There is a mini vlogger (video blogger) debate on whether or not one should bother. We all see these video sites popping up everywhere so clearly a lot of people believe video is the next frontier. Is it? Should you create a vlog?

As listeners to our weekly podcast here will note, behind the scenes I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to integrate video into our weekly Hmmcast. So far my biggest enemy remains time and I haven’t figured best how to overcome that yet. While some vloggers might have all the time in their world to throw at creative passions, unfortunately at this stage in my life I don’t. In my childhood years I did and in my yearning years I will, but probably not during my earning years. I’m envious of those who do have the time.

On June 14, 2005 while producing an original pilot vlog called “The Two” I laid out the time requirements for the three different mediums from a creator and publisher perspective:

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)

I think in retrospect a few of these times were a little on the low side. Not even once have I been able to create a scripted vlog version of the weekly Hmmcast in under two hours from start to finish. The Hmmcast in its current 7-12 minute incarnation, counting the pre-production time, takes from 1-2 hours to complete. Adding lighting, virtual backgrounds, props, video, titling, a script — which is necessary to keep some sort of logic, flow and reduce meandering — makes a total production that exceeds four hours.

A little over a year later and Brad echoes these time sentiments, but from a viewer’s perspective:

I can read material ten times faster than I can listen to it. At least with podcasts you can listen to them while jogging or moving where you can’t do anything else, but video has to be watched. If you’re just going to say your message, you’re putting quite a burden on me to force me to take 10 times as long to consume it — and usually not be able to search it, or quickly move around within it or scan it as I can with text.

So you must overcome that burden. And most videologs don’t.

Well said.

As far as attention span goes, two minutes of video are like reading 20 blog posts or listening to five minutes of audio in the background. I think a lot of material is being pushed into video format that doesn’t belong there. News on video only works if you have strong visuals and audio to compliment the material. And it works even less if you are talking about it on camera with no exterior related footage. Screenshots can work, but they aren’t as good as a live demonstration and many things on the web work better as a screencast than in a video. The two can be combined, but then that requires creating a separate screencast and blending with a video; more editing.

And have you ever messed around adding titling to videos? It can be as involving as creating graphics. Sure, there are templates and tools out there to help save time, but if you want to do something that doesn’t look completely cookie-cutter — just like with making web graphics — you need to put in the time.

Can you create good video content?
I think anybody reading this can create interesting video content, just as I believe anybody can write great text or record a worthwhile podcast. The not so secret ingredient to creating quality? Time. Time spent thinking, planning, producing and publishing. Short circuit the process somewhere and the quality inevitably suffers. Note: consider the editing process as part of the production and publishing.

Therefore the challenge I’ve been facing isn’t whether or not an interesting vlog of Hmmcast can be created. Heck, Aldo Nova laid down an entire album mostly by himself — and it was pretty darn good — but it took him a long time in the production mode. In the albums that followed, Aldo didn’t take as much time and what happened? He was seen as something of a one album wonder. I wonder what he is up to these days? Last time I read anything about him he was hanging with the band Bon Jovi.

Definitely have gained a lot more respect for folks creating daily video blogs with the production quality of Rocketboom over the last couple months. On that note, I see Amanda Congdon might be back vlogging her cross country trip, sponsored by Ford and others. She is one of those rare exception talking heads. With a smile and looks like that, she doesn’t need as much pre and post production — extra visual stimuli — as an aging white guy like me.

Experiment: How long to create and publish a mostly bare bones vlog?
I was curious how long a mostly talking head segment with a minimal amount of pre-production took. For this post I decided to conduct an experiment and compare against my time estimates above. One take, minimal production and a script using a Samsung Digital Cam and Visual Communicator. I started the timer at 11:00am and the result can be viewed at the top of this post.

My video experiment above is an outtake and something I would definitely have shot over. That said it still took a little over an hour to go from conception to shooting to labeling and uploading (motionbox was very slow to upload for some reason). I’ll let you point out the rough spots and mistakes in my experimental video but if I had done more takes the time for a finished video that is less than one minute would have gone over 1.5 hours. After uploading the video I spent more time shooting other videos and working with the editing tools. At some point I looked up and gasped at what time was showing in the systray.

