[Commons-l] Video skills and equipment

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 2:30 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> I just tried to watch some presentation videos from Wikimania.
> Some had very weak sound, some had no sound in the first minutes,
> some only played the first minute and then stopped.  I don't think
[snip]
> How can we learn to make better videos?  Are there some good
[snip]

The particular example you raised isn't much of matter of skill or
knowledge it's a matter of simply having the time: After all a lack of
sound is obvious to anyone, so long as they have the opportunity to
spend the time to get it right.

But in general even to people skilled in the art making video is
vastly more time and resource intensive than stills. So this will
remain a challenge even if better educational materials are provided
(I snipped out your suggestions in those regards because I had nothing
to say to them: they sounded like good points).

[snip]
> Current digital video cameras use hard disks or memory cards,
> instead of tape cassettes.  Many new models cost less than 300
> euro (or dollars), some as little as 120 euro (memory card perhaps
> not included).  Some have a special "Youtube mode", and I guess
> that kind of usage is what drives the price down.  What models are
> good, and what should one watch out for?

Unfortunately you're not going to be producing video which is remotely
professional looking with a 120 euro camera, not yet at least.
Consider the typical user-created video on youtube.

Even ignoring the skills and time issue, I don't think it's currently
possible to do decent staged videography without a couple thousand
dollars in lighting and camera equipment (and even at then we're not
talking fantastic results).

So I've laid down the gauntlet and said it couldn't be done: So now
someone gets to come and prove me wrong and show me some excellent
work done on a small budget. :)

> We can find free still photos on Flickr and copy them to Commons.
> Is there somewhere we can find free videos and copy them?  Yes, at
> the Internet Archive.  Somewhere else?

There are many US federal government sources of video. Many are not on
the internet and require digitization, but digitizing video is much
easier than capture and production.