VLoggig It - page 2 of the Video Blogging GuideHave you vloged lately? No, it’s not a disease or a new disco dance – vloging or vbloggin or video blogging is a new way to distribute and share your ideas, thoughts and opinions with the rest of the globe by using the Internet and video. You may have heard of blogs or weblogs – customized and simple to use online services that make it easy to create and maintain an online personal publication of your thoughts, ideas and opinions. Blogs can serve as a journalism alternative; a way for “average” people to get their opinions heard worldwide. Some blogs function as personal journals; some function as a family or group newsletter, while others are generated and maintained to serve as communications for large community of like-minded individuals Text blogging is hot right now but Video blogging is the next big thing. So what is a video blog? That’s a good question. Some video blogs are little more than standard text blogs with links to videos. Some video blogs are text blogs with embedded video. Other video blogs are sophisticated video oriented sites that consist mostly of videos with just a bare minimum of text. For a good introduction of what is out there, video blogwise, check out several compendium sites like vidblogs.com, bloglines.com and blogtelevision.net. The videos range from slickly produced video shorts to crude, unedited clips of someone talking directly into the camera and expressing their opinions. The single concept that seems to flow through most video blogs is the concept of individualism. These are my ideas, my opinions, my thoughts. Watch them, hate them, disagree – these videos tell you what I am all about and what I think. This personalization of film and video has been a longtime coming. According to the late French Director Francois Truffaut, “The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation...and it will be enjoyable because it will be true and new...The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.” Mr. Truffaut died in 1984. Without the benefit of experiencing the Internet or of video blogging, he came up with his vision of a world where everyone has the capability to use film and video to share their vision and opinions of the world. This is what video blogging is all about. You don’t have to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, you don’t need slick camerawork and editing, you just need to communicate.
Some video bloggers create blogs that use video clips to accentuate their text. Some bloggers are use their video clips as standalone movies to spotlight their opinions and ideas. Some of these video blogs are composed of sophisticated and smoothly edited standalone video documentaries. A good example of this is Ryanne Hodson’s vid blog at www. ryanedit.blogspot.com. Created by a professional editor, these personal pieces convey her beliefs and ideas. Other video bloggers simply hold their camcorder up in front of their face and start talking. Some video blog sites, like Rocket Boom, are more organized and “news broadcast” in production style, featuring one individual delivering a prepared presentation. Rocketboom is a three-minute daily video weblog based in New York City covering information and commentary ranging from top news stories to quirky Internet culture with a heavy emphasis on international arts, technology and weblog drama. According to the Rocket Boom site, even though it looks like a typical newscast, “We are unique from a regular TV program in many important ways. Instead of costing millions of dollars to produce, Rocketboom is created with a consumer-level video camera, a laptop, two lights and a map with no additional overhead or costs. Also, Rocketboom is distributed online, all around the world and on demand, and thus has a much larger potential audience than any TV broadcast. However, we spend $0 on distribution because bandwidth costs and space are donated, and $0 on promotion, relying solely on the viral nature of the Internet. Finally, while TV programs have traditionally been uni-directional, Rocketboom engages it’s international audience in a wide range of topical discussions.” Another interesting site is Adam Quirk’s Bullemhead (http://www.bullemhead.com) that combines opinionated text with personal videos of adventures, concerts, friends and family. Per Adam, “My video blog is a personal video experiment, designed originally to document my activities here in NJ, in order to stay in virtual contact with my friends back home in Indiana.” Video blogs also work for artists who can not afford to go the studio and gallery route. According to , “The structure of the blog has allowed me a space to play around with ideas, get feed back and interact with others. I make the clips very short so they are quick to download and categorize them based on content. I call it my studio because I am an artist and there's no way I could afford rent on a physical studio here in NYC.” Check out this site and see some very personal work including lots of video re the New York Gates project by Christo. Also check out Michael Verdi’s video blog – not only is he a filmmaker, he is also a self-pronounced video blog activist. Even better, he has a GREAT section on how to create and start your own video blog. It’s wonderful. Check out his vidblog at http://michaelverdi.com. The how to create your own video blog instructions are at http://freevlog.blogspot.com/. For a more narrowly focused site, check out the CSF Vlog, (http://csfvlog.blogspot.com) which spotlights on nifty and quirky garage videos from South East Asia. The site is also compiling MMS based vlogs. Blogs can also be used for business and marketing. Check out Jon Lelands video blog at http://www.mediamall.com/blogger/blogger.html. Even though these sites run the gamut of styles, quality and point of views, they share one basic concept – they all present ideas to be shared and distributed. Many of them are associated with the Creative Commons License that essentially says you can borrow and distribute my work but you can’t sell it or repurpose it for commercial purposes. The Creative Commons license applies to more than video, it can also support music, images, text and educational programs. If you license your video with Creative Commons, you can use the Internet Archive as a free spot to store and post your vid blogs. Internet Archive (at www.internetarchive.org) is a website that aims to create a collection equal to the entire sum of human knowledge within our lifetimes. They have text/ebooks, audio, movies, and more, and offer free hosting for any audio or video files you upload and license with Creative Commons. The easiest way to post video online with a Creative Commons license is to let Internet Archive handle all the hosting, posting, and licensing for you. Start by signing up a new account at Internet Archive.
