a great deal of SD content, I’m spending a lot of money for a downgrade in image quality for the majority of the stuff we watch. Sure, the Mac interface will be lovely and the HD content will be stellar, but 80% of what we watch will actually take a hit…

…Unless I get a DVR that records HD. Aha! We need a series 3 TiVo! That will significantly increase the amount of HD content we get to see. Sure, Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart will still be in SD (until MSNBC and Comedy Central get HD channels), but Dollhouse and FlashForward and SGU and Mad Men will be in beautiful HD video.

Unfortunately, it’s looking like it’s a pain to upgrade my TiVo for various reasons, one of which is having to make an appointment with a Comcastic “Cable Card Specialist” to install the cable cards in the new DVR. sigh.

And of course because we live in a modestly sized place, I need to mount the new TV to the wall to save living room real estate, so I need the fancy tilt mount unit, and then there are all the HDMI and component video cables, and all of a sudden this upgrade project is a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be.

I guess I better upgrade my home theater sound system so it’s worth the effort…

First up, science videos!

The indispensable TMBG has released anohter kid’s album, this time science-themed. Watch this awesome video and then click through to Pharyngula and read the comments. I heart nerds.

And now watch Eugene Hutz and Gogol Bordello sing about the Supertheory of Supereverything. Quick anecdote: a few years back I sat behind Eugene on a flight from Vermont to NYC and looking over his shoulder I noticed him reading 8.5 x 11 printouts of chapters from Brian Greene’s excellent super string primer, The Elegant Universe. Was I witness to the birth of this song?

It turns out that Vermont is front and center for some of the more fascinating Constitutional legal questions currently being discussed. Sexting, border crossings and laptop seizures, Al Jazeera-English on Burlington Telecom cable TV, Burton snowboards featuring “indecent” art — these have all been specific issues here in Vermont, though not all of them have invoked actual litigation.

I’ve edited and uploaded the entire conference onto the Vermont ACLU’s blip.tv channel. It’s in seven parts and each part is labeled with the specific issue that’s discussed. I’m embedding my personal favorite segment here. It’s Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the National ACLU in NYC, talking about privacy and free speech issues surrounding global, instant, digital communications tools. It’s worth your time…

If you’re reading this post on Monday June 29 between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., click here to view the live stream. The Burlington Free Press ran a story on the conference on the front page today. Read it here.

The implications of this are awesome. The future of live video is bright.

Between catching sessions on fair use and copyright and open video standards, here are some of the things I’m looking at today…

• The brilliant Pixar film, Up, made me weepy, but this made me weepier. (don’t click unless you have tissues handy.)
• Here’s a list of all the crap (literally, in some cases) astronauts left on the Moon (that the LRO spacecraft launched yesterday will apparently be taking pictures of soon).
• The headline reads: “Thieving Spider-Man with woman’s swimsuit, pink arm warmers caught in own web“
• Hmm, apparently rogue magnetars acually *could* cause us problems here on Earth (despite being amazingly far away from us).
• Vermont tweep Joe Mescher wants to help unemployed Vermonters make video resumes.
• Religious affiliations of super-heroes.
• An Arrested Development documentary? Yay!