November 2009

 

Writer and E-zekiel customer Minnie Lamberth had never so much as held a video camera before when she decided to create short videos and share them on her Web site.

“My inspired idea to put videos on my site launched one of the roughest three-week periods of my life, technologically speaking,” Lamberth said. “But now that I know how to do it, I’m enjoying it.”

The idea first started to percolate when she attended a social media seminar. “I had heard a speaker give the advice to ‘Lose control of your content. For your ideas to spread, you’ve got to give up control. Un-gate your content.’  That was in my notes. A few pages later, I wrote another note in another margin: ‘video camera for my own Web site – provide for free.’”  

What’s in it for her? “When I create a new video, I email the links to my personal contacts, many of whom are or could be clients,” Lamberth said. “I use these to encourage and inspire – while keeping my name in front of people who could have a writing project for me.”

Lamberth began with stories of the nine-year journey to the publication of her first novel. “I developed scripts for a seven-part series – created for the most part for an audience (my personal contacts) that already knew the novel. I originally thought each script would be about 5 minutes in length, but when I got into the process, several realizations occurred to me. I needed the script to be short enough to get through it without stumbling too much. I needed it on one sheet of paper for a quick glance. And the typeface needed to be 16 point so I could see it. That’s why the videos are 2 ½ to 3 minutes – because that’s what fits on a single sheet of paper in 16 point type with ½ margins.”

The writing was easy – but the camera technology? Never having held a video camera before, the learning curve was not smooth. Audio volume was the biggest hurdle to overcome. “I don’t have a booming voice,” Lamberth said. Standing three feet away from a pocket video camera did not produce enough volume using the internal mic. To get this right, she ultimately tried four video cameras (one a loaner, three purchased, two returned) over a three-week period.

The fourth camera was the one that won out when she finally found her solution to the audio problem through a simple search. “I ‘googled’ the brand name of my camera with the words ‘audio volume,’” she said. “Apparently, there are people who sit around their homes and offices and create videos that tell you how to work the equipment you just purchased, and these videos are freely available on the Web. I found a video of a man who explained to me how to use my new video camera. He even started talking about how the default setting for the volume was a little low, and he showed me how to go into the settings to increase the mic’s capacity. That was exactly what I needed to know.”

Lamberth also increased volume and reduced her own work by cutting the distance between her and the mic in half. “Because I was so much closer, I could press the record button right where I was sitting,” Lamberth said. “Previously, I had been walking around the camera to turn it on and off, and I had to go through a process of trimming off the beginning and end. Now I don’t have to do that.”
 
By now, to be fully functional with Web video, Lamberth only had one more problem to overcome.  “I was having an issue uploading the video through my site’s Media Manager. It was taking way too long. That’s because I did not understand one very important detail – my file was way too large. When I had saved my video to my PC, I had gone with the default setting of ‘gigantic.’ When a colleague showed me how to save the video to something that came in around 35 MB, no problem. It uploaded in around 10 minutes, and I had finally untangled the mystery of creating video for the Web.”

To see samples of these videos, visit www.minnielamberth.com and click the link for Multimedia.

 

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