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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Interesting - Moving Magazine Photos?
Nick Doan, Photographer, Assistant
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Scott Serio, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Colora | MD | USA | Posted: 12:11 PM on 10.07.09 |
| ->> Wow. I feel so inadequate now. OK, I felt that way before seeing that, but the feeling was just reinforced. Nice stuff. |
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Patrick Meredith, Photographer, Assistant
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Austin | TX | USA | Posted: 12:37 PM on 10.07.09 |
| ->> All that high tech equipment for....a web video? Am I missing something? |
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Erik Markov, Photographer
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Kokomo | IN | | Posted: 12:43 PM on 10.07.09 |
->> The comments at a photo editor http://tinyurl.com/yc98d5x are just amazing. I don't even know what to say. It amazes me that people can be so dense!
I see a whole lot of people who feel threatened by the future. "It seems like these are more so gimmicks that will also produce some video content for each respective website." "What did it cost?" etc etc
Doesn't anyone do anything just to do it?! How do you know what works and doesn't work if you don't experiment? Make mistakes, make a fool of yourself, *&%$ up every once in a while?
Thomas Edison said when inventing the light bulb, "I didn't fail, I found 2000 ways not to make a lightbulb." I really think that entrepreneurial gene hasn't been passed onto much of the population. |
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Chuck Liddy, Photographer
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Durham | NC | USA | Posted: 1:41 PM on 10.07.09 |
->> Erik, in my humble opinion I have to disagree with you on some of those comments at the website you linked to. Where you saw people threatened by the future and lack of vision I saw some real common sense questions asked on that forum. I mean, with even magazines being pummeled into extinction I had to wonder myself just how much money that piece cost Outside. I am quite positive after watching it twice it probably was more than I make in two years of salary. And I'm not even adding in the post production costs to "make" the product which doesn't exist yet. I think people have the right to gripe or question the sanity of managers making those decisions. Experiment? Sure, it's great, be ahead of the curve instead of behind it when something breaks, but in all honesty don't you think that a production like that is more than a little absurd to show what the magazine "might" look like in the future. I mean what if there is a quantum leap in technology and we jump right into 3D holograms? Just saying......
And BTW, I love Outside Magazine, I'm a subscriber and I really enjoy the way they use photos. I wish they would review equipment regular mortals could afford (wink wink) but they are a great read. |
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Nick Doan, Photographer, Assistant
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Scottsdale | AZ | USA | Posted: 1:55 PM on 10.07.09 |
->> I didn't post any comments when I put this up, but the conversation about this started because it does make us think about the direction our profession is heading.
I do not feel threatened by this "change in technology" (for lack of a better phrase). I know that a 9inch OLED television costs $7k. By the time the tech becomes readily available at prices a regular consumer can afford is so far in the future, I will probably be retired. ;)
I do wonder if I shouldn't start thinking more about video production. I think in terms of still photography, and I have worked and shot around video productions more than once. And, it's just a slightly different mindset about setting up the lighting and working with sound crews and such. The actual filming is outside my experience, but it can't be too far different than follow focus with a still camera can it?
As for the production of putting something like that together... Other than the cost of renting equipment, a dozen guys (some of whom are probably employed by Outside magazine already) at $500, the videographers, the post production, the lighting, that probably ran less than $20k. As a development and marketing project, that isn't crazy.
And, this is a good sign, it shows that there are magazines out there that are not so terrified of the economy that they are cutting projects and personnel, but are willing to spend money.
