If you can't be deep, then be brief.

I did a 20-minute interview with the curator, covering visual specifics and making a narrative that would work for a four-minute package. Then the videographer started taking the first half dozen b-roll pictures. Which is when the lights in the museum automatically turned off for the night.



I was able to come back the next day for a b-roll shoot, but was told that I only had 35 minutes to be there. That's appropriate for a news shoot, but not for the work that I produce. I managed to machine-gun 45 shots in 35 minutes and remain polite. The 20-minute interview was no good because there just weren't enough pictures to cover the words. Instead we have a music video advertisement with a few spoken bits. I'm happy with the final product and pleased that my budget expenditure was successfully recovered. Keep moving forward, team!

Back up, pivot, go forward.

This is a news-style package about Meridian Gallery in Union Square. That wasn't the intention when I first left the office.



Profiling Meridian was originally recommended by a co-worker. When I saw there was a "world premiere" reading by 92 year old Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I thought I could make a great evergreen package about him.

Except… he's 92. The poem was only three minutes long and he didn't want to do any interviews. Since I had already invested four hours of labor into the story, I decided to reduce Ferlinghetti and make Meridian the focus. The PR contact was very accommodating and lined up an artist and a curator on the same evening as a performance. I could get sights, sounds, and words in another four hour trip. Adapt and overcome.

Holiday Special - ODC "The Velveteen Rabbit"

The arts coverage gets a little tricky in December. I always look to create evergreen programs that we can run for a few months on SFGovTV, but there are mostly holiday-themed shows happening now. My answer was to do a story about ODC's "Velveteen Rabbit" which I know we can run again next November and December.



This was a pretty easy shoot. KT Nelson was available 15 minutes before the final dress rehearsal started. We set the camera in a spot where we could talk to her quickly and then swing the camera 180 to start shooting the show right away. John R and I took turns running the the camera and just tried to make best guesses on a program that we hadn't seen before. Later during the editing, I spent 2/3 of my time working out the narrative and the audio. The pictures were fairly easy once there was a natural story to hang them onto.

Culture Wire returns to SFGovTV!

Arts coverage for the City of San Francisco returned to SFGovTV in November 2011 with the re-launch of Culture Wire.



A successful partnership with the SF Arts Commission produced 50 videos between 2009 and 2011. Due to budget constraints, the SFAC was forced to discontinue their support of the program for Fiscal Year 2011-12. After two months of budget evaluation, SFGovTV has committed to continuing Culture Wire by providing 100% underwriting for the next six months.

In the first month of Culture Wire's return to Channels 26 and 78, producer Rich Bartlebaugh has profiled three local artists:

Aron Meynell http://youtu.be/qvZS5Pm5eyM
Sanjay Patel http://youtu.be/nQMm57B7l-U
Jim Campbell http://youtu.be/bxQRLFyVifk

Upcoming programs include a visit to the Meridian Gallery near Union Square, and a look at some of San Francisco's most adventurous dance companies.

The Talking Business Card

Candidate Statements are an annual ritual for government television stations. Last time, we tried to use an HD monitor hooked up to CG with a loop playing out of it. It was "okay…" I guess. The height of the monitor couldn't be adjusted, so there were only two positions- the candidate was either on the floor, or on an apple box. It was a bit sloppy.

This year we gambled on using our small folding green screen. It's a gamble because it isn't being keyed out live, so you can't feel 100% confidence. We did test shots a few days before, and we were very clear that candidates could not wear green. When they arrived we demonstrated how their hands would be "cut off" if they were too animated. It went pretty well.

I was very conservative on the lighting and gave a hard edge on the back light for a clean key. For the rest, I used three chimeras and did dance lighting- people are flooded from both sides. I must admit that one of the short candidates (and one extremely tall one) looked a bit spooky.

