In a bid to 'practice what we preach' when writing about online environments and how they have changed society, SBS has used only hand-held and web tools to record interviews for this site.
Here is how we did it, and what we learnt about the capabilities and drawbacks of Flip video cameras, iPhones, Viddler.com and audioBoo.fm.
Video
1. Flip Mino HD
The Flip is a video camera the size of a mobile phone. Its size and weight make it fantastically transportable, and it comes with an almost equally tiny and light tripod.
Flips shoot high definition video at 720p. That means they record 720 horizontal lines of colour on each image, rather than the standard 576. The 'p' stands for progressive – that's more complicated to explain, but here is a good user-generated breakdown.
The result is video of high enough quality for use on, say, a news website, and that looks really good on YouTube. That is quite remarkable for $250.
Flips are not Internet-enabled, but they do have built-in USB which means they plug in to any device with a USB port for easy upload onto the web.
Of course, they are not without drawbacks.
They produce grainy images when shooting in anything other than strong, bright light – as you can see in this video, which was shot in an office with normal lighting.
They lack a microphone input and do not pick sound up well, so they have to be positioned very close if the person being recorded speaks quietly.
As videographers know, people move when they speak, so shooting close means parts of your subject (head, hands) may sometimes be out of the frame.
Being so small, Flips lack the stability of a camera-sized camera, and even the most still-handed operator will end up with wobbly results when shooting freehand.
Finally, as SBS found out the hard way, when the Flip's one-hour memory is full, it simply stops recording and deletes the entire video you were shooting when it reached capacity. That can really hurt.
2. Laptop and Viddler
Freelance writer Stilgherrian used his MacBook to film himself telling SBS what he thinks of online social commentary, as he sat in an alley in Sydney's inner west.
Laptops offer plenty of memory and of course instant Internet-upload, but their cameras are not generally the best.
This resulted in a hazy video despite the afternoon sun.
Stilgherrian then bypassed all the hassle of emailing large video files by quickly uploading his video to Viddler.com.
Viddler is a Web site like Qik which instantly publishes videos sent to it from a range of devices.
SBS found Stilgherrian's message on Viddler via a very simple keyword search, and copied its embed code into this article.
The video can still be found in Stilgherrian's Viddler stream here .
Audio
1. iPhone and audioBoo
Crikey's Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane used his laptop to record himself telling SBS what online environments have done for democracy, and he emailed us the file in QuickTime format.
We converted it to an AIFF and uploaded it to audioBoo.fm, which is just like Viddler for sound grabs of up to five minutes. The site accepts sound in almost all formats.
We then found the embed code for Bernard's file by clicking the button just above his grab on the audioBoo stream, and placed it in our article.
The process was not as smooth using audioBoo on an iPhone.
AudioBoo for iPhone is a user-friendly app which allows you to record through the phone's microphone, then upload your 'boo' to the Web site with one push. Along the way it lets you give your boo a title and add a picture – new or pre-snapped.
The sound quality the iPhone recorded was fine – good, even – but it took an eternity to upload the files and failed a couple of times too.
The app also does not allow boos to be saved for upload later, giving only two choices: Upload or Restart – and restart means discarding the previous file.
The five-minute limit on boos is both a blessing and a curse. It is the perfect tool for quick sound grabs which tell a story in themselves, but is no use for interviews unless you don't mind interrupting people.
