Story Review

In the previous post (which seems ages ago) I posted all the footage I shot with my phone during a talk by Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales in Sofia and said I’d follow up with a few, hopefully useful, tips about what to do and what not to do when shooting video with a Nokia N95 8GB. So here you are, maybe somebody will find that useful.

One thing that may cause trouble is that if somebody rings you while you’re shooting, the camera automatically stops so that you can take the call. If it happens in the wrong moment, you can miss shooting something valuable, so be warned.

From a distance, the N95’s camera captures the audio that goes with the action even better than the voice recorder. However, if you are shooting people and want to capture their expressions, you’ll need to get near to the person. Otherwise, they’ll look like poor J Wales in one of my videos. And, whereas what he is saying is much more interesting than his facial expressions, his blurred face hurts watching the videos.

Keep it short. Hit stop and then start recording again as often as possible. The N95 produces video clips in mp4 format, which is fine with YouTube. However, if you shoot for half an hour without pause, your video’s length will exceed YouTube’s 10 min cap and you’ll have to split the clip. That brings headaches of its own.

If your videos get too long, you’ll need an mp4 splitter. Finding one that is free is not easy (if you know of one, please let me know in the comments), and eventually I had to settle for a stripped-off free version of a paid-for application called Boilsoft Video Splitter. It worked well and fast, but the free version will only let you split your video in segments up to 2 min long. That, in turn, may be too short for you. In the case of J Wales’s talk, 2 min were not enough for him to wrap up any of the topics he talked about. Thus, after having split the video into 2 min bits, I needed to join the bits into 10 min clips. Which, of course, required an mp4 joiner. (Boilsoft Video Splitter does what it name suggests and not the reverse.)

Finding a free mp4 joiner was even harder than finding a free mp4 splitter. In fact, I have yet to see one. I opted for the alternative route of converting the mp4 files into avi files and then joining those together. Unlike free mp4 joiners, free avi joiners are very easy to find. I used one called Virtual Dub, which is actually a much more powerful application than simply an avi joiner. It also let me recompress the video and make the files smaller.

But Virtual Dub does not support mp4, so I had to first convert the mp4 files into avi files. For that, I used a web-based free tool called Media-Convert.

The whole splitting, converting and joining of files took up a lot of time and effort and could have been easily saved if only I’d pressed the stop button more often. So if there is one thing I’m going to take away from the experience it’s to shoot shorter videos rather than feature-length ones.

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Original image by Andrew Currie.