Video is easy! Not like it used to be.

Back in olden times when I was learning video production it was still a Big Deal. Equipment was expensive. And bulky. My college graduation gift was a high-end video camera that was attached to a high-end VCR. Each piece weighed probably 10 pounds. I dreamed of one day buying myself an editing suite similar to the one the school had just purchased for (I believe) around $15,000. Computer effects? Remember the cheesy opening to Saturday Night Live during the mid 1980s? The computers that did that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was the top of the line, we students only hoped to someday have access to effects like that. (It didn’t help that I was going to a school with a new and very underfunded TV production program- we were making it up as we went along, and prior to the new editing suite- and cameras to go with- we were learning on a black and white 3 camera studio setup.)

I had that mindset. Video is complex, you need to dedicate time and resources to doing it properly. And either do it properly or it’s just home movies. I didn’t go into the business, but I never lost that itch to do video. I edited together a few things over the years, but mostly I just sat back and thought “someday…”

But along came the future. Now you just need an inexpensive digital camera and free software. Windows Movie Maker (free with Windows) or Mac iMovie (free with OS X) can do things we couldn’t imagine doing in 1985.

So slowly I’m picking up my camera, firing up iMovie, and playing around, to see what happens. A big kick in the ass came from people like Steve Garfield, who here explains how he (and video blogging) got started.

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Steve makes it look so easy. And it is! Now you can not only do it all with a couple hundred dollars worth of camera, you can even, as Robert Scoble says, “have a TV station in [your] pocket.” and broadcast live with a service like Kyte or Ustream.

I don’t expect I’ll be a regular videoblogger, but I do plan to put more videos like the one I did the other day out there. Just for fun :) .

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  • Kyte.tv is addicting! thanks for the heads up!
  • Makes me wish I'd gone ahead and gone for digital when we bought our Hi-8 videocamera a few years ago.
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