It's Rishi

My buddy Rob is a cooking machine. He wanted to start a video blog on cooking. Since I haven’t messed around with producing digital video in a long, long time, I decided it would be fun to help him out. The result was Yummy in my Tummy, Episode 1. The theme of this first episode is easy-to-prepare, great tasting Super Bowl food. We had some awesome plans for the show but due to significant time and resource constraints…well…click the link below and watch for yourself. Here’s some things I learned:

1. Image stablization technology in today’s digicams is awesome but still it’s not a tripod substitute. Much respect to professional cameramen who can hand-hold a camera with little to no shaking. I was the cameraman for this video and even while I thought my hand was fairly steady, it was not. The scenes we did with a tripod yielded far superior results.
2. Setting up the lighting for a scene is very difficult. Having taken photography courses in the past, I thought I knew a thing or two about studio lighting. However, setting up the lighting in Rob’s kitchen so that it was bright but diffuse and without shadows proved to be an impossible task for us. In some shots it looks like a flashlight is being pointed at the subject and in others it’s either too dim or too bright. Sigh..
3. Digital Video for the PC has come a long way. I remember taking a course several years ago on multimedia production. Back then, just the first step of getting the raw video transferred to the computer and digitized was a non-trivial task. For even the most basic editing tasks, you had to fiddle around with Adobe Premiere and have a top-of-the-line workstation to get the job done. And even then, rendering the video involved clicking “Start” and a long nap. This time around, we did the entire job with a 12″ Apple iBook using the bundled iMovie. I brought my much more powerful Windows laptop on which I installed a copy of Adobe Premiere, but we did not use it. Admittedly, if we had more time, we would have done some fancier editing and effects with Premiere. But still. We filmed the video with the camera. Plugged it in to the iBook via FireWire and fired up iMovie. It could not have been easier and I was amazed at how smooth iMovie ran on the iBook’s anemic 4200rpm harddrive.
4. Video Blogging/Sharing will be big. Podcasts are great, but video is really where it’s at. Furthermore, a nice digital camcorder costs less than $500 these days and, in fact, many of the latest digicams can record 640×480 30fps. Heck, I think I even saw a Sony HD camcorder on sale for around $1500 at Fry’s a few weeks back.
5. Broadband upload speeds suck. The typical DSL connection is 1500kbps downstream, 128kbps upstream. To upload a 100MB video at 128kbps, you’re looking at around 2 hours. For most people, upstream speed isn’t something they care about but in order for the sharing of multimedia content to be an everyday activity, we’re gonna need way faster upstream.

Okay, and now for the video:

http://www.youtube.com/?v=smRE6qHZv4I