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Filed under: Cameras •Distribution •Hardware •Production •Web Video •

It’s the End of the World as We Know It…

I posted a fun little video about creating a shoulder mount rig for the iPhone 3G S on Friday. You can see it here.

While done in a tongue and cheek way, the most important thing for Pros watching the video is actually the first minute. I was dead serious there. The new iPhone is a game changer… make no mistake about it.

The iPhone Video camera is clunky and not particularly high quality. There are many small video cameras and even other phones (think Nokia) with superior quality. But what it lacks in quality, it makes up for in ubiquity and ease of use. Having this phone is far easier than carrying a camera around. And being able to seamlessly upload videos to YouTube will take event coverage, from news to weddings, into an entirely new realm.

What many thought would be the tyranny of an all knowing shark, Big Brother, has been replaced with the piranha attack of Little Brother (or more accurately, Little Brothers, Sisters, and their cousins). Soon, you will not be able to buy a phone without a video camera… and because of iPhone’s ease of use, uploading will become second nature for many.

News will feel this first. In fact, they are already grappling with the impact. With correspondents in Tehran relegated to cell phones, reporters are only a step ahead of the hordes of cell phone users on the streets – who can speak Farsi and actually know what’s going on, in realtime, without a translator. There will be calls for “Journalistic Integrity” but what does that mean when the you have an outsider attempting to make sense of an internal conflict? Maybe we’re better off seeing two (or many) different skewed views than one “correct view”. After all, in the US, we have MSNBC vs. Fox News… who are arguably skewed equally to the Left and Right.

In any case, the immediacy of a thousand video capable phones at every news event… even when that news event is a sudden water landing in New York or violent crackdown in Iran… has captured the attention of CNN and others. Within months, I fully expect to see a CNN “iReport” iPhone app that will upload directly to CNN’s servers complete with GPS location, Time Stamp, and shooter release included.

I’m sure many videographers stand aghast. “How can the unwashed masses replace our years of experience and training?” The answer is, of course: By being there and being willing to share their videos with the world for a mere mention and maybe a T-shirt. As news organizations are continually pressed to make cuts and, at the same time, the demand for real-time news increases – this opportunity will be impossible to ignore.

The hard reality is that this has been coming for a long time. We saw this in print nearly 20 years ago. Highly trained pre-press artisans were replaced by whippersnappers with Photoshop (I was one of these interns). We saw this 10 years ago with the Web - where the lack of HTML coders accelerated the collapse of the “Dot Com” Bubble but soon they were $15/hour for basic work and often replaced overseas. Video is just the next step in this process. Never has the ability to shoot video, and broadcast quality video, been in the hands so many.

Before we all start looking for the door and lament the end of “our time” and video professionals… be of good cheer. While many video offerings will become difficult to create a business around, the demand for professional video is spiking. 10 years ago, you were “behind the times” if you didn’t have a website – today, you are behind if you don’t have videos on that website. Fortune 500 companies are scarfing up more video than the Cookie Monster at a Mrs. Fields outlet store. In hard times, video reduces the pressure on sales and support staff. When the economy expands, raw competition will take over. The revolution for video is not nearing the end but just at the beginning. Independent producers with a solid digital production background are in the pole position if they are willing to zig and zag with the chaotic expansion of this new market.

More importantly for this iPhone revolution, however, is the human impact. Where the pen is mightier than the sword, and a picture is worth a thousand words… a video camera is a WMD - Weapon of Mass Distribution. There is nothing more powerful…but like really… nothing. Gandhi didn’t take on the British Empire by himself, he did it with the press… as did Martin Luther King Jr.. Conversely, Vietnam was largely lost on the TV, not the battlefield. And losing one pilot in Somalia didn’t stop the US in its tracks, video of that pilot being callously dragged through the streets did. The bright light that video sheds on the world makes many of our darkest nightmares intolerable to ignore with a scone and latte. The ubiquity of these new tools and the distribution of their content will make it nearly impossible to hide… no matter how powerful the individual or country. This won’t always be “for the best” but in the end, it is most powerful defense against totalitarianism and violence.

This revolution is just beginning and on the other side lies not just freer self-expression, but a freer and more connected existence. It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine.

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Awesome article Alex!

Good news is there’s a lot more video. Bad news is there’s a lot more video.

The ability to triangulate multiple sources and form our own opinions will be a vast improvement from the heavily edited and censored content we get get from the media today. At its best we can view real-time updates of dramatic news events, yet at its worst it’ll be like watching 8 hours of unfiltered coverage of congress trying to pass a bill on C-Span.

I often wonder if it’s the death of journalism with everyone being able to report their own story online, but is that really the case? Sometimes events are self-explanatory as with the case of a burning building or a massive riot, but what about stories that require access to interviewing people or areas restricted to the public—things the casual iPhone user on the street might have a hard time filming.

Or times when an expert is needed to help set context and tell us exactly what we’re viewing or an editor is required to help summarize what happened in Congress (versus sifting through days and weeks of C-Span coverage)

I do agree that traditional news outlets will be heavily affected with the onslaught of portable video devices but to what expense? Will there be a trade-off between in-depth yet biased coverage, versus, broad and unfiltered massive amounts of video data, or, does this mean we need to develop new tools to help organize all this video data—i.e pattern recognition software that’s able to curate video and other forms of data from the web and condense and generate text/video that’s meaningful to the end user? Not sure, I guess we’ll see, but if anything this should be interesting.

