Why didn’t I learn video when I was actually in college?
Today was another installment of "Why didn't I _____ when I was actually in college?" as I finally sat down and learned how to shoot and edit video for news Web sites.
For some reason, I never found time while I was actually in J-school to take a proper videography course, and I only had professional experiences in newspapers, wire services and radio.
Well, I did shoot some video of the Degrassi cast members who came to Phoenix in April 2007 and managed to make one halfway presentable video of the encounter in iMovie or something like that on a Mac in the Computing Commons. But we never actually put it on the Web Devil as planned.
But today, I went back to school for a multimedia boot camp that was part of the regional Society of Professional Journalists conference the Cronkite School is hosting this weekend. The Cronkite School's Brian Snyder, who I met on assignment in Rocky Point a few years ago, sent us out with real HD cameras and tripods and mics and such and had us put together the footage we shot in Final Cut Pro.
Learning video not only plugged a hole in my resume but also turned out to be a lot of fun. Below you can watch the director's cut of the video that Kellie, an entertainment reporter at The Arizona Republic, and I shot and edited. Our original version was longer, but we were lacking the necessary B-roll shots for the last couple of sound bites we had planned to include. So after Kellie had to take off, I stuck around for a bit, trimmed out the last few bites and stuck our names on the end.
Then, after much wrangling with Final Cut, I got it to export an MOV file that was small enough to upload to YouTube. The text in our lower thirds got kinda stretchy in the YouTube-able export, but other than that, the video looks pretty much like the super-duper HD version: