Introduction
If you have been given a Flip or similar small video camera, and are being expected to produce some worthwhile video recordings, here are some useful pointers to getting the best out of it.

The good news is that these cameras are usually solid state, with a built in storage chip, so there are no tapes to worry about. It will record for maybe an hour or two depending on the model and then you will either hand it back or copy the recorded files to your computer for further use. To do this you will need to follow the instructions for your camera.

Hints and Tips for Creating your Film

Content
Every good film starts with the script and it’s no different for you. Think very carefully about what you want to say.

You may find that drafting a script, and perhaps using sketchy drawings or a text description to share your ideas in the form of a storyboard helps.

Carefully plan the length of each shot and depending on your plans for editing (there may be no time to do any!) you may need to shoot in sequence, so your finished film plays back straight from the camera.

Holding the Camera
Firstly, hold it still, and don’t wave it around!

The biggest mistake new video users make is to film in the way you would naturally look at a subject. The human eye will dart about taking in details of a scene, but with a video this is called ‘hosepiping’ and is very difficult to watch. Pros keep the camera steady, framed up on a pleasing composition and they let the action happen in the frame. Introduce slow camera movements where appropriate, either (very slow) pans across a scene, or (very slow) zooms in or out, either to reveal more of a subject, or throw emphasis on a subject by moving in. Make sure you have a reason for any camera move.

The other point on composition is to try and keep the subject large in the frame. If you are shooting a head and shoulders interview, then make sure the audience can see the expressions on the face, and if filming a larger subject cut together wide ‘establishing’ shots with close up detail shots.

It also helps if, for example, you are shooting a single person, to position them off to the left or right of the frame and have them looking into the frame.

Background
Try not to shoot against a bright light, and watch for straight lines or plants appearing to come out of the subjects head or ears.

Think about the background you choose – it should not be too fussy or detailed as that will detract from the subject matter.

Sound
Remember the microphone is usually built in to the camera and is often not very good quality. Being built in means you cannot put it where it needs to be -  near the speakers mouth or the action.

To counteract this, keep the subject close to the camera, close windows and doors, turn off background music if possible, or find a quieter spot to film.

And don’t let two people speak at once … the human ear does a much better job of sorting out multiple conversations than a recording, which will sound awful!

I hope this short list helps – and do come back and visit, as we will be adding new tips to it as we find them…

Good luck!

I’m always a bit sceptical of statistics, especially ones as glib as these, but the burgeoning tablet sector has certainly been given a huge boost by the arrival of the iPad. With that in mind, I thought this would be a good time to outline how I’ve been getting on with mine…

Never have I known a device engender so much comment – in NHS waiting rooms, on trains, in meetings, even on aeroplanes, where my gadgets have previously only ever known critical disdain from cabin crew! Someone even spoke to me on the tube, (the London Underground, that is, for our overseas readers!) which as anyone who knows London will confirm is, without exception, unheard of.

The conversations are usually quite straightforward variations on “Ooh is that an iPad, what’s it like?” but the more informed may ask if it has replaced my laptop yet. The device has clearly struck a chord with a wide range of people so, partly in response to all those questions and partly to put my own thoughts in order, here is an account of the trials and pleasures of the first month or two of iPad ownership. Hopefully, what follows will help you determine whether or not one might make sense for you, and if it doesn’t, well I’m delighted to have saved you some dosh!

It is a thing of beauty it has to be said. Shiny glass and matt aluminium, it does feel somehow right in your hand. The web feels very much at home, apart from the lack of Flash of course, but most pages are easy to read and natural to navigate. The instinctive expanding and contracting of pages with a simple pincer movement is a joy, in particular when used with Google maps that instantly rescale and refine themselves, O2 willing. And the battery life is amazing – I have yet to run it flat.

Anyone who has used an iPhone or similar interface intuitively knows how to use the iPad, but it is so much more than a big iPod Touch, as some have said. The iWork applications, Apple’s version of Office, are all highly useable and easy to understand. Redesigned for a touch screen interface, they also dispense with the files and folders analogy we have all become used to. Each application opens in a document browser enabling you to select a template or existing document to work with. Getting Word or Excel docs onto the machine is a bit of a process as it has to be done by syncing through iTunes, but actually it’s quite straightforward – a far easier way though is to email the documents to yourself and then open them in the application you want to use.

So what have I been using it for? In no particular order, reading ebooks and PDFs; browsing web sites, where only once or twice have I come up against the Flash problem, of which more later; social networking, with LinkedIn and FaceBook on their main web sites and Twitter using the excellent Twitteriffic, a much more useable application on the iPad than on the phone. Watching and showing video is very effective, whether from our HMX Gallery or external services such as YouTube.

