BinaryWolf

I recently attended a San Diego Social Media Breakfast event in downtown San Diego. Becky Carroll, an executive with the social media marketing agency Brickfish, gave an interesting presentation entitled The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Social Media Case Studies.

For those of you here to view the social media case studies presentation, you can just watch the video. For those of you who like to watch the Special Features on DVDs, continue reading for the behind the scenes story of the recording, encoding and displaying the video that I shot in a conference room on the 8th floor of the Bank of America Building.

This might be the longest single recorded video using a Flip Mino that is currently being displayed on the Web!

My primary purpose for attending the event was to watch and listen to the presentation (and do a little networking). Shooting events (mostly still photography) over the years has taught me that I will miss much of what’s being presented because I am focusing on tracking the speaker and framing the shot. I mention this fact because in this video, the framing is somewhat neglected, however the viewer can still see and hear the majority of the content that was presented.

My list of tools for recording the presentation consisted of only two pieces of equipment, a Flip Mino camcorder and a Gorillapod tripod. The Flip is an inexpensive pocket-sized camcorder weighing 6 ounces and the Gorillapod is a very lightweight (less than 1 ounce) miniature tripod. I set up the camcorder beside me on the conference table, turned it on and basically let it record with some occasional adjustments to the mini-tripod and the camcorder’s limited 2x digital zoom. It’s probably a good practice to avoid using the zoom for distance if possible, as there is a significant reduction in video quality. The tripod gave me a little height and some stability. My neighbor at the table was working on his laptop during the presentation and the resulting inadvertent vibration of the table from that shows up as some camcorder shake during playback.

As the presentation went past the one hour mark, I was amazed that the Flip was still recording as the technical specs state that the 2GB of on-board flash memory records only up to sixty minutes of video. Thirty minutes later – at the ninety minute mark – I had a 1.7GB video recording of the entire presentation. I suspect that when you record multiple videos, the meta information files take up enough space to limit recording time to sixty minutes, but in the case of one long continuous video, it will go to the ninety minute mark as evidenced by the video above.

There are a couple of additional points to know about the Flip. It likes a lot of light for video recording and its audio capabilities are somewhat limited with the built-in, omni-directional microphone. Others before me have asked San Francisco based manufacturer Pure Digital Technologies to add an audio input to accept an external mic, but so far, those requests have gone unheeded. Special Note: This video was shot just a few day before the brand new higher 1280×720 pixel resolution Flip Mino HD (no mic input) was released to the public.

I had this large raw 90 minute, 680×480 pixel resolution, AVI formatted, 1.7GB video without a clear direction of how to proceed. I have worked on much smaller clips using tools like Windows Movie Maker, Quicktime Pro, and Adobe Premiere, but this file was another order of magnitude. I knew that it needed encoding, a boost of the audio track and an online hosting service that would accept and display a file that large. I asked several people for suggestions and I did get some feedback, but the person who actually stepped up to the plate to help with the video was impresario Rob Lewis, the Executive Producer of the forthcoming web series Making Jenn2.0. Rob’s new show is about the life and times and drama of a social media consultant struggling to find balance between her online personas and her ever-present reality. Based on the real life of Jenn Van Grove, look for a release date of the pilot episode sometime in December.

Rob offered to render the file for me and find a site to upload it to. I just needed a way to get the raw file to him. I tried uploading it to his ftp server, but it returned a “file too large” error message (no surprise there), so I just burned it to a DVD and snail-mailed it to him. After he received the disc, he took the file into a consumer grade editing program, Video Studio and outputted a more compressed 745MB MP4 file. He then uploaded the entire file to the Veoh Video Network which then took a few more hours to convert it over to an FLV formatted file. There wasn’t any editing or color correction or any other post production work done to this video.

The embedded video displays the first five minutes of the presentation. Longer videos require the Veoh Web Player to watch in full-length, so to watch the full ninety minute length version, you must first download and install the software. To do that simply click on the Watch the Full Video button to be redirected to an installation page to run the Veoh Web Player installer to watch the video immediately. Sorry fellow Mac users, the Veoh Web Player only runs on Windows XP and Vista. On the Mac, a longer video requires that you first download the video and then watch it later. Complain to Veoh.

Basically, for under $200 in equipment with no bells and whistles, you can unobtrusively capture an hour and a half presentation that can be uploaded to a free hosting service where thousands of viewers can watch it.

Credits:
Speaker Becky Carroll
Camera Steve Eisenberg
Encoding & Distribution Rob Lewis
SMBSD is organized by Holly Matson