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With the ability to shoot and broadcast quality video, in the hands of so many it’s sometimes hard to see how the old values of video production are still relevant or stack up against the new ones, but as history has shown us, anytime new technology levels the playing field, as it did with the printing press, telephone, television, desktop publishing, internet, it hasn’t made obsolete the core competencies of what it is that we do.

So what do we “do” exactly? On one level we can say we shoot or produce videos. But on another level, and on a much higher and fundamental level we can say we’re in the business of communications. What was the intention when we wanted a better lighting system, lens, camera, editing software, plugins? To make things look and feel better for the sole purpose of communicating better.

So it is knowing the “what” and the “why” of production is the value we bring to these new medium, workflow, distribution model, etc. And from that perspective not only are you in the pole position, you’re already way ahead of the curve.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  06/22  at  03:06 PM

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Great article! Gets me excited, hehe.

It will be interesting to see new standards of journalism veracity and credibility come into play with everyone holding the power to hold others accountable and to report things hyper-locally. For instance, “registered time to upload” might become a standard, which is to say that the turnaround between the event happening and it appearing on the internet, ideally negating the ability to tamper the video or skew it. Maybe we’ll start seeing near-instant compositing, graphics, and other alterations in a race to beat the upload time. Just a thought. Hope it makes sense.

I had another idea while reading it: live video feed in the hand of the everyman. Right now, you’d upload your iPhone 3GS video and others would watch the static video, already uploaded, on YouTube or Qik, etc. There was plenty of talk pre-3GS release that there’d be live videoconferencing via iChat with the new iPhone. It still seems plausible, if the networks could support it. So, a person could stream their iPhone video live onto a live version of YouTube. This might create or revive some new/old artforms, such as the Live Reality TV show, Live Documentary, live independent and hyperlocal news, or choose-your-own-adventure stories where the audience interacts with the person casting the live video. Now I’m going a bit overboard!

Anyway, thanks for stirring up some interesting thoughts.

Posted by Jared Scheib  on  06/23  at  01:32 AM

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Whoops. I’m a little late on those latter notions. Apparently the 3G could do video if jailbroken, and Qik had an app for it already as far back as August 2008. (Info from http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/13/qik-enables-live-video-streaming-from-3g-iphone/)

And apparently even now, the new iPhone 3Gs’ Samsung chip supports 720p30 (http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=99452) but Apple has for some reason apparently not enabled it and instead has only allowed VGA 640x480 video.

Posted by Jared Scheib  on  06/23  at  01:51 AM

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I just started working with Pixelpipe, the app that allows you to directly upload iPhone 3Gs video to Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Flcikr and just about everywhere.

Game-changer indeed…we’re talking broadcasting station in your pocket…

Franklin

Posted by Franklin McMahon  on  06/23  at  04:44 PM

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Well articulated - thanks.

Posted by Mark Spencer  on  06/23  at  08:14 PM

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It’s funny you should mention a CNN iReport app, in the UK we have a news reading app from Sky News.  It’s a decent app that includes some nice video report integration. The real stand out feature for me though is the ability upload stories direct to Sky News through the App. It’s obviously an important feature as it takes up a prominent place in the app (one of only four buttons along the bottom). At the moment it’s still images only, but this hasn’t been updated since the 3GS was announced, so I would expect an upgrade soon to exploit the new video ability of the iPhone.

I think your future is pretty much already here!

Posted by Simon T  on  06/24  at  03:00 PM

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It’s bad enough that folks are running around like decapitated chickens accessorizing Canon 5D MkIIs and Nikon D90s and Panasonic GH1s and making them do things that G_d never intended. If this gets out then Redrock Micro is gonna feature it on their site, and then you know Zacuto is gonna do a “zPhone” rig with all sorts of fiddly little quick releases and such that’ll cost EVEN MORE than an iPhone 3G S *and* two years of AT&T;‘s ruinously expensive service, and it’s only a matter of time before RRM and P+S Technik and Letus and everyone else and his mother all come out with freakin’ PL-mount relay-lens adapters, so you can get the cinematic look of shallow depth of field on this groundbreaking paradigmatic radical earthshaking new production tool, the frakkin’ iPhone fercryinoutloud!

And then Art is gonna have to do all his filter tests all over again and I’m going to have to explain why I’m such a stick in the mud that I’m still using a RED (it’s *so* 2007, dearie) instead of an iPhone and then, oh horror of horrors, there will be the 3D adapters for the camera just as there’s a 3D overlay for the screen: Michael Bay & James Cameron present “Transfreakinformers IV: Trashing The Titanic in 3D”. Shot on iPhone.

Next up: train your cats to shoot, edit, and post their own danged falling-down-stairs YouTube clips. With a bleedin’ iPhone, of course. Gack!

And here, I’m afraid, is the “first music video shot with an iPhone 3GS”:

http://www.vimeo.com/5295286

Gabble,
Adam Wilt / filmmaker, MeetsTheEye / writer, provideocoalition.com

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  06/27  at  06:51 PM

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You people think I’m kidding?

http://www.zacuto.com/zgrip-iphone-pro

This is how it begins…  The End Times are upon us, and Alex, you have a lot to answer for!

Doom, doom,
Adam Wilt / filmmaker, MeetsTheEye / writer, provideocoalition.com

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  07/01  at  08:53 AM

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The first time this happened was during the Great Depression with the Kodak Brownie Box camera. Maybe it’s no coincidence that this so-called “video revolution” is happening now. Anyway, the solution for professionals is the same now as it was then. We need to shoot better video, and convince the public that it’s worth hiring us because of that.

Posted by DanConklin  on  08/11  at  12:50 PM

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