During editing, I made a dumb producer mistake. I had the official Department of Elections list of candidate addresses, URLs, emails and phone numbers. I used this for the background info. When I was ready to publish, I felt compelled to be a nice guy and double-check with all the candidates. This meant I had to re-type and re-render 13 of the 25 videos because they had new offices, business phones, etc. The other information would have been "correct" but the new information was more helpful to a voter. I could have saved myself three days of rendering if I had a yellow legal pad in the studio during taping and just asked them to write this all down for me.

In the end, it was a huge success. Every one of the candidates posted the video to Facebook and many put the video on their front page. The view counts were way up compared to last year. It was wonderful positive feedback for me to see the candidates supporters give "likes" to my effort. One of the people called it "Cool… It's like a talking business card!"

A Working Vacation in Greene County, PA

My good friend Greg Ayersman was kind enough to buy me an airplane ticket to Pittsburgh, in exchange for doing some camera work and editing for him. We picked a ten day window in August 2011 when four tourist events were happening.

The first was a portrait of the last day of the historic Jacktown Fair. The farming communities around Wind Ridge have had this celebration for well over one hundred years. But now, as the economy changes, so does the feeling at the Fair.



We went with a classic "hands-off" documentary approach for this one. Some viewers found it gloomy, others were reminded of their happy experiences at Jacktown. For me, it was just fun to be in PA during the summer, edit to a pop song for a change, and to test out the "cinema" settings on the Canon Vixia.

A few days later, I stopped for an hour and captured the Waynesburg Farmers Market during the height of the season. My production goal was simple- get some pretty pictures and focus on one message. I came up with the line "Wednesdays in Waynesburg" as a persistent mnemonic device.



The best part of editing the Waynesburg Farmers Market video was writing the music. By doing a cut-down video edit, I was able to see how many pictures I liked and what the approximate pacing of the video would be. I had used GarageBand in "Music Project" mode and wasn't impressed. This time I opened up "Movie Score" mode and had a completely different experience. I was able to write a short song that contained the pastoral country flavor of the market, contained a faster section to show off the products, and then returned to the laid-back sound for the closing.

The next Saturday I stopped at the Historical Museum for the opening of the annual Quilt Show. This is "in their own words" event coverage. Greg and I turned it around quickly, so it could be embedded on the front page of the local newspaper to promote attendance the following weekend.



This showed the limits of the Vixia, though. It did not capture great pictures with only ambient indoors lighting. And even though we closed the door and turned off the room's fan, the built-in mic's audio is not acceptable to me.

The last video was for a small section of The Warrior Trail in western Greene County. I shot some pretty pictures and then headed for the airport and back to San Francisco. So of course it's still sitting on my computer, waiting for an edit, behind all the regular daily edits I have to keep up with. Soon. I promise. Soon.

Allan Alcorn for PBS in San Jose

Personally, it was a real treat for me to meet Al and spend a few hours with him.



Very similar to the structure of Guy Kawasaki's piece: there's an opening scene, a linear story of his life, then a return to the opening scene (which allows me to re-cap the story you were just told).

Graphically, it's based on the box of the Atari home version of PONG. Not an outright copy, but it uses the curved line and the bands of orange color. The rest of the graphics were a real egg hunt. Al provided a few pictures from the 1970s, but the rest came from trolling around on Atari tribute sites.

I was very sad to cut out an early section about the importance of his Berkeley years. He witnessed the tear gassing of rioters on Telegraph Avenue and considers it to be an important event in his life. It took about thirty seconds for Al to tell the story, and it was only cut because This Is Us had to fit it's running time.

Guy Kawasaki for PBS in San Jose

This profile was scheduled around the same time that Guy's new book "Enchantment" was coming out. I read the book before the interview, and decided that the design of the book cover would be the design of the profile- strong red gradient and Helvetica font. When we arrived at his office, he had the original butterfly model framed in the corner. Perfect!



The main narrative is in three parts, built around his three careers. The hockey rink is a frame for the introduction and the closure. (It is also a more exciting start scene than a writer just sitting at his desk.) A moment of conflict was placed near the end of the story- where I question Guy's credibility.

