Turning journalists into VJs with HDV

In a decade, the Internet has gone from bulletin board obscurity to global ubiquitousness, and along the way it’s also evolved from a primarily text-based medium to a full-on multimedia experience. And with the likes of Ofcom predicting that by 2010 we will be watching the majority of our broadcast content over the web, you can see why there’s so much interest in IPTV at the trade shows.

Along the way though, this process and the introduction of other technologies is inevitably going to have seismic impact on the established media landscape, with newspapers in particular casting a worried eye on the future.

“A lot of newspapers have their own websites, but for a while they’ve been running static or RSS copy,” explains David Dunkley Gyimah, an international award-winning videojournalist and senior lecturer at the University of Westminster.

A number of them have had some plans to go multimedia, but I guess they were spurred on by a Society of Editors meeting in September at which the BBC announced its plans for ultra local television. That scared the bejesus out of a lot of press people, as the BBC plans now not just to have TV from Oxfordshire, say, but localised further down to Banbury or wherever. That could take away the market from local papers, although the BBC has denied this will happen.”

So, local papers have been looking to mark out their own territory and Gyimah, consulting for the Press Association, is in the middle of running a pioneering seven-week course – spread over several months – that aims to transfer the print journalistic skill-set into that of a videojournalist. “We had eight journalists at the PA’s training centre in Howden from the first two papers in the trial, the Liverpool Daily Echo and the Hull Daily Mail, who knew absolutely nothing about television,” he explains.

Fantastic quality

The camcorders chosen for the course and subsequent deployment at the newspapers were the HVR-A1E compact HDV camcorder and the popular HVR-Z1E.

“The small size and power of the two camcorders are immense,” says an enthusiastic Gyimah. “I’ve handled a lot of cameras, but they’re like nothing I’ve ever come across before. The HVR-Z1E in particular has a really nice centre of gravity when you shoot.

“HDV gives you incredible quality and depth,” he continues. “In the past we’d use DVCAMs, but what HDV gives you is absolutely fantastic. The arguments in the past about camcorder picture quality are now null and void.”

Editing is being undertaken using a range of NLE desktop software. HDV resolution, meanwhile, means that frames can be taken from the footage and used in place of conventional photography.

So, how have the eight journalists taken to it? You can find out the answer to that by visiting the Liverpool Daily Echo and Hull Daily Mail’s individual websites, as the two papers decided to go live well before they got to the end of the training course.

“They’re shooting very good TV, the equivalent you would see on any regional news programme, and they’ve got to that standard in ten days,” says Gyimah. “How transferable are the skills? Very. There are a number of things you have to learn and a number of paradigm shifts you have to go through to learn how a visual narrative is built up. You also have to undo some of the literary skills and learn how to underwrite a story.

“But we were able to get them to the point where they understood how to frame things, what the picture meant, what the composition meant, what shooting it at high or low levels meant, what crushing the blacks in the edit would do quite quickly. These are brand new skills they’re learning, which do couple with their transferable ones, but as I always say, if you want to ride a bike you’ve got to be prepared to fall off it.”