#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – avoiding common video storytelling mistakes

Multimedia journalist and video journalism lecturer Adam Westbrook has pulled together a list of what he views as common mistakes made in video production, and also offers his tips for how to avoid them. Mistakes include not prioritising audio and producing video based on television for the internet, rather than exploiting the opportunities online.

Read his post in full here.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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App of the week for journalists – Capture, a single-click video app for your home screen

App of the week: Capture [iTunes link]

Operating systems: Apple (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad). The app only works with a device with a video camera and running iOS 4 / iOS 5.

Cost: £0.69

What is it and how is it of use to journalists? Capture is a single-click video recording app that is worth having on your home screen.

Tap the app and it automatically starts recording, making it ideal for capturing breaking news.

Videos save to your photo album, where you can trim and email, MMS or send to YouTube.

Reviews: It gets five stars in Apple’s App Store

Have you got a favourite app that you use as a journalist? Fill in this form to nominate an app for Journalism.co.uk’s app of the week for journalists.

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App of the week for Journalists – Klip, a great new iPhone app for video sharing

App of the week: Klip

Operating systems: Apple – Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

Cost: Free

What is it and how is it of use to journalists? Klip launched last week (20 September) as a video sharing app for iPhone. There are plenty of video apps out there but this stands out for several reasons. Not only does it offer a great user experience, with fast video streaming, pleasing swipes and a phone shake action that fast-forwards through videos, it has features that are really handy for any journalist who shoots footage from an iPhone.

You can record footage directly from Klip or add a video that you have recorded using another app, then trim the video and share to Twitter, Facebook, by email or upload to YouTube. For journalists who want a quick way of trimming and uploading to YouTube, which can be embedded in a blog or news story, this is really valuable.

You have the option to geolocate the video, add hashtags and self-shoot as you can flip the camera without moving the phone and record footage of yourself.

Another useful feature is the fact that an emailed clip appears within a player in the recipient’s email. This could be a useful way of alerting the newsdesk and giving them a preview of your footage.

Reviews: iTunes has not yet received enough ratings to provide the average.

Have you got a favourite app that you use as a journalist? Fill in this form to nominate an app for Journalism.co.uk’s app of the week for journalists.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Industry insight videos offer job hunt tips

If you’re looking for more information on how to break into a certain area of the industry, check out Journalism.co.uk’s new series of Industry Insight videos. The clips feature interviews with journalists working in different areas of the field – the first four in the series will look at the careers of a news reader, wire reporter, foreign correspondent and radio producer.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk, email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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App of the week for journalists – Bambuser

App of the week: Bambuser

Operating systems: Apple (iPhone and iPad), Android, Nokia

Cost: Free

What is it and how is it of use to journalists? An app for live streaming video to your Facebook page, Twitter account or to an embedded player on your news site or blog.

It is similar to Qik, another app for live streaming video.

Reviews: It gets three stars in Apple’s iTunes store

What else should I know?

Bambuser has been around for a couple of years. It attracted media attention at the start of the year due to its wide spread use by protestors during the Arab spring demonstrations.

Over the last six months Bambuser has introduced a new hardware video encoding system. In short, it means Bambuser now has a higher frame rate, sharper video and better audio – while at the same time needing less bandwidth. The improvements are more apparent when using the most up to date smartphones (iPhones as well as numerous Android models) as well as the iPod Touch 4th Gen. The full list of 260 suitable phones is here.

Another advancement is Bambuser now automatically assesses the quality of your connection and then varies the quality of the broadcast accordingly so viewers don’t suffer increased latency.

Ultimately, users are held victim to the quality of the 3G / WiFi signal they receive. If they’re competing with 100,000 others at somewhere like Glastonbury, the end result isn’t ideal. However this is set to change in the near future with the 4G trials in Cornwall that will ultimately give smartphones the same download speed as fixed-line broadband connections.

Examples:

Given that Bambuser comes out of Sweden, many of these examples are from Scandanavia.

• One of Sweden’s best know sports journalists doing a live broadcast on board a yacht;
• NRK doing a Eurovision contest doorstop;
• Nokia and Microsoft announcing their partnership – with live coverage of Steve Ballmer’s speech via a laptop;
• This example from Tahrir square, Egypt and this example from inured protestors in Egypt

Have you got a favourite app that you use as a journalist? Fill in this form to nominate an app for Journalism.co.uk’s app of the week for journalists.