The writing and editing didn't take long. The graphics were time-consuming, but I had a quick jump-off because I already knew what the general look was going to be. During the final edit, there was an early section of Guy's history that had to be deleted. I didn't have family pictures to cover up the narration, so the information had to be cut.

Edit for a national show - Nightly Business Report

My friend Tom calls some jobs "making Chicken Salad out of chicken sh!#". This is one of those cases.



The story is solidly written, but it's mostly about abstract ideas. Those are harder to edit than stories about physical objects or events and happenings. This cuts-only story uses SD footage, web video, press handouts and staged shots (people talking, walking, answering phones and just pretending to work in general).

It was a total charge for me to be in "news mode" again after several years of being in "post world. You sit down to work at 9am and you know the Fed Ex office closes at 5pm. You better be done before 4:40.

End of Summer Highlight - Matt Mullenweg

As Bigge Crane was winding down, I started working on a profile of Matt Mullenweg for KTEH, the PBS affiliate in San Jose.



This is built around a sit-down interview with Matt. I talked to him for nearly an hour, beginning from his religious and social background to his philosophical influences as a young developer. We also covered the facts & figures surrounding the success of WordPress and Automattic.

The challenge was finding video to cover the thoughts. Luckily for me, Matt is a photography fanatic and there are web videos from WordPress's fans around the world. By using those assets, plus Photoshop and After Effects animations, we were able to turn abstract ideas into visual expression.

The reaction to the story was VERY positive. The folks at WordPress put it on their company blog and Matt himself posted it and recommended it as a good introduction to WP. It was re-tweeted and re-posted onto other blogs around the world and received many positive compliments.

First item: Summer Job!

I've been too busy to post during the past few months, but that means I have a bunch of good stories to share during the Christmas break. First item: Summer Job!

My full time employer, The City & County of San Francisco, had to reduce the pay of 25,000 workers by roughly 5.5%. This meant I would have 12 unpaid days of furlough coming up in the fiscal year, so I found a part-time job as a videographer and editor for Bigge Crane & Rigging.

The company is a market leader in the US for rentals of cranes, but they had no video presence on the web. Bigge wanted a half-dozen direct sales videos to be done quickly. Management was interested in creating softer videos, like recruiting and overview pieces, but they didn't want to waste time by doing those first.



The camera was a Canon Vixia 30 with a shotgun mic. By setting it the camera to "auto-everything" I had good pictures 90% of the time. The CMOS sensor "jelly" effect ruined a few shots and the auto-iris became confused by foggy weather sometimes, but for speedy production I could ignore the few bad takes. During this job I edited on Sony Vegas for the first time. It was a great product that filled the niche between Avid and low end tools like MovieMaker. For editing news-style pieces, it was a snap. The compression tools were a time-killer though. If you work with HDV and output m2t files, you'll be fine, but many people can't play m2t on their desktops. For internal review I needed mp4 or .mov, and Vegas is very slow to compress those.

After making five or six of these of these videos, we had a script template and the production process was understood by the full time Bigge staff. I knew that I was leaving in a few weeks, so I created another short piece to use as a template.



This was made from an old press realease that I found on their website and a half dozen photos from Bigge's archives. I thought it was a good example of how to turn old content into a new experience. Bigge has hundreds of photos in their archive, dating back to the 1920s. I enjoyed seeing them, so I assume that others will as well. These videos only take a few hours to knock out and can be done when other shoots are delayed. It's a good corporate image series to complement the hard sell of the other pieces.

Volunteer Work - Hacks And Hackers

Two weekends ago I helped a Meetup group by doing some volunteer camera work for them. Hacks/Hackers provides an environment for journalists to meet application developers and work together on new forms of storytelling.

