Videocracy Blog

I read an interesting article today about the trends in the Home Media market…thanks to services like YouTube, Sony and JVC have released a new camera that is specifically meant for people interested in taking video of their child or their dog playing, or any other simple home movies.

These companies are coming out with a simple digital video camera for around 100 bucks…I had one of these kinda cameras almost two years ago, it’s an aptek digital camera and it takes stills and video. Pretty neat camera I get a lot of use out of it. It saves the image to a flash card and you can take them right off the card and put them in your PC. What’s interesting is the demand for a camera that is cost effective, for someone who isn’t going to be using the camera too often, or for extensive purposes…it’s really today’s answer to Home Movies.

Likewise, with the demand for an easy an affordable camera, comes an easy and affordable way to edit and display your home videos. You can now do simple edits, transitions and add music to your video, and then from there put it on YouTube, or send it to a friend.

I looked at a few of these sites, and the one that interested me the most is a site that is actually owned by Yahoo…it’s called JumpCut (www.JumpCut.com) and you simply upload your video, and edit it however you please. It’s pretty neat, for a basic editor…and I’m talking more basic then iMovie, or Windows Movie Maker…it does a pretty nice job.

The one feature I was most interested in was that it will send it to your cell phone…however upon trying it, it didn’t actually send it to your phone, instead it sends a Text Message providing a link to where you can look at in online.

The other website worth noting is one called Motion Box…This one is more of a way to upload and store your photos and videos, similar to YouTube, the difference is, you can do simple edits…and you can share your videos in the form of an eCard, and or just to email it to someone….

These days it’s becoming more and more possible to be a filmmaker, no matter how novice…

We have youtube debates…and now, in the newest wave of Election 2.0, we have the first ever user controlled debates…Yahoo offered a debate online, where you could choose the question and then choose the candidates, and then you can watch their answers, and then judge for yourself who has the better answer, thus being the better candidate.

Pretty neat…in the end viewers choose Barack Obama as their political candidate.

I can’t wait to see more from this new “Election 2.0″ as I like to call it….

I read an article today in Entertainment Weekly about NBC pulling out of iTunes….They specifically referenced that episodes of the Office, and Heros were availbe for download (at a price) through iTunes.

So I’m not a fan of They Might Be Giants, but they are the topic of a podcast I was listening to today. In the past I may have mentioned my liking of the podcast This America Life, in this episode which was recorded in like 1998, they are talking about the telephone, and they are referencing They Might be Giants, and a process they use to choose their songs. They have a thing called Dial-a-Song, where fans can call this number in New York, at their apartment, and they would get a free song, which has been recorded on their answering machine. What a great idea…they record a song, and record it to their answering machine, and then fans listen to the song…and they can leave feedback about the song right there on They Might Be Giants answering machine, and then from there they decide what songs get put on their album.

I never realized what a valuable tool your outgoing message is…I heard one yesterday where the person you called gave an updated weekly quote….I have had the same message on my voicemail for like 3 years…of course, my problem is that it takes me 3 hours to record the outgoing message because I’m never satisfied with my first time through…so I gotta do it again and again.

I’m not sure if Dial-A-Song still exists, I tried the number that was mentioned in the wikipedia page about it, but the line kept ringing and ringing and ringing no answer. If you do a google search you will find that the Dial-A-Song website, which was an online version of the once popular phone number. Well apparently they started doing this in 2003 and is became what is now known as………podcasting.

So I’m waiting for my FIRST EVER Computer Animation to finish rendering…I avoided Computer Animation all through college thinking that it wasn’t for me….now I’m wishing that I hadn’t, because I’m really having fun with it. The hardest thing to learn was modeling, it took me about an hour to figure out how to animate the camera movements and the object movements.

I’m animating a commercial for theBubbler, I am doing it right now because of necessity…I needed another commercial for the latest episode went so long that I have to make another commercial for the additional break that was added…and for this one, I figured it was time to step it up a notch…making something better then I had 6 months ago…

I can’t wait to show off this animation, Blender has become a really good tool under my belt.