Lessons from the MediaStorm Methodology Workshop: Day 4

Day 4 at the first MediaStorm methodology workshop explored social networking, blogging, gear and Final Cut Pro. The latter session was so deep that there’s little I can share from it. However, what follows are a few lessons from the day. You can read previous blog posts to learn about Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.

Before I get into the lessons of the day, here is a link to some valuable MediaStorm documents.

You'll find a list of recommended gear and insight into Final Cut Pro.

Software Tips
• Tips from the MediaStorm Final Cut Pro workflow by Eric Maierson pdf(PDF)
• Video Tutorial: Producing with Final Cut Pro
Tips from the MediaStorm Compression Workflow: from Quicktime .mov to .flv, by Eric Maierson

You’ll also find advice on audio at the same location.

As for lessons on social media, Jessica Stuart, the workshop director, told us that Facebook is the “hub” of MediaStorm’s social networking efforts. She said that in February of this year usage of social networking sites exceeded usage of web-based e-mail.

To make it manageable to operate in a social networking world, she recommended you schedule it into your day. Otherwise it can eat an enormous amount of time. She reminded us that you have be be willing to converse and interact if you want to participate in this world. “You have to be willing to be you. Be real, be open, be involved.”

She encouraged us to secure our user names on all major sites now, even if we’re not going to use them. It’s too much of a loss to find out you can’t use the name you’re known by because somebody else grabbed it first.

We also discussed Twitter and other tools and how to use them as part of our work.

In discussing video on social networking sites, I learned of tubemogul, which allows you to upload video to many sites at once.

We also discussed blogging, and especially how to set up a blog in wordpress, which has become the clear leader in this area, and is a real content management system.
Sharethis.com is a site to get code to allow you to build sharing into your blog.

As for Final Cut, what amazed me was that a MediaStorm documentary has 16 tracks, 6 for visuals and 10 for audio. They have a very clear way of organizing their work to allow them to focus on the creative work rather than spending time trying to find things. They encouraged us to establish a clear and consistent system of folders and labels. Keep similar things together.

A long day, that ended with a trip to the city to hear a powerful presentation from the founder of Charity:Water, an amazing nonprofit bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Worth checking out and an example of a nonprofit that could use the kind of work that MediaStorm produces. There are many other than news organizations with important stories to tell.