A week ago I somewhat unceremoniously created a pilot episode vlog called: Tablet PC “The Two” — my idea was to use it for a vlog (video blog) on news and current Tablet PC events. I called it a pilot because it was quite experimental. Considering to date over the last week it has received a scant 50+ browser views and a mere couple hundred downloads, it doesn’t really warrant putting together such a production as frequently as weekly. Maybe every couple weeks or once a month? I didn’t do much in the way of promotion for the show, but I did receive some positive feedback and unsolicited help from another Tablet PC blogger Warner (thank you!). It was all but ignored by pretty much all of the Tablet PC news sources. I probably could have gotten the word out better on that front by emailing the owners of those various forums and telling them I was trying something out to test the waters, but then I didn’t really want to get into the whole: “don’t spam us” thing.

Create, produce, publish and let the bird fly.

The “Two” is a one man production, so it’s got to really be something folks are interested in for me to put the hour or two in producing this weekly. BTW, I blame myself for not making the pilot episode interesting and/or entertaining enough. I certainly don’t blame the audience for not tuning in with large numbers. It took me almost two hours, from start to finish, putting together the two minute video pilot for The “Two.”

This is one reason why I doubt you’ll see many vlogs like this, because it’s even more time consuming than a podcast. And a podcast is more time consuming than a blog entry, and a blog entry is more time consuming than a linkblog entry and linkblog entry is more time consuming than a moblog entry. Yowsa, here’s a chart which better explains the time estimations:

Time alloted for each type of post
1-2 hours - vlog (2 minutes, scripted, produced, compressed, edited, published/FTP)
30 minues - podcast (10 minute show, show notes, compressed, edited, published/FTP)
5-10 minutes - average sized blog entry (100-200 words)
1 minute or less - link blog entry
30 seconds - moblog (camera / picture phone send)

At least with a podcast one can gather his/her notes, turn on the audio and roll. I suppose one could do something like this with a vlog, but then a single shot with no graphics or effects is pretty boring to look at. I’m guessing that after practice and cutting out wasted time I could probably get the production of a two minute video down to under 30 minutes. Let’s go through where the time went as well as how it was put together for those who want to make their own vlogs.

First, I used software called Visual Communicator $289.95 (VC) from Serious Magic. They make it pretty painless time-wise to actually record the show, but the older version that I have from a couple years ago requires recording everything in one take. The newer version 2.0 lets you record the video in pieces which would certainly be easier but I’m not sure it would save any more time. If I should produce more episodes of The “Two” then I’ll probably drop the extra bones and pick up the upgrade. There is something electric about one-take recordings though. Sort of like being live and it’s hard to explain live vs. pieced together takes. One, it takes longer (editing time) doing individual takes and then piecing together and two, you have the lighting issues again to contend with.

Screen shots
To prepare the various screenshots I clipped using the clipping tool 2.0 and then used Adobe Photoshop to compress the images. I did a subpar job with the image compression and I think if/when I should do another episode I will not compress the images as poorly.Once the video was compressed the screenshot picture quality suffered.

Audio / Video clips
I culled the sound and single third party video clip from the royalty-free library provided with VC. Then I wrote the script which basically was pulled from various posts on the Tablet PC River of News stream (also very experimental) that I coded together 10 days or so ago and from Tablet PC sites in my bookmark list like Tablet PC Buzz. Time to prepare script and materials:  45 minutes.

Recording The “Two”
Recording the show was done, as mentioned above, in one take, although the very first couple takes the lighting was all wrong. Too much light and it screws up the virtual backgrounds. I gave up messing around with the lighting after a couple takes and just recorded the single take. 30 minutes.

Tagging and Publishing The “Two”
I decided to use Ourmedia for the video storage, though with the low volume I certainly could have used our own dedicated servers and bandwidth. To save on bandwidth expenses for delivery I could also have gone the BitTorrent route, but that takes extra time and one of my goals was to keep the time down. Time is my most least available resource. The process of tagging the video and publishing to Ourmedia took less than five minutes and the video was available within an hour.

Publish and promote the vlog
The final step: tell people about it! I then went and wrote up a quick blog entry (5-10 minutes) and posted about it in two places. My Tablet PC blog and here at MakeYouGoHmm.

Will there ever be another episode of The “Two”?
When will there be another episode of The “Two”? This is sort of up to you, friendly readers and viewers. If the counters reach 1,000+ or if there’s some really hot Tablet PC news, really cool Tablet PC software to try out, etc. or enough people ask me about it then consider it done. If you haven’t seen the pilot vlog episode of Tablet PC The “Two” yet then feel free to check it out now (sorry, only in Windows Media format only, no Quicktime — although I’d like to make a Quicktime version someday … alas, more time … argh). If you aren’t interested in vlogs, well, then you probably haven’t even come this far. If you have, then thanks for reading and, if applicable, watching. Please let me know what you think: good, bad or indifferent.

• Tablet PC The “Two” Episode #1
• Tablet PC podcast debuts and Tablet PC CES 2005 meetup pics
• All Consuming
• (Limited time) Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles pilot free
• Mario lookalike, Useless Account, IM blog to podcast to videoblog experiment
• Time still the biggest enemy of video blogging