I'm sure that there is going to be enough publicity and PR value in this piece, that the expense might be worth it in terms of advertising dollars. |
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Erik Markov, Photographer
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Kokomo | IN | | Posted: 2:04 PM on 10.07.09 |
| ->> Chuck, I agree, I'm sure it was ridiculously expensive, but Alexx Henry didn't come to me and try and siphon the money out of my bank account. He had the $, he had the equipment and he had the required experience to make the project work. Is that the exact way I want magazines, or the way they'll end up? Prob not, and yea it's all pretty prohibitive right now to do something like that. The Red camera, dollies, people running with lights. But back in the day the NC2000 cost $18000, and as Tony Kurdzuk said in Rob Galbraith's article, "The NC2000, in general, was a practice in masochistic anxiety." All the digital cameras back then seemed pretty similar in the aggravation they gave. Can you imagine if Nikon and Canon had given up or put off development for 5 or 10 years? I remember film fondly, but I also remember the aggravation of trying to develop in a bathroom sink and trying to scan half dried negatives. I don't want to go back to that. Fortunately, no one questioned the sanity of those newspapers who went digital. Well maybe they did, but it also didn't intimidate anyone into backing off from it. Now, people and companies are intimidated into backing off at the slightest bit of negativity. I find it sad, thats all. |
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Myung Chun, Photographer
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Los Angeles | CA | USA | Posted: 2:32 PM on 10.07.09 |
->> I thoroughly enjoyed the forward thinking.
Technology, and its applications, always evolves so it's not such a far-fetched idea.
Nick, shooting moving pictures is a lot different than shooting stills. |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 3:19 PM on 10.07.09 |
->> It's a nice production. It's not ground breaking. We've been able to do this type of thing for years, particularly with a large budget. When you have that kind of money to throw around, the camera you choose really doesn't matter that much from a cost perspective. It's a rental, they charge by the day, and it's probably less than 20% of your budget. When you have that much money in play, you should rent the best tool for the job to make sure you don't waste the other 80% of your budget because you went cheap on the camera.
Production costs are one thing - distribution costs are another. Web video does not scale well from a cost perspective. Due to bandwidth and server resources, it gets more expensive to deliver the content when more people watch it. Serve a million copies of your hit video and you're talking about a heck of a bandwidth bill. If you want those hits to happen more or less at the same time (due to viral or a good PR hit), server resources are very expensive. What this means is if you're doing business properly, you HAVE to recover your delivery costs for each copy served, or you are destined to lose money. Web advertising rates are nowhere near high enough to cover those costs - particularly if something gets popular quick.
Television doesn't suffer from the same scale problems. A popular show and an unpopular show cost the same amount of money to deliver to affiliates or cable TV operators. If a million people or ten million people watch a show, the cost to deliver is basically the same. You are not penalized for popularity - you just make more money because your delivery costs remain fixed yet your ad revenue increases.
This is why web video will not be the savior of print media. As print media produces more video and the video becomes more popular, expenses rise with it. There is no crossover point from loss to profitability...the lines are more-or-less parallel.
Put it another way...YouTube - who has been doing video on the web for years and is owned by the #1 search engine on the planet - can't figure out how to turn a profit. ALL of the content on their site is provided to them FREE. They don't pay a dime. They have millions of minutes of video cutting across every demographic and special interest. And they can't turn a profit.
That said, why does a daily newspaper with a handful of years of experience producing video think they stand a chance when they have to pay for everything - production costs, server resources and bandwidth?
The only thing this fascination with video will do is make it easier for media properties to roll print operations into the television side of things. When the rollups happen and it's time for layoffs to come down, who do you think they'll lay off first - a TV shooter that has been producing four 3-minute packages A DAY for the past ten years, or a photojournalist with two years of experience producing short web features that last two minutes and take a week to produce?
The world of "photojournalism" is not "evolving" because still shooters are doing video with DSLRs. It's just merging with an already established profession. Telling stories using moving pictures with sound. It's been around for a very long time, even if photojournalists haven't done it before. |
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Dan Routh, Photographer
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Greensboro | NC | USA | Posted: 5:15 PM on 10.07.09 |
| ->> Maybe it’s my my connection, or the server traffic or whatever, but I just watched a choppy video where the sound didn’t sync with the lips. Am I missing something here? Where is this technological revolution I’m supposed to be witnessing? There is a 1937 B&W movie on TV as I type this, and it’s much better quality. What is so new about all of this? |
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