Pocket-size video journalism

About almost a year ago now, I came across a pocket-size video camera that was going down a storm with youngsters in the US. The camera was the Flip Mino.



Now, as I'm bit of a tech enthusiast, I was drawn to it by its simplicity and also by the fact that it didn't appear much bigger than a matchbox and was quite cheap really, at around $100! Good gadget; good gift is what I was thinking.

Having bought it for a friend, I thought that, actually, it might be of use to journos as well (remembering what it was like filing with a much bigger and heavier camera). So I posted it onto our internal networking site as a gadget to watch.

About a day or so later, the then director of the College of Journalism stopped me in the corridor saying he had seen my post and asked me to investigate what it could do.

Permission to play with a new gadget? My eyes must have lit up. (Possibly sad but entirely true.) There was no stopping me after that.

'Play' turned into a fully fledged report on how these tiny cameras could be useful to journalists in our new multimedia and highly efficient world.

The limitations were obvious: contrast and stability, for example, were drawbacks and our natural tendency to want to follow our subjects didn't make for comfortable viewing.

But with this knowledge in hand and after having figured out a few simple concepts to make it work, it became pretty obvious quite quickly that we could make good use of this new tech.

As it happens, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I discovered that other parts of the BBC were also having a bit of fun with them. (BBC Radio 5 Live and the World Service in particular.) All sorts of experiments were taking place; some simple and some more complex.

Radio 5 Live journos took them to the US elections and found they were great for getting good vox pops. They said people spoke more freely when filmed by a smaller camera. While presenters were also equally chuffed - for not having to grapple with complicated tech.

In the meantime, technologists at the World Service were busy facilitating a much bigger pilot. A team took Flips and Vados (a similar camera to the Flip) to bureaus in South Asia. They trained up a group of journalists and had them filing from laptops to their own language websites. The results were great!

So all that remained to be done was to take stock of the lessons learnt and lock down some workflows that would work across the BBC (not easy). Here, several chats with techies ensued.

So where are we now?

So far I've produced a little two-minute training video providing tips on how best to use a small camera device - Flip, Kodak, Vado, or what ever it might be - and we're working on developing some best-practice sessions for journos wanting to use them to file for the web AND - wait for it - maybe in prep for TV.

You see, a recent pilot commissioned by Arabic TV explored whether a small camera could make a television package. A producer and reporter were deployed to make short packages ahead of the UK general election. The producer used a Kodak zi8 - a small camera with external microphone capability.

The results were better than expected but begged the question of quality. How perfect do we need to be?

The jury's still deliberating on that one ...