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Editor's note: This excerpt first appeared in photographer and author Harold Davis' recent Focal Press book, Photographing Flowers: Exploring Macro Photography with Harold Davis.
The closer you...
In the previous two articles, I discussed ways you can begin experimenting with multimedia and publishing your photos to the Web to share with others. Thus far, we’ve looked at methods of optimizing the quality of single images in a Web gallery and identified strategies for recording, assembling and posting audio slideshows using Soundslides.
As camera manufacturers continue to introduce new, video-enabled still camera’s which add full HD-video capabilities to a tool you’re already accustomed to using, photographers are excited to experiment with, and incorporate digital video into their still shooting.
As the enthusiastic owner of an Olympus E-P1, I can attest to the fact that shooting video footage alongside still images is addictive. Maybe you’ve already been bitten by the video bug, or are considering a new video-enabled still camera. In either case, this article will give you an overview of the steps involved in capturing, assembling, editing and publishing your Rich Media Narratives. Meant to help you get your “feet wet” in the world of video, we’ll focus on the big-picture issues and I’ll provide a comprehensive set of links to help you get up to speed quickly and to get answers to your more detailed questions.
What are Rich Media Narratives?
The term, Rich Media Narrative is likely one you haven’t come across before. I like to use it to define multimedia projects that are predominantly photography-based, but incorporate digital video clips, audio, text and graphics. I’m using this term to differentiate it from other types of multimedia, since the general term “multimedia” means so many different things to so many people.
Regardless of the terminology we use, the beauty of telling a story this way is that you get to select the best attributes from a variety of artistic mediums and blend them together to inform, inspire, empower, influence or whatever your end goal may be. Most of all, Rich Media Narratives give you choice of content and often add depth to your story.
Building Your Story
As you begin to formulate your ideas for your first forays into Rich Media Narratives, consider how you can take advantage of a variety of communication elements to tell your story. Consider the following elements:
Voice: As we are all aware, a person’s voice expresses a great deal about their personality. It communicates whether they are old or young, timid or strong; the subtle inflections in a person’s speech help your viewers paint a deep mental picture of a person, even if you never show their face on screen.
Ambient sounds: As with audio slideshows, one or two carefully selected sounds can immediately place your viewer in an environment. Try this, imagine the sound of a lawnmower roaring to life. You immediately generate a mental image of a lawn and perhaps even smell freshly cut grass.
Still photos: Video is great, but I still marvel at the power of still photographs to suspend time. Using photos throughout your project is a great way to emphasize a moment oran expression to arrest your viewer’s gaze. Think of still photos as the counterpoint to the motion in video. The yin to video’s yang.
Video: The greatest strength in moving pictures is the ability to show motion and sequences along with cause and effect. Where photography freezes time, video renders time more fluidly, through fast, normal or slow-motion playback of clips.
Graphics: Ideal for quickly illustrating statistics, accenting an element of speech or for quickly setting context, graphics, when used effectively, can inform and educate your audience.
While having all these communications mediums at your disposal is certainly exciting, it is also a tremendous challenge, for it takes patience and requires greater forethought and planning than most still photography assignments.
Figure 2
Planning
One of the most significant differences between still photography and Rich Media Narratives (or any type of motion graphics) is a difference in goals. Most still photos aim to capture an entire story within a single photo. Video, on the other hand, looks at each scene as a piece within an entire story and must weave together a beginning, middle and end into a coherent and cohesive presentation. As such, multimedia stories require more time of the creator to think through the story, identify key visuals and interviews, sketch out possibilities for ambient sounds and determine how they relate to one another. Perhaps the best approach is to think of a Rich Media Narrative as a two-minute documentary.
Given such a short time frame, you’ll want to hone in on a narrowly defined topic and sketch out a rough idea of how you’ll tell the story. For example, you’ll be more successful telling the story of Jim, the kettle corn vendor at the state fair, than trying to capture all the excitement at the entire State Fair. Once you’ve identified your subject, it will make it much easier to prepare for your shoot.