For a taste of the future of magazines, and maybe the future for print in general, the iPad version of Wired takes some beating. It’s a slick, satisfying experience, equalling, no, surpassing the print version, with a level of built in animation and interactivity that is, dare I say it, cool. It’s also very impressive how advertisers are taking the opportunity to deliver much more interesting content, through embedded video and animations.

I’m not a huge gamer, but the usual favourites that I have tried feel strangely too big on this platform, Sudoku and MahJong, for example – although Solitaire and Othello work much better. Scrabble is a joy, with the iPad hosting the board and each players iPhone serving as their individual letter rack, although there are the inevitable dictionary debates. Driving games, at least the few I’ve tried, seem to work very well, using the whole pad as the steering wheel, but as for Shoot ‘em ups, no idea I’m afraid.

The killer though is, of course, can I work on it? Writing, budgeting, emailing, note taking, recording meetings, all an emphatic yes. I’m eagerly awaiting the iPad version of Daylite, our production management database, but spent some time with the iPhone version, which inevitably felt a bit constrained. This blog is being written in Evernote, which I find an indispensable tool for capturing all sorts of thoughts, which are then available to me on my phone or laptop with no further effort or thought due to the seamless syncing.

It’s also a great device to have on hand when filming, serving, as it has done, as a clapper board, a prompter, a portable and instantly updated question sheet and Call Sheet, and hopefully in future as a hand held monitor (app developers, there’s your challenge!)

It has it’s drawbacks, such as the Flash problem I mentioned earlier – Flash cannot run on the device, which means a lot of websites, including our own, do not work, or display strange gaps. But then again a lot of Flash applications require an accurate mouse for pointing and use rollovers to relay feedback, neither of which work on a touch screen interface, so I feel that even if Flash did work, it would probably be pretty much useless. I guess it’s an evolutionary thing like removing SCSI ports and floppy disk drives…how have we lived without them?

Overall then, it’s a fine piece of kit. Most of what it does could be done by the laptop or phone for sure, but not as well, or as satisfyingly. The more I use it, the more I find I can do with it and it has certainly become the device of choice when I’m at home for reading or browsing and yes, OK, checking my email while watching telly! And for many people, such as my Mum, I can see it becoming the only computer they need, far simpler, easier to use and always to hand.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think…

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Is it corruption though, or incompetence, and which is worse when you are in control of these sorts of projects?

Let me know what you think…

When we start to get those calls and emails at HMX asking for work experience, I often find myself surprised, and somewhat frustrated, that the young people involved do not seem to be given the simplest and most basic instruction in how to present their case.

I believe it is part of an employer’s role, if that doesn’t sound pompous, to give young people a taste of the work environment and perhaps give them an idea of what they might like to do with their lives, so we are receptive to these requests, but over the years have developed strong filtering antenna.

Of course, being a video production company, we are quite high up on the ‘want’ lists, which makes us very picky, so here are some thoughts to put in front of your (or your friends) son or daughter to help them make the most of an opportunity…

1. Make the approach yourself. It seems a basic point, but surprising how often it’s missed. I know it’s hard. That is why it immediately makes you stand out to a potential employer. I’m much more likely to take on someone who is keen, and motivated and can show it, rather than someone who’s Mum or Dad is asking on their behalf.
2. It’s a good idea to do some preparation and planning work first. Think of it as a project, and break it down into a series of steps.
   For example:
   Call up the company and explain you are looking to get some experience of their type of business and that you’d like to send an email with more details. It’s difficult to refuse that request, and it’s a great way to get you off the phone – the receptionist’s main goal! They just need to tell you who to send the email to – and if they try and fob you off with info@, just ask for a name too.
   Send the email straight away – you have prepared it already, haven’t you? And please make sure it has old fashioned things like capital letters, paragraphs and words that are spelled correctly.
   Follow up with another call. Maybe not the same day, but definitely the day after. Now you can ask to speak to your contact by name and you can honestly tell the receptionist that you are calling about your email correspondence.
3. Don’t be knocked back by a refusal. In fact, you might as well get used to it. You’ll get loads. Companies get lots of these approaches and will default to saying no, sorry. It’s not personal, but you really have to prove you want to do it, you’re keen and will be able to be useful, even by making the tea. In fact, you should offer to make the tea!
4. Lower your sights. Companies are more likely to agree to take you on for a day or two rather than a week. Once you have been there for a couple of days and have proved how useful you are, they are quite likely to let you come back for another couple of days.
5. Make yourself immediately useful (remember the tea?) What else can you do that is immediately useful to someone? Filing, tidying up, labelling things, counting things…? Most offices are full of stuff that nobody gets around to – you could be the answer. They just don’t know it yet.
6. Final point – try and see things from the employer’s point of view. They haven’t got time to train you, they know from bitter experience that it takes hours out of their day, and they are busier than ever. So make it easy for them, you don’t want weeks, you can be useful straight away and you will not take up loads of their day…

Remember, the key thing is to make yourself stand out – by being more pleasant on the phone, more determined to get through to them, by doing what you say, by turning up, by being friendly and being interested in the business.