Make Your Own Web Site - You don't need to know HTML or design
Get Started in Blogging It’s relativity easy to get started as a blogger – there are three basic steps. Set up a blog, shoot some video and then upload it. To set up a blog, start by downloading some free or inexpensive blogging software and then sign up with a free or inexpensive blogging hosting service. Aside from the before mentioned how-to sites, you might want to also visit videoblogging.info You will find that there hundreds of different blogging options, software packages and blogging sites to pick from. Some are very simple applications and sites, perfect for those just starting out, while others are more complicated, perfect for large “community” sites that anticipate lots of traffic and interaction. You also get to choose whether you want to install software on your computer for creating your blog or if you prefer to use an online service where you do all your updating via the net and nothing lives on your computer. You can get blogging software from sites like WordPress and Moveable Type These enable you to create your own text and video blogs and then upload them to any web host. Sites like TypePad, Blogger.com, WebHelp.com and MSN Space are online sites that provide templates. All you have to do is type in your text and upload your videos. MSN Space and Blogger.com provide free space to get started free but don't provide a lot of capabilities. The more full featured TypePad provides a 30 day free trial to see how well you like video blogging. Not only can you create very interesting looking blogs, you can also upload videos and stills from your digital video camcorder, computer and even from your cell phone. By the way, the TypePad people call the uploads of images and video from a cell phone – moblogging. Some blogging sites allow you to host video directly on them. For others, you will need to create links to your videos hosted on other sites. You “could” open up several free sites, use them to host your videos and then use your blogging page to direct people to those videos. So how do you create a video for your video blog? Obviously the first step is to shoot some video and audio. You can simply sit down in front of your camcorder, hit record and start talking. A cool variant of this is the vid blog producers who have created a special harness to hold the camcorder focused on their face as they walk, talk, bicycle or whatever. This is really cool and enables you to see the background scenery as they expound on their themes. You can also create a video, complete with edits, text and simple transitions and effects and then upload it to the vid blog site. The next step is to compress or optimize your video for the web. Video straight out of your camcorder is about 3.5 MB per second. A ten second vid blog would run 35 MB in size! As you can see this can create some monster size files that would take a long time to download, or would stream very slowly, and would not be enjoyable viewing experience for your audience. And, if you want people to watch and appreciate your vide blogs, you got to make it easy and enjoyable. Internet viewers don’t have the patience to sit and wait for long downloads or put up with video streams that stop, pause, drop frames or simply crash. Simple is good; simple is best; especially when you are starting out. In addition to compressing the video into a smaller file size, you also need to convert it into a format that is Internet friendly. This includes formats like Apple QuickTime, Windows Media, Real Video, DivX or even Flash Video Luckily almost every computer video editing package on the market offers some kind of video optimization ad compression and conversion as part of the final out put step. If you are on a tight budget, you can use the free MovieMaker program available Windows XP computers or the free iMovie program found on Mac computers Serious Magic Vlog It! What if you don’t have a digital video camcorder, what if you don’t want to take the time to learn how to edit, or to set up a video blog site or upload finished videos? The new Vlog It! Software package from Serious Magic might be an answer for you. By using an inexpensive web cam connected to your Windows computer, you can create a sophisticated looking video blog presentation without having to spend any time editing. Fr many years, Serious Magic has been creating software to enable people to easily create their own professional looking newscasts and videos, Now they have seen and recognized the value of video blogging and have introduced a new product called Vlog IT!. According to Mark Randal, CEO, “Video Blogging is a great way to reach other people and share experiences, ideas and feelings. You can be the next Tom Brokaw, Jon Stewart or Jay Leno. It's the ultimate way to share your world.” The new Vlog It software enables you to easily create video blog footage that looks similar to a broadcast television newscast, complete with transitions, background and keyed in images, audio effects. One of the hardest things, at least for me, is to remember what I want to say when I'm doing a video cast. I don't want to be continually referring to my notes. I usually end up starting and stopping and doing multiple takes in order to get the words right. Vlog It, and the full Visual Communicator software, is essentially a TV studio wrapped around a teleprompter. Used in broadcast TV, a teleprompter projects the scripts and cues onto a piece of glass in front of a TV camera lens and enables the performers to read their scripts. By using a teleprompter, the on-air talent don’t have to memorize anything – they just read the scripts and their eyes never leave the lens. Serious Magic’s products do the same thing for you. It is basically a TV studio in a box. The web cam is the video source, a colored cloth on the wall behind you for chroma key is your studio, your computer monitor is your teleprompter, and your computer is the TV station crew. You spend some time typing in your text for your script, pick out your video inserts and background or wiped in images, and you are ready to roll. It makes creating a video newscast very simple. Combined with Vlog It!’s built in FTP uploading module and Serious Magic’s online video blogging hosting service, Vlog.com, you have everything you need to create your own newscast style vidblogs. A good example of a site that uses Serious Magic is VlogMania, a wildly cynical view of current events, news, politics, satire, humor, movies, pop culture, vlogs and vlogging etc.. VlogMania is a combination of a typical text based blog with video blog as an extra. So if you have an opinion, a big thought, an insight that needs to be shared, its time to pick up your camcorder and video blogging. Religion., politics or just bad jokes or snide comments, video blogging over the net may be the best way to share your thoughts and ideas with the world. RESOURCES BlogTelevision.net, http://www.blogtelevision.net Creative Commons License – www.crativecommons.org Internet Archive www.internetarchive.com Ryanne Hodson http://ryanedit.blogspot.com/ Serious Magic – www.seriousmagic.com Videoblogs.com Videoblogging.info VlogMania – www.vlogmania.com Wordpress – www.wordpress.org | 