I used two Sony VX2000 DV cameras from KQED, where the event was hosted. The medium shot fed the live feed for LiveStream, the wide shot was the live feed for uStream. The cameras were generally good for locked-down shots and worked well on full Auto mode. The wide shot ended up looking better than the medium shot, which I was trying to operate in manual mode. The Sony flip-out viewfinder isn't detailed enough to show you sharp manual focus. The manual iris control is also the same dial that rides the audio input levels. As I changed f stops, it didn't roll through the exposures- it clunkily stepped from one level to another. When the room's power went out for a few minutes during the first morning, the camera's settings weren't saved. It came back with auto-white turned On for the last two presenters. The bright LCD projector in the picture frame caused a continuous psychedelic effect as the camera tried to compensate for the blue, then green, then red, then back to blue. And it wasn't visible in the flip-out viewfinder.

Despite the power interruptions and my unfamiliarity with the gear, I still managed to come up with six hours of tape from the two cameras. During the next week, I ingested all the video and started locking up the audio waveforms in the timeline. I had five guest presentations, one open forum, twelve project presentations and one award ceremony.

http://www.youtube.com/hackshackers#g/u

Each of the nineteen segments were about seven minutes long. During the Memorial day weekend, it took 24 hours of labor to do all the meatball editing- cuts and dissolves, ride the audio. Forget color correction. Forget ProTools. Just keep grinding.

Not my best technical work, but a yeoman effort for an interesting group of locals.

Spring training continues...

This season of Digital Juice jumpbacks continues with two new episodes. These shorts were inspired by the PSAs from when I was working in Washington, DC.

Police Commission neighborhood meeting announcement:



One of six voter information shorts:

Spring Training

During this past Christmas holiday, I transferred some of my old Beta tapes to DVD and made mp4s to post on YouTube. There was some dodgy material in there, but also a few gems from 1999-2001.

The first PKG that I produced stands up pretty well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhR_VMMV93U

This edit won a NATOA Award in 2001:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLxpr2f4hUo

For me, the most interesting stuff was finding all of the old PSAs that I used to make for Washington, DC's Office of Cable Television and Telecommunications. It was a very "Iron Chef" situation. You would have two hours to create something by using the materials that you could find around the office.

I realized how out of practice I've become at making :30 spots. The "tilt-shift" video for the Small Business Commission that I did last year was really cool... but it took three days to put it all together.



So this month is spring training for PSA season. Getting back into the "Part Animal, Part Machine" mindset hasn't been easy, though. There were a few edit sequences that didn't make it to tape... one dodgy PSA that actually did hit the air... and finally, a winner of sorts:



It looks and feels like 2003, but it went from an email request to a finished product in 1 hour and 56 minutes. Winner!

Local tie-ins to Ken Burns' "National Parks"

After my volunteer work on the Doctor Who project wrapped, the next episode of KTEH's "This Is Us" was crunching just a little. Everything was shot, but now there was a stack of segments piled up in the edit room at KTEH. I was asked to edit two of the packages, working as a paid freelance editor this time.


First was the story of Betty Soskin. There was a good amount of new video, plenty of HD-sized pictures and some bits of SD archive video. Also, the writer was a pro who knew how to hand off a script with all the music cues marked and the stills numbered. Always a nice thing when you're editing something you didn't produce yourself.



The story of the Buffalo Soldiers was a little more challenging. The pictures were just too small for HD. There were over a hundred of them, though, so there was a workable solution. I went to KTEH for two days and didn't touch the Avid. I sat at Photoshop and constructed scenes by layering pictures on top of one another. I became good friends with Magic Lasso selector and Soft Erase brush that week.



The weekends that I was working on these two packages was probably the highlight of the year for me. My full-time job is for a great company, but it isn't a media company. It feels good to be in an environment where everybody is a media maker and speaking the same language.

The Doctor Who project at KTEH

Sorry, no updates for a while... I was finally finishing all the "How Who Are You?" videos for KTEH. This was a six month project that was produced by Stacy Bond and Becca King Reed. The goal was to interact with the Doctor Who fans in KTEH's audience by having a video competition that would allow the winner to host several evenings of Doctor Who on KTEH. Behind the scenes photos and essays can be viewed at: http://blogs.kteh.org/drwho

It began with a sample "home made" video that would accompany the contest announcement email. This was to serve as an example that the participant's submission didn't have to be a professional video.


