digifilmvid.com

Journal: Live Video & Editing

Recently, the topic of live video streaming on the web has caught my interest. I was surprised to discover that live streaming only constitutes about 1% of online video today. However, companies such as Livestream (formally Mogulus) are working to provide quality streaming services. I predict that within the next 5 years, streaming video will be a staple in the world of new media. This would truly revolutionize the way we communicate. Imagine taking an online course and being able to watch the instructor lecture in real time for example. Students in India could take classes at a university here in the U.S. and get almost the same classroom experience as the students in the classroom. This is just one example of how this technology could potentially change the way we interact.

On the technical side of things, editing is a key component of video production. Editing can make a video tell a story. It’s also important in the world of online video, as sites like YouTube impose file size limitations on the videos that users submit. In my view, this is a good thing because of copyright laws and bandwidth management. Further, it is very easy for users to get bored while watching a video. Of course, they are not going to stay bored for long, so if you don’t have a well edited video, they are going to quickly watch something else instead. This is one area in which web video is different from other traditional video formats. While television shows and feature length films are edited to fit a predetermined, standard length, there are no set guidelines for how long a video on the web should be. Traditional media companies that have been successful in creating T.V. shows and movies struggle to create content for the web that matches the popularity of content created by amateurs. Although editing is one of the most important steps in the process, not everything can be “fixed” in this post-production phase. This is why planning is such an important part of pre-production, as Larry Johnson points out in Web Video. If the right shots are not captured during production, or if the scenes do not follow the rules of continuity, there is very little that editing can do to tell the proper story. Nonetheless, editing is a key part of creating video for the web.