Nokia Project

It's easy to dismiss the camera phone if you focus on the visual quality of the image. This is very often the argument against their use in the newsroom, as you know if you've been reading the posts on this page (and you should be). But quality is a nebulous term. The footage to the left is not what I would call good "quality", but what it captures is priceless to me.

You see, I have pursued the "paper car" seen in the video for months and, until today, it eluded my photographic grasp. The car would be there, but I didn't have a camera phone. A friend would see the car, but again, no camera. Once, it was spotted in the computer center lot and and a call came to the newsroom to run out with a camera. By the time we got there, it was too late. "Moby blue" scooted away, just out of my grasp.

What made the difference today? My new Motorola SLVR. No, this isn't an ad for the SLVR. In fact, looking at the image quality it provides might make you run into the open arms of Nokia's N-series phones (full disclosure: we are working with Nokia on uses for the N-series, in case you missed that). Nevertheless, because my new phone has a VGA (ugh!) camera in it, I can now share the glory that is the "paper car" with the rest of the world. That is what I call a "quality" catch!

Who drives this vehicle? Why do they keep so much paper in it? Is it, in fact, hard to drive over speed bumps due to the low-riderish, compressed suspension?

These are all questions that a citizen journalist could answer by staking out the car and talking with the owner. Let's face it, a reporter isn't going to cover this story. Me? I had to get back to the newsroom to show off my catch to all of you. This must be that pesky lack of time so many have written about interfering with the citizen journalist.

So let me ask you, the viewer, is it worth-while to see this absurd vehicle in the diminished visual quality I have provided or would you prefer that I just verbally describe such a sight to you? Let me know in the comments.

...couldn’t put my video back together again.

The video to the right is one of three source videos I used to create this train wreck. I was trying to cover/review a new video game, Supreme Commander. The idea needed three separate shots. I might have set myself up for failure though, as I decided that I was only going to allow myself one shot at everything, no re-dos. The plan was to:

• Shoot 30 second clip of buying Supreme Commander (filming with a Samsung A920 phone – maximum 30 second clips)
• Shoot 10 second interview with another customer also buying SC
• Shoot 30 seconds worth of action scenes from game while talking over them with a short review
• Convert from phone video format (.3g2) to .wmv to edit in Windows Movie Maker
• Glue the shots together in WMM (crude but good description in link)
• Convert from .wmv to .mov for the blog
• End up with 1 minute 10 second clip

Everything in the processed worked great. By great, meaning that I ended up with about 33 seconds of garbled audio and a bunch of missing video. I’m pretty sure the multiple conversions killed the attempt. I wanted to try and use only tools that were already on my computer. WMM comes with XP and I had the conversion tool from previously playing with a video off my phone. Had I just settled on a single shot or gone up to the college and used Final Cut to put the three shots together, everything probably would have gone swimmingly.

Lessons learned:

1. Use better conversion/editing tools.
2. .3g2 format seems to play just fine unconverted, but it's small at 176x144.
3. Faces look better than computer screenshots with my phone camera (video doesn’t show this, but I learned it).
4. I pity the fool who would have to manage content like this.

There’s a classic scene in Swingers: Mikey (Jon Favreau), after careful drunken consideration, calls up a girl he just met at the bar that night. He leaves a perfectly acceptable message on her answering machine with one problem – he wasn’t able to give the last number of his phone number before getting cut off. He calls back to give the last digit, then falls into the same trap again. Over the next few minutes, he hilariously and painfully descends into a downward spiral of incoherent babble, frustrated by the limitations of the technology at hand.

Eleven years later and the basic storyline remains the same. I have a RAZR phone, which had generally satisfied my expectations. Then I tried using it to play “citizen journalist” this week, and it was an absolute train wreck.

The quality of the video is strikingly poor with limited zoom capabilities. The worst part is that it only shoots in fifteen second increments. You want to interview someone? Good luck trying to fit a complete question and answer in fifteen seconds. And then you are prompted to “save” or “delete” the clip before you can record another one, which disrupts any natural flow to the interview.

“Gee thanks for those eight gorgeous seconds of insight, sir…hang on just a sec while I save this file to the video gallery, select a file name, get back to the main menu and then choose to create a new ‘flix”--

The Swingers scenario is 11 years old now, and nifty advances like Caller ID have sort of solved the problem. In a few more years, it’s a pretty safe bet that prices will go down and technology will improve for video phones, and citizen journalists around the globe will begin to reap the benefits. Until then--for the vast majority of people who don’t feel like dropping half a dozen C Notes on a mobile phone—we’ll just have to settle for abysmal production value, fifteen grainy seconds at a time.

The title of this blog serves as a metaphor for what my citizen journalism venture was like. I set out with my Motorola RAZR, over the weekend, to shoot some cool vid. Spot news, a squirrel eating an acorn? I didn't have a preference. I just wanted to shoot something interesting. I decided to record some storm footage since there was a thunderstorm hitting Kansas City.

Lightning always looks cool on tape, especially when shown in slow motion. So, umbrella in hand, I sat outside and waited for that lightining strike to occur, hoping its destination wouldn't be on my head. I held the phone up to record right as a PERFECT strike came. As I pulled my phone down to try to save what I recorded, my RAZR showed a fuzzy screen and said it could not store the footage. Noooooooooooooooooo! Right as the PERFECT storm came, my phone decided it was the PERFECT time to no longer shoot video.

Now, in the real news world, this wouldn't happen. Instead of relying on a 3 inch long Motorola RAZR to shoot something amazing in 15 second intervals, the reporter would have an expensive hi tech, GOOD QUALITY, camcorder.

While my venture in the citizen journalism realm was unsuccesful due to a "technical difficulty", I still do not know how I would have gotten my video off of my cell phone, and onto a computer. According to the Motorola RAZR manual, I hit "copy", and then hook up a "Device" to transfer it. While I consider myself to be somewhat technically saavy, this is unknown territory to me. I can export a video from a DV camera, but not from a cell phone.

What this venture into the citizen journalism world has taught me is that we can't rely on citizen journalists alone. We can't rely on cell phones, and we certainly cannot just hand out dv cameras to everyone to catch the news. Who knows, there may be people out there with great video, but they just don't know how to transfer it to a computer. There also may be citizen journalists out there that missed a key news moment because of a faulty phone.

So, hopefully, lightning will strike for some other citizen journalist out there, but it just isn't gonna happen for me.