My Video Career

Reminds me of my daily life. I produce media and work with the infrastructure to deliver it in a university setting. Frequently, things like this will happen: someone hands me a pile of video files recorded on a cell phone and wants me to make a "professional" looking video to go on some department website...with like...editing or something.

Or maybe someone wants to run an online conference that looks as nice as the media we record in our lecture halls but using their personal laptop that has no way of getting camera and mic feeds into it from the room.

Or someone asks why they can't just email that 500mb video file to all of the students because "what do you mean by hosting?"

Don't get me wrong...I'm not particularly bitter or one of "those guys" who scoffs at folks who don't just know this stuff. As this is a university setting, these people are often experts in their fields of study but I don't expect them to be experts in all. As long as they're receptive when I explain the details and requirements for attractive and coherent video with good lighting, good audio, and a way to distribute it, I don't mind explaining it.

Turns out that a lot of the time, people are surprised to learn that it's not as simple as tapping an app icon on their phone and that a good deal of planning and operation goes into even a short video production. It's not always something you can do well if you're focused on something like teaching a class. So therefore I have a job and while some faculty or student groups are disappointed that they can't just slap something together and have it look good, the ones that work with me on planning get something that looks quite nice and occasionally makes their phone-cam-toting colleagues a bit jealous.

Reminded me of this professor [1] - he built a clear whiteboard system that is really very clever and overcomes many of the issues that OP's professor had.

1 - http://www.visualnews.com/2013/11/22/flip-teaching-professor...

2 - Build URL: https://sites.google.com/site/northwesternlightboard/home

There is a very interesting 'robot cameraman' device called Swivl which helps creating better educational videos in classrooms http://www.swivl.com/

Just skip the editing and let the watcher seek in the video. I usually watch one hour presentations in 5 minutes, unless there's something very interesting.