So far, so good…
I have been a lifetime proponent of Apple products.
I was editing on Final Cut 1.2 for air.
I still have an eMac downstairs.. somewhere.
And through the various Academy projects, we own about 60 Apple laptops.
But when it came to a phone, I always had a Blackberry.
I liked the keyboard, and you get used to things.
But when the iPhone4 came out with HD video and a $5 downloadable iMovie ap, it seemed like things were going to change.
They are.
I am still playing with the editing software, so not just yet ready to post my own work. (I am emailing little video snippets to my friends, and that feature alone is pretty amazing, the whole thing is self-contained), but I wanna get a bit more fluid at this before I start to post, lest the slightest error show up on b-roll.net. So stand by.
In the meantime, my entry into the iPhone world has brought me two immediate conclusions (I am sure there will be more).
First, with the advent of aps, there is far less web surfing. In fact, almost none.
On the BB, I used to go to the www function and then let loose – and who knows where things would end up.
But now, I have downloaded my regular spots – The NY Times, The Guardian, (The Daily Mail does not seem to have an ap yet) and so on, and while it’s certainly easy to get to their sites, there is an inherent limitation as to what I will see. I suppose this is an inevitable kind of focusing of the web, and also a form of monetization (though at $1.99 for the aps, I don’t think anyone is making a fortune).
The second observation is more relevant to the video world.
Once I got the phone (of course, it comes with no instruction manual), I had to try and figure out how to do the stuff I wanted to do, like insert titles on the video, for example). And here, I discovered that the easiest way to learn to do these things (and much more) was simply to go to Youtube and search for instructional videos on what I wanted to do.
There are, I am sure thousands, if not millions of them…
And they run the spectrum from very good to very terrible.
But the good ones are quite good.
And here’s where I think our whole world of video literacy starts to take shape.
Youtube is good for more than just posting cats in trees. And while its great for snippets (or whole TV shows), its real purpose, and videos]s real purpose as well, may be to teach us how to do things.
Lots of things.
A ‘watch while I do this’ instructional video is worth tons more than a written manual.
It’s easy, and you can go back and repeat it until you get it right yourself.
What someone should do (good idea here) is organize the reams of instructional videos that are already on Youtube -everything form laying in graphics on iPhone 4
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbyrBkn8bio[/youtube]to how to straighten your hair.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUGxf91JPzY&feature=channel[/youtube]Organizing lots of disparate video information can be a good business in itself. Just ask Walter Annenberg, who founded TV Guide.
