video production…

I have been interested in video production for some time now. I have no desire to be artistic, but I would like to explore the possibility of creating a protocol by means of which anyone can quickly create educational videos of a certain known quality. I am interested in making some videos, but more than that, I am interested in having the kids in India make them on their time at their payrates.

I met a friend who went to India last summer and went through some of his pictures with him, then I recorded him narrating the pictures. Here it is:

I recorded his audio in a noisy coffeeshop and cleaned and edited it with Audacity, which is a great program that does magic and is intuitive to use. I synced the audio to the slides with Windows Movie Maker, which is a lousy program but it came with XP. Still I think I got a useable result. The point was to capture descriptions of photos so that they have added value for others to use. I have met a lot of people who take lots of pictures during their vacations, and then when they return they remember the significance of them for a while then forget them. The personal problem they have is losing their memories of their trip, but a problem for me and the world is that they take these pictures that the public needs but without context, the pictures have little value. Flickr and Picasa or whatever other sites allow tags and captions, but when someone has hundreds of pictures it is not practical to expect anyone to process them all. However, many people are willing to look at a set of pictures and talk about them, so that is a place where I think I can do some good.

I am still exploring this. There are some problems with the above video in that I did not achieve the level of quality I wanted for either sound or picture, but I think I want to learn this.