TRAVEL: Travelers can now shoot decent videos at a fraction of what it cost just a few years ago

January 19, 2010, 11:00 pm

Your Trip Is Ready for Its Close-Up

By MATT GROSS

Clockwise from left, the Flip MinoHD, the Sony ECM-MS908C microphone, the Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1010 and the GorillaPod.

Last week, as I walked through B & H, the giant electronics store in Midtown Manhattan in search of a strap for my wife’s camera, I made a quick stop in the video department to check on the Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1010, the camera I bought a little over a year ago to record my Frugal Traveler adventures, like my family trip to Italy and several days of eating at Portland’s street carts.

Back then, the camera had cost around $600 — hardly frugal, but it was tiny, lightweight and could shoot full high-definition video. (Also, it was what The Times’s video department told me to get.) Now, it was selling for $319.99, just over half the price.

Sure, a tough break for me, but good news for other frugal travelers who can now shoot decent videos at a fraction of what it cost just a few years ago. It’s now possible to spend well under $200 on a camera that will not only fit in your pocket but also shoot in high-def.

Which means budget travelers are now primed to become travel videographers. The first thing they’ll need is equipment. If I had to shop all over again, what would I buy today? My needs haven’t shifted: I want great image quality and flexible controls, and since I’m traveling I need something small and lightweight. So, to figure out what I needed to know now, I spoke with Bill Horn, the manager for technology at The Times’s newsroom video desk, and the go-to guy for all things technical there.

“You should look for cameras that are a good match for your level of interest and engagement,” he said. “For someone that doesn’t like to worry about technology and doesn’t want to fiddle with it at all, you really want the simplest one- or two-button kind of operation.”

That pretty much sums up the extremely popular Flip. With 120 minutes of high-definition recording time, built-in editing software and a price tag around $150, the pocket-size Flip MinoHD is ideal for travelers who just want to shoot without having to think about how. My friend Robert Reid, Lonely Planet’s United States travel editor, has been using a Flip to produce his weekly “76-Second Travel Show,” with fairly good results.

There is, however, a big drawback to the Flip: audio. “The cliché, and I think it’s fairly true, is that 50 percent of the video experience is really the audio,” Mr. Horn said “Most consumer cameras have fairly poor microphones.”

The solution, then, is to get a camera with a microphone input. But that will cost you more, both for the camera — the Flip doesn’t have one — and the microphone itself. There are two kinds: a shotgun mic, which attaches to the top of the camera (like my Sony ECM-MS908C, about $70) and the kind that clips to a lapel.

Other than that, Mr. Horn recommended a tripod, calling a stable image “the single biggest differentiator between video that looks like home video, and video which looks a bit more professional.”

It doesn’t have to be expensive. The Gorillapod that I use cost about $40, is small and light enough to throw in a bag, and its flexible, multijointed legs let me prop the camera on counters, perch it in tree branches or simply brace it against my chest for added stability.

But Michael Rosenblum, a television producer who runs the Travel Channel Academy, which offers four-day, $2,000 boot camps for aspiring travel videographers, says he never uses a tripod — ever. “To me, it’s a big thing to drag around for no reason, and in all honesty the camera weighs eight ounces, so any idiot can hold still for 10 seconds,” he said. “It’s a total waste of time.”

Frankly, buying camera equipment is the easy part. Actually shooting compelling travel videos — now that’s a challenge. Everyone from Mr. Rosenblum to my producers at The Times says to focus on two things: characters and their stories. That is, find interesting people to watch and talk to, and then talk to them and watch them.

As the Frugal Traveler, I’ve tried to focus on my own adventures as little as possible, instead hoping to meet characters who will illustrate the life of the destination. At times in my video-making travels, I’ve gotten lucky — like with the kids of Greensburg, a small Kansas town that was devastated by a tornado in the summer of 2007. As they showed me around the wreckage of their home, they were by turns funny and heartbreaking, and when, at the end of the video, they smashed a damaged guitar they’d found in a trash pile, you could feel their frustration.

Other times, it’s been tough, especially in Europe. Europeans just seem to be more reluctant to appear on camera than Americans, and whenever I pulled out the Sanyo on my Frugal Grand Tour, people would shy away. Or they’d come up and ask me where I got this amazing device, which made me feel pretty cool. (It doesn’t take much to make me feel cool.) But I’d rather have felt less cool and found more unself-conscious subjects.

In the absence of easy-to-find characters, I’ve had to turn the camera on myself, which almost always makes for a less-exciting video — see my trek across the Harz Mountains in Germany for an example. Perhaps this is because when you turn the camera on yourself, you double your responsibilities — you’re producer, director and star. I don’t know how Clint Eastwood does it.

I have, however, picked up a few minor tricks along the way. First, and this comes from both Mr. Rosenblum and my producers at The Times, is:

Don’t move the camera. Figure out what you’re going to shoot, set up the shot, and hit record — that’s all you need to do.

If you’re watching someone or something interesting, it will come through without elaborate pans. Save the shaky-cam for the next Jason Bourne movie.

Second, if you’re shooting crowd scenes or want to spy a particularly fascinating person, set up your shot, hit Record and then look away, as if you’re trying to find something better to look at.

They won’t know they’re being watched and will continue to act naturally.

Finally, plan things well. Make a list of the shots you’d like to get, and scratch them off one by one as you take them.

It’s an easy way to stay organized. (Actually, I’ve never done this, but I know I should!)

Frankly, shooting video can be a chore, but it’s nothing compared with what I do when I get home. In order to assemble a video for The Times, I then re-watch everything I’ve recorded, labeling files and transcribing dialogue so that I can eventually produce a script of the final three- or four-minute video. It’s not fun, but at least afterward I get to hand the package off to a producer/editor at The Times, who’ll then cleanly cut everything together.

For amateur travel videographers, though, the process can be much simpler.

When it comes to editing, you don’t need expensive software like Final Cut. Free editing software like the Mac-only iMovie is perfectly adequate for assembling travel videos. “A 9-year-old can operate iMovie,” Mr. Rosenblum said.

And since your audience is likely to be family and friends rather than The Times readership, you don’t need to go through an elaborate logging-and-scripting process. “You’re not going to do fancy video editing, because you’re not a video editor,” said Mr. Horn, “but you can do an assembly and say, ‘Here’s the three minutes of interesting stuff from the boat trip, and here’s the three minutes from the beach, and here’s the two minutes from the airport because we’re being funny, and I can show my friends that and send it to my uncle.’ That’s really all you want to do.”

But maybe you should consider your audience a little bit, since you’re likely to upload your video to YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook, where potentially millions of people may see it. At the end of 2006, I was on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, hanging out at a beach that happened to be right at the end of the airport’s runway. When a plane was about to take off, I pulled out my still camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1, to record the action. Unfortunately I hadn’t realized the plane’s jet engines would kick up a massive sandstorm that sent me running for cover.

When I got home, I uploaded the video to YouTube under the heading “Beach + Airport = Chaos!” It’s not great, image-wise, there are no memorable characters, the story is pretty minimal, and the viewer comments tend to be scathing (“GET A TRIPOD” is the most recent), but to date more than 425,000 people have watched it, and Google contacted me about setting up an AdSense account so I can make some money off it. It might only be pennies, but pretty soon that’s what a great camera will cost.

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