iPhone Video Blogging, What Worked and What Didn’t
On the Friday before NAB, I decided that I was going to try and live video blog from the show floor. I knew that I wanted to get information out quickly and efficiently and that I didn’t want to have to run back to the media room to ingest, transcode, edit, encode for the web and upload. Shooting video with a DSLR seemed impractical for my goals which was confirmed on site by Jared and his crew from Cinema5D who were doing a great job but working their asses off – I’m too old for that and life is too short.
We pulled a straight 48 hour shift to shoot, edit and upload all of the interviews to get them to you as quickly as possible then drove back to Los Angeles and kept editing on the way – Jared Abrams
My brief prep involved going over to Redrock Micro HQ and bugging Brian for parts while he was trying to get ready for the show. I remembered them posting a joke about a rig for the iPhone and I really wanted to put something together that would support the iphone and a Litepanels micro light. We set it up to use a Canon G10 as the counter balance weight since I might want to take some higher quality photo’s as well (I didn’t).
When testing it out, I realized that the microphone faced me and not the subject so I borrowed a friend’s Rodes shotgun mic. The plan now was to replace the Canon G10 as the counterweight with the shotgun mic. It probably still needs some added weight to really balance the rig but it seemed like a great solution.
Unfortunately, the typical mini-stereo connector has two stripes but the iPhone connector has three. I went all over Los Angeles buying adapters to try and get the mic working with the iPhone to no avail. I bought the Belkin headphone adapter ($19.99) from Best Buy but it wouldn’t carry the microphone signal. Next I tried the Cellet 3.5mm to 3.5mm Jack Pin Adapter from Fry’s ($4.99) but it just produced a clicking sound.
I finally gave up and bought a Blue mikey from Guitar Center. It wouldn’t work as well as the shotgun mic, but with three gain settings, it would pick up more than the built in iPhone mic. The mikey doesn’t rotate but it will fold over 90 degrees so I learned to cheat the interviews so that the person was speaking from my right side a bit. There were some instructions online for how to dismantle the mikey and reverse the microphone directions but it seemed too easy to break. The next version of the mikey will rotate 230 degrees but that didn’t help me at NAB. By the way, the adapter that looks like it will work is this one.
With that adapter you have many options for connecting a high quality microphone to the iPhone. One problem I would’ve had using a shotgun mic was my sound levels when asking a question. Since the shotgun mic would be pointing away from me, my vocals would have sounded distant. While at NAB I came across the new Zoom H2 which looks like a great solution for iPhone video blogging. It has microphones pointing both directions with a selector switch to determine front only, rear, or front and rear 4 track recording. It’s also small and lightweight. See the video here
.Once I had my default hardware configuration, I set out to test UStream live video service using the UBroadcaster app for the iPhone. I think it frame drops to allow 3G broadcasting which really shows up when you pan, but other than that it seems to get the job done. The deal breaker for me was that once archived, UStream puts an advertising spot on the front of my videos. There is no way to pay for an upgrade without advertising and you have no control of the ad content or duration. I especially hated it for short clips like we ended up doing at NAB. The concept was 30-60 second segments focusing on why the item discussed is a benefit to the video DSLR and micro production crowd. Sitting through a 30 second spot to see a 30 second interview is asinine. Count me out.
The workflow I came up with was to email the video clip from the iPhone to my Vimeo account then post it to the PhotoCineNews blog. In an ideal world, we would have had enough time to set up an RSS scraper that automatically added the Vimeo video to the blog but we never took the time to figure it out. Instead, one of us would create the blog post in the media room whenever we had a chance. With someone watching for the videos to appear on Vimeo, it took about 7-10 minutes to email the clip and get it posted. Not live video blogging but very timely.
One app I might try next time is BlogPress. It lets you post to Youtube and then automatically creates a blog post with the embedded video. You can see it in action here. I already had a Vimeo pro account and I wanted to limit embedding to only the PhotoCineNews site. I am sure it would’ve worked fine in YouTube as well but I just ran out of time to set it up and test BlogPress.
I caused quite a stir with my iPhone video blogging rig and was photographed hundreds of times. My interviews were also ruined by people walking up and talking about the rig right into the 90 degree positioned mikey – which was very annoying. Another annoyance was answering text messages or phone calls on your video camera. Most of the time it was in airplane mode unless I was expecting a text or call from someone I was trying to meet up with at the show. I had to tell one friend:
Quit texting my video camera!
The Redrock Micro rig would have been great if the microphone had worked to balance it out, but I wasn’t using my compact camera and I got tired of bumping people with the stabilizing rod. On the second day I tried the rig without the rod and used the it in more of a pistol grip fashion. I noticed Zacuto has an iPhone pistol grip but it costs a whopping $300 – so not worth it since you still don’t get any kind of stabilization. On the show floor of NAB, I stopped by the Tiffen booth and saw the iPhone Smoothee Steadicam. 
It is really a sweet rig but I want to add a light and microphone. The inventor/designer Garrett Brown came over to talk about my iPhone Video kit and suggested I try the Merlin Steadicam. It seems like a great rig but it retails for around $800. It definitely would have helped the shakiness – that was in no way caused by excessive drinking and lack of sleep, but the price point still seems steep for a iPhone video blogging rig. I will try and review both the Smoothee and the Merlin in the near future.
Live video blogging is still in the embryonic stage but quick video blogging is possible with the iPhone 3Gs. Another way to go would be to use a better camera along with the eyefi Connect X2 card that when in range of a wireless network can automatically upload your video at 802.11N speeds. I spotted this Zoom Q3 while looking at the H2 mic. It takes SD cards so it will work with the eyefi and it has the microphone capsules used in the Zoom H4N. I thought it was cool at the show but I wished it was 720 instead of 640 video.
I saw Vu Bui of Bui Brothers fame, running around NAB with the Olympus Pen EP-2. It seems to have a lot of promise for a small camera with video capabilities. It’s a micro four thirds system that can accept many different types of lenses. I suspect that if I go the route of running up to the press room to post video entries, I would be content with the EP-2 using a eye-fi card, Redrock rig or Merlin Steadicam, a Zoom H2 plugged into the camera and a Litepanels micro. Of course an HD iphone 4G rig might still be the best bet for live video blogging in the future.
Edit: One more thing. The laptop we were using in the media room wasn’t the one I normally synced my iPhone to, so there was a brief moment of wondering how to get the videos off the iPhone without unnecessarily syncing with another computer. The iPhone doesn’t automatically show up as an external drive unless you set it up that way with third party apps but all you really need is Image Capture. It comes with your Mac operating system and works like a charm.