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Beet.TV: Vook on working with ABC News to produce video books

In this video interview on Beet.TV Matthew Cavnar, head of product at Vook, a company which creates video books, talks about its collaboration with ABC News to produce a ‘vook’ which combines its text and video reporting of significant events.

Recent publications produced by Vook and ABC News, which Cavner claims offers the “360 degree experience of a news story”, includes the capture of Osama Bin Laden and the royal wedding in London.

Cavner added that while the company is looking at extending the platform out to partners, for now it is concentrating on its uses in-house.

Right now we’re really focused on going to a media company, going to a publisher, and saying we’ve got the platform … come work with us and create 50, 100, 1,000 titles because we’ve got the ability to do it.

… We think we’re basically cornering that market of scalable quality.

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Media release: BBC announces launch of web-connected TV product

Today the BBC announced the launch of a new product for connected TVs which, according to a release will see BBC News video news clips brought to television via the internet.

The BBC News product for connected TV combines existing video and text content from BBC News Online and will initially be made available on Samsung’s range of Smart TVs. It will subsequently be made available on a range of connected devices over time.

This is part of a “value for money” strategy to re-purpose BBC Online products for a wide range of devices. Editorial teams in the BBC’s newsrooms will work to curate clips to complement the 24 news channel and to run alongside text-based news from BBC News Online. And the control of what content the user views will be in their hands, with navigation via the remote.

BBC Worldwide is also said to be launching an international version which will be supported by advertising. In a blog post BBC Online editor Steve Herrmann said in time the product will also be rolled out to other devices in the UK.

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News sites can remove YouTube logo for embedded video

News sites and blogs no longer have to display YouTube’s logo on embedded videos.

YouTube announced the change on its blog, where it has published a full list of player parameters.

To remove the YouTube logo from the player when displaying a video on your site just add the code ?modestbranding=1 to  the end of the URL. For example:

<iframe width=”425″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/IytNBm8WA1c?modestbranding=1” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

A small YouTube text label will still show up in the upper-right corner of a paused video when you hover over the player.

The video-sharing site has also introduced ‘As Seen On’ YouTube pages. These pages bring together videos from news sites which regularly display YouTube videos, such as the Guardian, which now has its own As Seen On page.

A YouTube blog post explains how it does this:

By crawling web feeds of sites that have embedded videos, we’ve built dedicated pages that highlight your embedded videos. This means that there is now a place on YouTube to find videos mentioned on your favorite blogs & sites. We think these pages provide a way to find new and interesting content while helping you dive deeper into the conversation around a video.

A third recent development is HD preview, the option to add a high-quality placeholder image to a YouTube video in the hope of encouraging more viewers to be tempted to click play.

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TechCrunch: YouTube launches creative commons licence option

It is being widely reported that YouTube has now launched the ability for users to choose how they licence their content through its video editor platform.

The new Creative Commons option will give other people permission to use footage, including for commercial purposes, with attribution, according to TechCrunch.

It is also reported that initially YouTube is working with content partners including C-SPAN and Al Jazeera to offer a starting batch of 10,000 videos under the creative commons license. Al Jazeera already makes some of its content available under a creative commons licence, shown in this repository. TechCrunch reports that it will not take long for YouTube’s 10,000 video store to grow.

That library will rapidly increase as more people switch their content over to Creative Commons, and there’s even a tool that will let you swap the license for a bunch of videos at once.

A request for more information from YouTube has not yet been answered, but details of YouTube’s creative commons policy can be found here.

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Editorsweblog: AFP launches YouTube channel for election coverage

International news wire Agence France-Presse (AFP) has launched a YouTube channel which will be dedicated to covering next year’s French presidential elections, the Editorsweblog reports.

The new channel has been launched in conjunction with Twitter and the CFJ journalism school (Centre de Formation des Journalistes), the report adds.

The channel hosts videos posted by political parties and tracks candidate popularity, but its main feature is an interface in which viewers can submit questions to candidates. The questions are then posed in interviews held by journalism students from CFJ.

Read more here…

See the YouTube channel here…

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