Next was an on-air :30 promo for the contest to air on KTEH. It can be seen from 2:00 to 2:30 in this Doctor Who pledge break appearance, which also promoted the competition.


The competition ran for a few months and there were nine qualified entries. These were edited into three 5:00 promo reels that ran on-air for six weeks to encourage voting.


After viewers chose their favorite, a date was set for the studio shoot with the winners. They did the wraps live to tape, and also passed-off some field tapes they had shot. There were a total of eight studio segments and three field packages to edit.


The whole project was a lot of fun for me to work on, as a fan of both PBS and Doctor Who. The commitment of the winning fans and their in-studio guests was unbelievable and it was a completion of a circle for me. I first started watching Doctor Who on the PBS channel from Ohio University in 1985 and it was one of the things that influenced me to pick a career in TV production.

A Bad Day in Golden Gate Park

Getting Granicus captions onto YouTube.

If you are captioning your live meetings and also using Granicus, you can put those captions on your YouTube page. You will need to download the .sami format captions from Granicus, then convert them to .srt format using the free Subtitle Workshop program, then upload to your YouTube page. This process was put together by Tom Loftus at SFGTV. The free Subtitle Workshop program is only available for Windows.

On Granicus: log into your account, go to the Archives tab, find your video and click to highlight it green. Click the "edit" button at the top of the window. When the new page loads for that video, click on the green "Captions" tab. You'll need to now scroll down slightly, so that you can see the radio button to choose Download. Click the "Go!" button.
You should have a windows pop-up and you'll choose to Save File and click "Okay." You should have a new file on your desktop called captions.sami with an unassociated file icon.

You can close Granicus and go to www.urusoft.net to download Subtitle Workshop. Under the Downloads tab, the current version is: Subtitle Workshop 4 BETA 4. Install the program and open it.

In SubWork, go to: File, Load Subtitle and open the .sami file from Granicus. It should open a spreadsheet with the IN/OUT times and single lines of captioning. If you click on any cell of caption text, it will appear in the bottom panel of SubWork. You can do text editing there, for spelling corrections or homonym mistakes.

Your SHOW/HIDE times are probably delayed by about four seconds, if you're using an off-site captioning service for your meeting coverage. Click in the first row of text. Now go to: Edit, Timings, Set Delay. A new window will pop up. You can choose to "+/-" your times by "HRS:MINS:SECS,milliseconds" but you probably want to change the SECS which are in front of the comma.

You should go to your YouTube video now and log in. Find the video you want to caption and click the Edit button. In the new window, there will be four tabs. Choose "Captions and Subtitles". In this window, find the correct time that you want the captioning to start.

Back in SubWork, you can now add or subtract a few seconds, select "For All the Subtitles" and Apply it. Don't worry about the milliseconds. Your captions will tend to float ahead or behind the actual speech, the same way that the captioning lag varies in real-time. You could go through and correct every line of your SubWork spreadsheet, but it will be extremely tedious for any spot longer than 60 seconds.

When you're done editing the text, go to: File, Save As... In the new pop-up, you'll need to scroll down to the SUBRIP (.srt) icon and double-click it. Rename and save the new file. You can close Subtitle Workshop.

On your YouTube Captions and Subtitles page, Browse for the .srt caption file you just made. You should probably name it "English" or "English subtitles available". Then select English in the Track Language drop-down. Upload the file. The caption option won't appear immediately, but should be available on your video in less than a minute. Go back to your main YouTube page to check it.

Single-line captions can be hard to read during playback. If you want double-line captions, you can open your .srt file again in Subtitle Workshop. Highlight two lines of text, then keystroke Ctrl+K (or navigate Edit, Subtitles, Combine Subtitles). You will have to do this for every two lines of text. An average video can have 200 line entries for ten minutes of speech. The repetitive process of selecting two lines and Ctrl+K (combining them) can be automated by using a free keystroke macro program like AutoHotkey.

Please, allow me to contradict myself.

