There’s a flipside to this, however: just as one sees lots of people who claim to be video editors, but who’ve no idea about the offline/online workflow, so one also sees lots of post-production facility houses who’ve no idea about the web video workflow.
Finding someone to take up the slack on SciCast is going to be extremely difficult — and not just for technical reasons. See, I also need that person to have the practical savvy to spot safety hazards, the production experience to know what can and can’t be cleared, the editorial expertise to judge helpful and problematic tweaks, and the academic knowledge to recognise content that’s plain wrong.
At the moment, it’s not clear how that generation of film-maker is going to get trained up. So, I watch Scoble’s demo of a Newtek Tricaster, and I think four things:
I think it all comes back to one problem, and one worry:
The problem — shiny new equipment and falling prices are great, but the real challenge is working out how to maintain anything like high production values, when the people using the gear haven’t experienced high-value productions.
The worry— audiences will take what they can get, and high production values will simply die. YouTube is evidence of this, though YouTube without copyright-infringing material might be evidence to the contrary.
One solution — Apple, please please please open up iTunes video in a similar way to the signed iTunes artist programme for indie music. Being able to sell videos through iTunes would be… interesting.
(for more of this sort of thinking, see Gia’s post about several things, including professional journalism and blogging.)
]]>I’m inrigued.
]]>You are absolutely correct that people will watch what they are given…
sigh
]]>But that’s not really it, is it?
I think it’s back to production, actually. The ‘old way’ was to have a production team, with researchers finding stories and pitching them to a producer, who’d make editorial judgements and commission directors to go and film successful pitches.
The ‘new way’ involves the researchers calling themselves ‘producers’ (or ‘self-facilitating media nodes,’ if you spot the reference), shooting stuff themselves, and often cutting it too. Where’s the Production in such a circumstance? Specifically, where’s the production value?
One way out of this is to have not ‘post-production houses,’ but plain ‘production houses.’ The place you go to do your video project - both as a story on film, and from a project management perspective.
That model would imply editors gaining a stronger editorial voice, and post-production coordinators turning into production managers. Both these situations are common already.
The trouble is, we’re continuing to make the editing process cheaper, simpler, and less mysterious. People are buying Final Cut and finding they can operate it, without assistance.
So I worry when post-production facilities are places I regards as integral to the programme-making process, but inconsequential to the web video process. For the web, I do it all myself. I’m not at all sure what the future holds for post-production houses, but I’m convinced the video we watch will suffer as a result.
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