Preparation
Having worked both with professional photographers and videographers in the field, one of the biggest differences in their shooting styles is the degree of preparation, pre-planning and logistics involved. For a professional video shoot, even a small one, there is often a director, cameraman, audio engineer and assistant. For most of your video shoots, odds are you’ll be performing all these tasks and possibly more.
Even if you don’t have a cast and crew, you’ll still want to think through your project, identify what resources you’ll need, such as a tripod, microphone, audio recorder, etc. along with a brief shot list or asset list. And, during planning you may find that you feel you need some help. By planning, you can ask a friend for assistance in advance.
And finally, I’d suggest that you start with a small project and allow yourself plenty of time for shooting, editing and experimentation. The complexity of rich media projects, combined with working in a new medium, requires more time to go from concept to completion.
Now that you have your story idea and you’ve created a rough shoot list, let’s look at strategies for capturing audio, shooting video and shooting stills.
Capturing Audio
In my previous article on audio slideshows, I highlighted a few basics of audio recording, like placing the microphone as close to your subject’s mouth as possible, setting your recording levels for best quality and selecting a quiet room to minimize background noise. These all hold true when shooting video, however, these are complicated somewhat when capturing both audio and video simultaneously, as in the case of an on-camera interview. You can’t place a microphone inches from your subject’s face when they are on-camera and you don’t want to conduct your interview in an acoustically superior, yet aesthetically inferior, environment—like a coat closet. (Yes, closets are great places for voiceovers; the clothes do great job of dampening echoes.)
If your camera has a plug for an external microphone, this opens up a number of possibilities. You can:
Use a shotgun mic mounted slightly off your camera to record your audio. By moving the mic off-camera, you reduce some of the camera-handling noise (zooming, focusing, auto-focus, etc.) while still capturing clean audio.
Use a shotgun mic mounted on a boom just out of the top of the composition. This requires either a sturdy light stand or a patient assistant to hold the microphone in front and above the speaker, just out of sight of the camera.
All three techniques are commonly employed by professional videographers. You’ll want to adapt your microphone setup to the specifics of your shoot and the equipment you have on hand.
If you don’t have a plug for an external microphone, the need to find a quiet location for your audio will be even more important as you can’t use the microphone to help manage background noise. On-camera mics tend to be more omni-directional, meaning they capture sound from all angles, as opposed to a shotgun mic which captures sound from a narrow angle. Put simply, the shotgun mic will allow you to isolate your subject’s voice and sounds.
Figure 3
One possibility is to capture your audio separately using a digital voice recorder tucked in your subject’s pocket and sync the better-quality audio from the recorder with the audio track captured on-camera.
If you don’t have an audio recorder, be sure your camera is set on a tripod, get close to your subject and use blankets or towels to dampen the reflection of sounds within the room.
Figure 3: Your on-camera microphone captures sound from many angles and as a result, captures both the audio from your subject and the background noise in the room. A shotgun microphone has a narrow pick-up pattern making it easier to isolate your subject from any background noise.
Audio Sync
Whether you’re capturing audio and video together using your camera or capturing video with your camera and audio using a digital voice recorder, you’ll need to play close attention to the synchronization of the audio and video tracks.
When capturing video and audio on hybrid still cameras, the audio often drifts ever so slightly through the course of the clip. In clips longer than a minute, this can result in a visible difference between the movement of the speaker’s lips and the sounds on the audio track. If you’re capturing your audio and video separately, synchronization becomes even more important as a slight mis-registration between the audio and video is easily detected.
One way to ensure audio sync is to use a clap track, or slate at the beginning and end of each audio clip, just like you’ve seen in the movies. Clapping your hands once at the beginning of your track produces an obvious spike in the audio track which can be easily aligned at the beginning of the clip. By clapping your hands once again at the end of the track, you can adjust the speed of the audio track to line up the spikes at the end of the clip.
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figures 4 & 5: Lining up the two audio tracks (left) ensures the clap in the video synchronizes the audio captured with a digital voice recorder to the video footage.
For more information on audio sync issues, read this post by Zach Wise, photojournalist for the New York Times.
Shooting Video
For most photographers, picking up a video camera is far more intuitive and familiar than capturing audio. For this reason, I’ll concentrate on a couple of key points to consider when shooting video.