Hope it helps…and good luck!

Me, I couldn’t possibly comment, but I did like this…

For those of you who haven’t got a clue what I’m on about, Apple have launched a new device which they believe will be a game changer in the space between laptops and smartphones which, I know, you hadn’t realised was there. It does seem to be attracting more than it’s fair share of flak and praise. It promises to ‘make the technology’ disappear, which is a bold claim indeed. They should be in the UK at the end of May, and I for one can’t wait!

So here’s a version for Kim;

1. Make sure your video files are in the same folder as the PPT, on your hard drive.

2. Go to the slide where you would like the video to appear and from the menu select Insert; Movie.

3. Choose ‘Wait for a keypress’.

4. Don’t resize the video box

….and if you need any more, carry on reading!

www80.wolframalpha.com

And this is a link to a short video which will make you laugh out loud, it is so mind boggling!

www80.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me there’s been a groundswell of optimism already this year and it’s a great feeling. After last year, when everyone seemed a bit down most of the time, it’s a refreshing change.

At HMX we’ve certainly been very busy since the year began and with some great wins just before Christmas, I feel we are in a good place to hit the New Year running.

But then I saw this phrase in the papers last week – a ‘breakout of feelgood’ and thought, actually, it is a bit like that – and maybe we should be a little cautious in assuming that the whole boring recession thing is behind us…

So for an optimistic chap, I might just temper those inflated sales forecasts and not put too much store by the positive noises from the media.

After all, we’ve an election to get through yet…

Before you start there are a number of things to bear in mind;

Video files are not actually ‘embedded’, into your PPT presentation, they are simply linked, which means the video files need to be placed in the same folder as the PPT presentation, and remain there, if the link is not to be broken. This folder should always be on the hard drive. Never try to play videos from a CD, always copy them over for best results.

So how do we go about getting the videos ready for Powerpoint?

Firstly, the video files must be in a compatible format, such as AVI, MPG or WMV, and which formats work best varies depending on the laptop and the version of PPT  you are using.

If we know you will need to use the files in PPT, we will prepare the correct versions for you, bearing in mind a number of things which are outside our control, such as speed and power of the delivery laptop and the resolution of your presentation.

If we make files too tiny they will display too small, and will then appear fuzzy if they get resized. (NB: Never do this! More later)  If we make them too large the laptop can sometimes stutter or even crash. As a result, we tend to go with a standard size of 640 x 480 pixels, or if we are confident of your delivery laptop, maybe 800 x 600 pixels.

The presentation resolution will depend on the screen resolution of the host laptop, or will have been set in the master template, but is likely to be either 800 x 600 pixels, in which case the video would show up in a box slightly smaller than full size; or it may be 1024 x 768, so the files at 640 x 480 would occupy about two thirds screen size. If we can find out what resolution you are using for projection, we can make files which fill the frame, assuming the laptop will be able to cope.

The process of linking the files is quite straightforward;

1 – Go to the slide where you would like the video to appear
2 – Go to Insert;Movie on the menu
3 – A dialogue box will display asking if you wish the movie to play as the slide displays, or wait for a keypress. If your video is playing from it’s own slide then the former would apply, but if you have a title or some other information displaying before the video, we recommend choosing the latter, so when you hit the space bar, the movie will run.
4 – A video box will appear on the slide for you to position it as you wish. For all sorts of complicated reasons, the one thing you must not do at this stage is resize the video box. Videos must stay at the size they are when they are imported, if the quality is to be maintained. Resizing the video box will almost guarantee that the video displays at a lower quality.

To determine the optimum size for your final videos, we can provide sample videos at different sizes and in different formats. You should soon be able to work out which version works best.

To summarise then;

1 – Make sure the video files are in the right format and are the right size for your computer and software.

2 – Make sure you have copied the video files to the same folder as your presentation.

3 – Menu – Insert; Movie

4 – Don’t resize the movie!

Good luck – and you know where we are, if you have any further questions!

For more information, here are the official Microsoft sites which have a lot more information on the whole topic.

For POWERPOINT 2003:  click here
For POWERPOINT 2007:  click here.

And finally, thanks to Charles and Paola of Viva, our favourite provider of Powerpoint whizziness, for proofing these thoughts.

Here’s something to kick off with, which made me fall over laughing…

http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html

…and it’s an object lesson in great ‘blogging’.