Video Editing/Production

Photography

The Biden family arrive for the funeral service for Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III at St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church in Wilmington Saturday.

5/15/15 7:46:24 AM — Kathmandu, Nepal — Patients are treated on the first floor and outside of the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu the day after a 7.3-magnitude earthquake shook Nepal. The quake was the second major quake in under three weeks. — Photo by Daniel Sato, Gannett

5/16/15 4:37:45 PM — Bhaktapur, Nepal — Local Nepali acted as intake operators and translators during a clinic at Khwopa Higher Secondary School in Bhaktapur Saturday. This is the team’s first trip since responding to the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. — Photo by Daniel Sato, Gannett

5/11/15 9:10:20 AM — Kathmandu, Nepal — Workers salvage a desk from a collapsed building in Kathmandu, Nepal Monday, May 11, 2015. — Photo by Daniel Sato, Gannett

Fire crews battle a house fire in unit block of McMahon Drive in Glasgow.

Fireworks light up the sky during the Fourth of July celebration at Tubman-Garrett park in Wilmington.

Times photo by Daniel Sato, dsato@stcloudtimes.com Andrew Johnson, left, knocks Geno Cummings off of the log during an exhibition of lumberjack events at the Liberty Block Party on Friday.

05/01/12 – Middletown, Del. – 02sx.HS.track – Hodgson senior Octivia Booker wins the girls long jump with a distance of 18.2 1/2 at the Blue Hen Conference track and field meet held at Appoquinimink High Tuesday. The News Journal/DANIEL SATO

Bradford Wason and Drew Osberg launched their offbeat venture, Ugly Outfitters, and have already received orders from across the country. The company is based out of the coIN Loft in Wilmington.

In April, a 7.8M earthquake struck Nepal 50 miles northwest of the capital Kathmandu. Two weeks later, myself and a reporter were on a plane headed to Kathmandu with a group of doctors and nurses to help assist with medical aid efforts.

The year also saw the vice president’s son, Beau Biden, die of cancer, the Pope visit Philadelphia, local football player turned cancer advocate Devon Still and his daughter Leah use their story to inspire people across the country and the usual assortment of local flavor, high school sports and quick and dirty portraits.

Whether you are working with thousands of photos, hours of video or semesters of lesson plans, securing and backing up your data remains critically important. If you have all of your data stored on the hard drive in your computer, this can be as easy as plugging in an external drive and setting up Time Machine (on a Mac). More likely, if you work with a lot of photos and video like I do, you have most of your data on an external drive. In an ideal world, you would back these up using some sort of Network Attached Storage RAID array. Coming from a newspaper environment, I know this isn’t always a reality. Sometimes all you have are a few externals lying around. Did you know that you can also set up Time Machine to back up one external drive (a media drive or capture scratch for example) to another external?

To do this, we will first go to our Apple Menu Items in the top left, and select the System Preferences. From there, open up Time Machine. Once in the Time Machine preferences panel, click on “Select Disk…” and choose the drive that will serve as the Time Machine backup.

Next, click on “Options…” in the lower right corner. This will bring up a window showing you what drives are excluded from the backup process. By default, your external drives will be here. Your backup drive is automatically excluded from the backup process, as it wouldn’t make sense to back it up to itself. However, we DO want to backup the Media drive, so let’s remove it from this list by selecting it and hitting the minus symbol as shown below.

As currently configured, Time Machine will try and backup the Media drive along with any internal hard drives. But we only want to backup the external Media drive, so let’s add our internal drives to this exclusion list. Click on the plus sign next to the minus sign you used earlier, and then find and exclude your internal drives.

In my case, I have two internal drives that I needed to exclude from Time Machine backup. Once complete, you can hit “Save” and then turn on Time Machine.

One such challenge was to work harder to find graphically interesting ways to present non-visual stories in video. While it is nice to think that video is only done when the subject matter is appropriate, more often than not, video is becoming an expected part of many stories. This is especially true of Sunday packages and any series. How then, can we create video that remains visually engaging when all that we have are talking head interviews? Turbovideo trainer Brian Kaufman addressed this by making printouts of photos and racking the focus on them in the studio. He would also take static objects, like stacks of paper, and move the camera around it.

Here at The News Journal, we have been playing around with digital solutions. The example below is from two videos. In the first, a follow-up to the New Castle Courthouse shooting, I used Google Earth for a fly-over to show where David Matusiewicz took his children when he kidnapped him, and then a waveform generated in After Effects to visualize the radio traffic on the day of the shooting. The examples from the second video include more After Effects work, mainly animated graphs and charts to visualize the number of foundations headquartered in Delaware.