Stabilize your camera: When you first start shooting video, it can be tempting to try and emulate the sweeping camera movements you see on TV and in Hollywood movies. These shots are accomplished by using sophisticated cranes, dollies and steadycams, all tools that exceed the budget of any amateur shooter. As a result, amateur pans and zooms often look shaky and, well, amateur. Resist the urge to indulge in elaborate camerawork and instead use your compositional skills as a still photographer to create a composition for your subjects to move through.
Secure your camera on a tripod, beanbag or other stable object while you capture the action in a series of short, static clips.
Compose Carefully: With still photos, if your image isn’t composed as carefully as you’d like, you can always crop the photo to remove superfluous details around the edges of the frame. With video, you’re often shooting at exactly the same image size as your finished project, leaving no room for error. Take a few extra moments to check the edges of the frame for unnecessary inclusions before pressing record.
Shoot B-Roll: If you’re producing an interview with Jim the kettle corn vendor at the state fair, your interview is the main content. As engaging as Jim may be, watching a talking head on screen gets boring rather quickly, so you’ll need to intersperse your interview with clips of Jim at work at the state fair, attendees munching on popcorn and other sights of the fair. These clips, called B-roll, are essential in keeping your video lively and engaging.
Shooting Stills
The most familiar of all the elements in your Rich Media Narratives, you’re likely very comfortable shooting still images, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article. Still, there are a couple of unique things to consider when shooting still images for video.
Vary your shots: Be sure to shoot wide-angle overview shots tight shots and close-ups of key details. While you’re probably already in the habit of varying your shots for still shoots, it becomes increasingly important in video, particularly if stills are your primary visual medium. A long series of still images shot from the same vantage can become monotonous, but an assortment of images providing both the big-picture overview and fine details can be very engaging.
Orient horizontally: When helping photographers improve their still images, I’m often advocating them to shoot more images in a portrait (vertical) orientation. In the world of multimedia, these needs are reversed. While you can add vertical images to your video projects, the elongated, horizontal aspect ratio of HD video formats makes vertical images less versatile than horizontal images.
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figures 6 & 7: Vertical images don’t match the strong horizontal aspect of an HD video clip. Whenever possible, try and select horizontal images which lend themselves well to video’s common aspect ratios.
Shoot loose: You’ll also want to compose your pictures a little looser in for multimedia than you do for stills. I know, it sounds heretical to advocate a photographer to be sloppy in their composition, but the aspect ratio of video doesn’t match the aspect ratios of still cameras. To fit your stills on the timeline, you’ll need to crop horizontal slightly on the top and bottom to fill the frame.
Shoot lots: Experiment with shooting traditional still images, capture short bursts of action or use a time-lapse sequence to show the passages of time. All three styles of photography can be very successful in your multimedia project. Shoot more than you think you’ll need for your multimedia project. When you get into the editing process, you’ll be thankful you did.
Assembling & Editing
Once you’ve captured all the raw footage to create your masterpiece, it’s time to craft and sculpt your footage into its final form. To do this, you’ll want to use a Non-Linear Editor (NLE), like Final Cut Express or Adobe Premiere Pro. NLE software allows you to edit your clips independent of one another, a big change from the way things were done with film years ago where film clips had to be edited in the order they were captured.
Today, you have several excellent NLE’s to choose from with options to fit almost any budget.
Hobbyist: (Around $100):
iMovie (Mac only $79 in iLife set)
CyberLink PowerDirector (Win only $69)
Adobe Premiere Elements (Win only $99)
Serious Amateur:
Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 (Win only $115)
Final Cut Express (Mac only $199)
Professional:
Sony Vegas Pro (Win only $540)
Final Cut Studio (Mac only $999)
Adobe Premiere Pro ($799 or Production Premium Suite $1,699)
While each of these NLE’s contains the ability to create multiple audio and video tracks, add basic effects, create transitions between clips and export your video in common video formats and sizes, the more expensive packages offer a greater degree of customization, better audio and video editing and correction tools, and a wider set of publishing options. If you’re new to video editing, select one of the less expensive options and upgrade as your needs and skills improve.
