Internet Videos Coming Soon - Just Need to Figure It Out

As the days in sunny Worcestershire shorten and darken, it becomes increasingly more difficult to take photos of our doggie guests running and playing outside. To get a decent (non-blurred) photo of a running dog you need a lot of light because you need to use a fast shutter speed. But as the days get darker, we need to increase the lens aperture. A bigger aperture means a smaller depth-of-field (the area that's in focus).

I'm a member of BAFTA, and back in early 2005 Marjorie and I attended a BAFTA "master class" on introducing video to websites. We were both excited by what we saw, and we purchased both Flash Communications Server (to allow videos to stream) and Avid Xpress Pro (to allow us to edit the videos).

But with the pressures of time, complicated by my fracturing my back in May 2006, we didn't have a chance to test this software and launch our videos.

With the arrival of winter, video tape offers us a chance to take moving images of running dogs --- so blur isn't a problem. We've had the Flash Communications Server re-installed on our web server, and as I type this I'm in the process of downloading an upgrade for the Avid software.

We shot our first video today, in high definition. Marjorie and I were really impressed by the clarity of the picture and the vibrancy of the colours when we watched the tape this evening. We had a good chuckle: when we take digital (still) photos, Marjorie uses the vertical format to catch a full shot of jumping dogs. So she did the same thing with the video camera. The problem was that we had to lie on our sides to watch this portion of the tape. Or turn the TV on its side.

We made the decision to go forward with videos on Thursday. When we got home from London (another one of my visits to the specialist) there was an e-mail from one of the major TV networks in the UK. They are doing one of those end-of-the-year retrospectives, and want some lighter stories. They saw the article in the Independent about swimming pigs, and thought that would be light enough.

The programme is a bit different in that it's filmed from the viewpoint of the participants in the news story. So we've been asked to do a fly-on-the-wall documentary of life at Lucies Farm, and send it off to the TV people in a couple of weeks. I've been told that if they use our footage we'll be paid --- a hundred or two hundred pounds. Please notify our bank!

As for our own usage of videos, we realise they need to be short because folks will view them on the internet. Our thought is to make a daily report: edited tape showing the activities of our different doggie guests. Of course we don't know how long it will take to edit this each day, so it may be that our goal is too ambitious --- and not realistic. But we'll at least give it a try.