A few months ago, I was questioning some panelist's advice to "work for free" to advance your career. Too much free camera work or editing would devalue the services offered by camera ops and editors.

Except I really wanted to attend the SCAN NATOA conference in Santa Monica, coming up in May. I have a few videos entered into the competition and I'm also interested in being seen by some SoCal stations (in case I need to move to Los Angeles for career advancement).

The City isn't funding conference attendance this year, due to budget cuts. The only way to attend the conference for free is to be a speaker. So I sent a cold-call email to one of the organizers and sold myself as being knowledgeable on the subject of online video distribution. During the past month, I've been setting up the official SFGTV pages on YouTube for our different TV series. I had to make a plan for distribution, learn page layout settings and spend hours and hours comparing the look of compressed video on YouTube. I've been putting my own videos on YouTube for two years, but the standards have recently changed and the old settings aren't the best choice anymore. In addition to YouTube, I've also been comparing other online video sharing sites. Some of them have special features that would work well for educational and How-To programming. Some of them have no special draw, except that they rank well in Google search results.

By speaking at the panel in exchange for free admission, I've decided to do some free labor to bootstrap myself professionally.

And then I did it again.

The San Francisco MusicTech conference is also happening in May. The topics are interesting to me, but not $300 worth of interesting. They don't directly relate to my career, except that these events often help as sideways advice six months from now. So again I made the cold-call email to the organizer. This time I offered to crew the video production in exchange for admission. From last year's videos, it looked they could use an extra hand. And again, my offer worked.

I'm working for free and devaluing the TV production business.

I guess you could look at it that way. I'm thinking about it as being paid in terms of education and exposure. Basically, the same things I was skeptical about last time. The difference for me is that I'm doing it on another level. If I did straight labor for free, then yes, I'd be ripping myself off at this point in my career. But I'm moving past straight labor. I'm entering knowledge worker territory. Look out!

There's No Business Like...

I'm not sure what is going on in the world of media production these days, but it doesn't seem good (at least for people trying to pay the rent from production work).

This year's NATAS panel at the annual Snader equipment show was about Job Hunting. After seven years of HD panels, the number one topic is jobs. Going into the meeting, I was expecting a room of recent college graduates. Instead, it was filled with dozens of people who have over 10 years experience working in production. As usual, the NATAS panelists were a combination of out-of-touch, slightly unrealistic and sometimes hypocritical comments. I love 'em, but very few times do I get an "ah-ha!" feeling from something I'm exposed to at a NATAS event.

There was some good career advice about the value of knowing everything and not being pigeoned as just Audio, or just Editing. There were also some blasts at the broadcast unions. Unfortunately, the natural extension of this advice is a vast pool of widely qualified job-seekers who will work for any money or even no money. This pool will de-value the entire ecosystem by undercutting each other in an environment without minimum standards of pay or work conditions. I understand what the panelists were saying to the individuals in the audience, but when you scale it up into the thousands of people looking to make media, it falls apart. Everybody starves.

After attending the traditional big money media event of the Snader show, I went to the Disposable Film Festival panel later the same week. Two dozen enthusiasts were having an open discussion of their concerns and issues about making media with disposable media tools. The odd part was how much they sounded exactly like the From Here To Awesome participants from last summer. The distance from Disposable Filmmaker to Independent Filmmaker is about two or three feet. I could hear the sound of grinding gears as these people tried to figure out if there was any way to make some money off of what they were doing.

I actually think the Disposable crowd may be in the best position to have a balanced life. They have Regular Jobs and they make media for fun. They are still enthusiastic and creative in their approach to their hobby and they can still pay the rent on time through their nine to five. I understand the emotional urge to go into production as a full time occupation. After seeing the older NATAS crowd, I'm just not sure I can recommend media as a sensible career choice for everybody.

Hopefully everything changes in a few years. The economy recovers to the point where it can support more media production again. In the meantime, the disposable filmmakers will be two years more experienced in their hobby. There might not be as much call for "Professionals" anymore.