Instead, our first thought was to build a blog that would highlight the work being done by our staff, and have it fed automatically through their smartphones and photo services such as Flickr, Instagram and TwitPic. I wrote about the blog theme last year, but unfortunately, it never took off.

Fast forward a year and I decided to try and tackle a photo blog again. This time, with a community-centered blog that encouraged outside contributions, highlighted photo communities and events in the state and no longer relied on what is an already overworked staff for content. The new photoblog, now titled First State Focus, launched last week and is easily one of the projects I am most proud of here at The News Journal.

I’ve had my fun with the iPhone initiative in the past but, fast forward a year later, and Gannett has sent out some of its best multimedia journalists to train newsrooms and evangelize the multimedia mindset in what they are calling #turbovideo training. As with anything, there was initial skepticism. Those that had been around for the previous Gannett-wide video training pointed out how quickly those directives fell by the wayside. This was different though. This wasn’t trying to get a reporter/photographer to shoot on an A1U and edit on Avid. The iPhones were small enough and simple enough for even the least tech-savvy to be able to knock out a video package.

Of course, the training wasn’t perfect. As talented as the instructors were, the reality at their workplaces (and their resulting ideas of how video should be done) didn’t always mesh well with the realities at The News Journal. For example, lead instructor Brian Kaufman showcased his year-long project on an abandoned Packard plant in Detroit. Of course, examples such as this are meant to inspire more than anything, and on that front he more than succeeded. But he was quick to admit that, when on a video assignment, his editors do not expect him to shoot stills. On top of that, he will typically have only one assignment a day. Contrast that with our normal days, where shooting stills and video on two assignments, then editing five reporter/photographer videos is not considered abnormal.

Without a doubt, the focus of the training was on reporters just based on their numbers in the newsrooms, and to that end the training was a success. Since #turbovideo training, we have been getting a constant stream of reporter video, and they have been more willing to collaborate with the visual staff both in the field and back in the newsroom. There was a time, not too long ago, that I could easily say that I got more help from competing tv stations in the field than from my own coworkers. Now, they are doing standups, flagging me down before interviews start and just have a better understanding of what we do in the field. It also hasn’t hurt that some of our recent reporter video has been some of our most watched, including a 100k+ views reporter video featuring female arm wrestlers and a 30k+ views reporter video about a wallet with 800 dollars returned after three years.

I’ve attached a few examples of our more successful reporter/photographer video below. No, they aren’t perfect, but they are videos that would never have been shot prior to the training.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

While this has worked well for our photographers, one of the major draws to adopting iPhones in the newsroom was the prospect of reporters shooting videos of breaking news and interviews when videographers and photographers can’t make it there. While this has been met with varying degrees of success, the biggest hurdle remains transmission.

Reporters would email video from their camera roll, severely compressing the file to the point where a 100+MB file would come in under 10MB. While these clips were still viewable … and viewers are often more forgiving of visual quality when watching clips on the Web, they stood out like a sore thumb next to footage from our Sony HXR-NX5U’s or Canon 7D’s.

When we looked at the majority of our reporter video, we saw that most of it was from our sports reporters as well as from our reporters downstate, where we have only one photographer and no videographers. These were reporters who had easy access to a Wi-Fi connection, either in the press box, or back at their home after an assignment.

Our solution to this transmission issue was to have all of these reporters create Dropbox accounts and join one shared folder. The main account received storage bonuses for each new account that signed up, allowing it to handle the influx of video. Sending in video through Dropbox, as opposed to mailing it in to an address that goes to ten different people, also has made it easier for video editors to be able to tell when something has been grabbed, as it will disappear from the shared folder. Of course, the greatest benefit to this process is that reporter video now gets to editors in full HD, as opposed to compressed beyond recognition (we did try Google Drive, but those videos came through compressed as well).

Below is the video we made to show reporters how to set up and use their Dropbox accounts.

Anything Once: Delaware Mud Run from Daniel Sato on Vimeo.

I had the fortune to work on a number of projects, including ones on climate change, prescription drug abuse and repeat offenders, and earned my second Best in Show award from the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, this time for a series with Mike Chalmers and Esteban Parra on crime in Wilmington, Del. I also learned how to play with some new tools, the iPhone and the GoPro.

Outside of work, I made it a point to learn more about building custom WordPress themes, and have created two photo themes to date.

No doubt, a redesign of this blog is next on tap.