Setting Up Your Project
Before you launch your NLE and begin editing your movies, you’ll want to take a moment and assemble all your photos, video and audio clips into a single project folder. This will prevent many headaches later. When you import your video into your NLE, the clip is referenced in it’s current location, it isn’t contained within your NLE’s project file. If you move your project file, or any of your project’s assets, the link between them will be broken and you won’t be able to work with your clip until you re-establish the link. So, to save yourself the trouble later on, take a moment to organize your clips before creating your project file.
Figure 8: Storing all your still images, audio and video clips within a single folder will help keep your project organized.
Working In Your NLE
Because there are so many different NLE’s available, it is impossible for me to provide a step-by-step guide to building and editing your Rich Media Narrative. Instead, I’ll use the rest of this article to highlight the key concepts you’ll come across in your NLE and outline the basic structure you’ll follow when creating your project.
Most NLE’s follow the same basic layout of tools and conventions making it relatively easy to switch from one application to the other. Here are some of the common conventions you’ll need to become familiar with.
A: Bin—a staging and organizational area for your audio & video clips, titles and still photos.
B: Source Monitor—a window to preview the contents of an asset and perform basic edits before it is added to the timeline. For example, if your clip is longer than you want to appear in the finished movie, you can double-click on the clip in the Bin causing it to open in the Source Monitor. Here, you can trim the In and Out points of the clip. When you drag it to the timeline, only the desired portion of the clip will appear in the finished project.
C: Project Monitor—although the Project monitor looks similar to the Source Monitor, the Project monitor shows the contents of your timeline. While your Source monitor will display only one clip, the Project monitor will display all the clips on your timeline.
D: Timeline—the area where you perform your edits, arrange clips and add tracks.
E: Editing Tools—most NLE’s offer a variety of specialized editing tools. The simplest, and most common, tools allow you to trim the ends of a clip. More sophisticated tools allow you to stretch time, split clips into segments or trim one clip without leaving a gap in the timeline.
Working In a Timeline
In your NLE, you’ll create a sequence and arrange your assets on the sequence’s timeline. On the timeline you’ll often want to work with multiple tracks. Similar to Photoshop’s layers, tracks allow you more flexibility in assembling your clips and editing your story. As an example, you may have a video clip on Track 1 and a Title on Track 2. In this arrangement, the title overlays the video clip.
Frames and Keyframes
Any video footage is captured as a series of still images, when played back in rapid succession appears to be in motion. The number of still images per second of video is your frame rate, listed in frames per second (fps). Most hybrid still cameras capture video at 30 fps, though some can be set to capture video at 24, or 60 fps. Often, when you create your project, you’ll be asked to choose a project preset. You’ll want to choose one that matches both the image size of your video and your camera’s framerate.
When you perform time-based changes to your clips, e.g. fade a title in and out, you control the fade through the use of keyframes. Keyframes are also used to control the volume of specific points in your audio track.
Rendering
In order for your video track to play back smoothly, or to generate better-quality previews in your NLE, you may have to render the footage in your timeline. This prepares your footage to playback smoothly within your timeline and is a necessary step in preparing your project for output. Most NLE’s display a red bar at the top of the sequence to denote unrendered video. A green bar indicates the footage has been rendered and is ready for playback. If possible, edit your footage without rendering as the rendering process takes a significant amount of time, particularly on slower computers.
Figure 11: If your clip doesn’t play back smoothly, you may have to render your video footage. In this figure, the green line indicates areas of the timeline which have been rendered and are ready for playback. Red areas are unrendered and may appear choppy or lower-quality during playback.
The Editing Process
As you assemble your clips in the timeline, strive to create a rough cut of your project. This a quick, unpolished version of your project which allows you to get a sense of how well your story is coming together. Once you’re satisfied, you can begin smoothing transitions between clips, adding motion to still images, color correcting video and sweetening, or improving the quality of, your audio clips. Typically the last step will be to add titles, your introductory slide and your credits.
When this is completed, you’re ready to move on to the final step in the entire process, publishing.