Am I just moving way too slow on this stuff or what? I need some expert vloggers to tell me what I’m doing wrong here or to confirm that yes, indeed, video eats time.

Interactive video
You’ll note above I tried using the new motionbox video service. I like the feature that allows anybody to clip out, tag and link to sections of the video and it’s taking the Google video permalinks a step beyond. The next logical step for this type of feature would be to allow embedding on third party sites only the clipped sections of the video which motionbox doesn’t allow. I’m guessing this is a copyright concern? Maybe if they limited the copyrighted clips to no longer than say a certain percentage of the overall video? I don’t have the solution to prevent DMCA violations here but there has to be some happy middle ground.

This would be the vlog equivalent of blockquoting from another blog post or article. This would also enable creators the ability to upload source video of scenes and outtakes and let other people mix, mash and edit their own video masterpiece. This could also save time in the overall process and provide an viewer interactive element which sounds like a win-win to me. I’m interested in exploring the possibilities here further.

But vlogging is for amateurs like podcasting, right?
There is something to the thinking of screw production values just point, shoot, stop, title and upload. This might work ok in a situation where a vlogger labeled all his/her stuff as source material only and licensed it so that it could be used in other videos. This could be appealing because:

a) it throws the quality argument completley out the window. I’m seeing videos of watching paint dry as source material
b) it allows source content to be shared with little care or concern as to whether it has mass appeal by itself and
c) it is an authentic amateurish effort, no Hollywood crap
d) it could provide linking to the original source creator’s website from the masher (mentions inside video are useless in current search engine algorithms)

Time isn’t on our side
As you can probably surmise by now, I’ve pretty much switched gears with the Hmmcast and no longer am looking at a weekly video version of the entire show. If I can’t create at least a semi-respectable vlog, or something that I think is creative and useful on its own, there seems little point. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to create a video blog, because I very much do but I wonder how many others feel like I do?

How to produce and publish a vlog with the minimal amount of time available to me in any other quality than source material? Maybe I’m being way too quality-consicous or maybe I just don’t have what it takes with video. I’m going to keep working on this behind the scenes, as I don’t give up easily.

The whole process sort of reminds me of writing and producing music. I’ve written and recorded a couple dozen songs mostly when I was in a band in high school and that was a long and arduous process. I enjoyed it — and still do — but I didn’t own two businesses back then and have a family to support and raise.

So instead I’ve turned my interest to the idea of a monthly vlog. In other words, perhaps a most Hmmworthy of the month segment which pulls in the best parts of an entire month’s worth of Hmmcasts (generated from posts and comments here at this blog) and clips out the most Hmmworthy parts. This seems more realistic time-wise and something I could build on a little bit each week. Not sure that this is will actually get done but this seems more realistic than a weekly vlog version of each Hmmcast. Now when or if this site ever makes about ten times the amount of money it’s currently making, then I could easily justify spending 4-6+ hours on a weekly vlog. Otherwise, that time is much better spent programming or writing and sharing text material.

Podcasting on a weekly basis is very possible for a site with limited time and human resources. It might even be possible for a single website owner/creator working part time on the web to do a daily podcast. However, a daily vlog for a single person working part time? I’m sure there will be a few exceptions — there always are — so I won’t say never, but the vast majority of individual vloggers at least will not be able to keep up with this publishing schedule and maintain any sort of production quality and viewer value. And if the production quality slides viewers will eject — quickly. Brad wisely pointed out that video demands too much viewer attention.

I’m most attracted to producing more regular source video material and not worrying so much about production values. Just as I’ve thought about producing audio files that others could incorporate into their online creations.

I spent much time today planning, shooting and editing video and the result is this single blog post and some more raw source video that I might use another day. I also made a title graphic for a video that I will use another day. In that same amount of time I could have written a dozen blog posts and taken a bunch of screenshots for several different blogs plus created logos and graphics for at least one webpage. I feel like I didn’t accomplish very much today. Do some vloggers feel like this?

Yeah, I’m sure the process gets faster, but weeks have gone by and I’ve been trying to speed up the process. It’s not getting much faster. Maybe I need to seek out better tools?

I’m opening up the discussion below for good input and suggestions how one might better be able to do the whole video creation and production process faster? Ideas? Also, feel free to play around with clipping and tagging my experimental video. Flash 9 is required.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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