Publishing
You have essentially two options for displaying or sharing your project, on DVD or the Web. Of the two, DVD is the more complicated option, with a greater number of steps and potential obstacles. For one, the standard DVD format uses a 4:3 aspect ratio which differs significantly from the aspect ratio used in HD video. When preparing HD video for DVD, your footage will be downsized and letterboxed (adding black bars to the top and bottom of your video to preserve the full width of your project). Most DVD authoring applications will handle this, and other changes, automatically, but you should expect to see some changes in the quality and presentation of your video when you opt for DVD output.
Figure 12
A more straightforward option is to export your video in a Web-friendly format. This often involves downsizing your video from its original size and compressing your video footage to achieve a smaller file size for faster downloading. This compression process uses predefined settings on consumer-grade NLE’s. Professional-level NLE’s expose a full range of compression settings to the user, and include several sensible presets for a variety of formats. Compressing video to achieve the best quality and smallest file size is something of a dark art and there are some people for whom their entire career is devoted to compressing video. Talk about a specialized niche!
Figure 12: A wide format clip letterboxed to fit the aspect ratio of DVD.
The three most commonly used video file formats for the Web are:
Flash Video (.FLV): The most widely adopted video format online. Flash video is used in YouTube, Vimeo and others and is a great choice for publishing video online. Flash Video is tightly integrated with the Adobe NLE’s (Premere Elements, Premiere Pro) and gives excellent quality at low file sizes.
QuickTime (.MOV): The number 2 player in the online video world. QuickTime is tightly integrated into the Apple line of NLE’s (iMovie, Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro). The QuickTime format can be used to store high-quality uncompressed versions of your movie for future use or incorporation into other projects, or can be intelligently compressed for the Web. The QuickTime format is currently the only video format supported on the iPhone.
Windows Media Video (.WMV): A distant third in video on the Web, WMV files aren’t as widely supported as either Flash or QuickTime and don’t provide the same quality. However, if you’re using one of the least expensive NLE’s, WMV may be your only option and can be uploaded to most video-sharing sites online.
Uploading And Publishing
To publish your video to a service like YouTube, export your video, follow the directions provided by the video hosting service, sit back and enjoy!
To help you get started, here are a collection of resources to answer specific questions, find tutorials and locate specifications for online video-sharing sites.
Producing Great Sound for Film and Video by Jay Rose
Audio Postproduction for Film and Video by Jay Rose
Apple Pro Training Series: Final Cut Pro by Diana Weynand
Adobe Premiere Pro Classroom in A Book by Adobe Creative Team
In the Blink of An Eye by Walter Murch
The Lean Forward Moment by Norman Hollyn
Conclusion
While challenging, working with Rich Media Narratives is immensely rewarding. If you’re like me, after you start working with this form of multimedia, you’ll start having a whole new appreciation for the nuances of and work that goes into feature films, documentaries and even television commercials. Combining videos, sounds, music and graphics is a true art form. Some photographers are concerned that video will be a fatal blow to photography. Personally, I think photography’s ability to capture a decisive moment is timeless and a critical component of the multi-sensory experience that is multimedia.
I hope this article series will spur you to begin exploring the world of multimedia photography and begin creating your own hybrids of photography, video and audio. This is a new and exciting field, we’re still laying out the ground rules and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. I firmly believe that the Internet, and multimedia in particular, will help usher in a new golden age of photography.
Jay Kinghorn is an Adobe Photoshop Certified Expert, Olympus Visionary photographer and full-time digital workflow consultant and trainer. He specializes in helping corporations use their photos efficiently and effectively by streamlining workflow processes and improving employee’s skills using Adobe Photoshop. Jay is co-author of Perfect Digital Photography and author of two Photoshop training DVDs, Photoshop CS3 New Feature Training and Beginning Photoshop for Digital Photographers. Jay lectures and presents to businesses and universities internationally. His presentations focus on digital photography workflows, color management, image optimization and the future of photography. His clients include Olympus, Sony, Adobe, Cabela’s, Vail Resorts and the Rocky Mountain News. Jay is often found climbing the rock walls, running the trails or scaling the mountains near his home in Boulder, Colorado.
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