Q&A with Mark Batey
Questions and Answers with Mark Batey
Participants:
Bill Thompson, host
Mark Batey
Audience members
Bill Thompson, chair:
So, we have the ‘hashtag’ for the day, which is #cowsinwater. “Show me the cow”
is now going to be the first thing I say to anyone who suggests we make a film
together. So thank you for that. Actually, I wanted to ask you about that – did you
just come across that, and think “Something is wrong here, ah, there are cows”
and think “This is the perfect training material”?
Mark Batey:
Yes, I did spend some work training the guys in Inverness, and had watched a lot
of their programmes to get an idea, and that was – in fairness, quite a lot of their
stuff is pretty good actually - but that was so appallingly off-beam that I just had to
grab it.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Well thank you for sharing it with us! I want to just throw this open right from the
start – you ask much better questions. Does anyone want to kick off with
interrogation of Mark here?
Audience member:
Hi Mark, I’m Nina from Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I’ve done lots of things on flip
cameras before, but audio is something – that’s the thing that freaks me out a bit. I
definitely won’t move the camera any more, but can you recommend what I should
do about audio, and maybe what equipment I should upgrade to to get a better
quality?
Mark Batey:
It’s not really a question of upgrading equipment. Sound is absolutely vital – you
can’t make a movie without really good sound. In fact, an audience will put up with
1
Q&A with Mark Batey
poor picture quality before they tolerate before bad sound quality, does that make
sense? You need to get the sound right. The best thing to do is to get the
microphone as close to what’s making the sound as you can. So if you’re doing an
interview – how close is the microphone from my mouth now? Six inches or so – if
you’ve got a very directional microphone you might get away with having it down
here, but these ones aren’t... So I think with your flip cameras – if you’re looking to
acquire any camera to shoot with, an external microphone socket into which you
can plug the cheapest clip-on mic from Maplin will do a much better job than the
built-in internal mic. Not because it’s better quality in itself, but just because you’ve
got it close to the source of the sound.
Bill Thompson, chair:
A guerrilla film-maker friend of mine Christian Payne documentally on Twitter uses
iPhones a lot for his film and always has an external mic, and as you say, if the
sounds works you put up with the shoddy video quality a lot more.
Mark Batey:
If you can find a way of monitoring the sound as you’re doing it, by having a
headphone socket – something as simple as that – and plugging your iPod
headphones into it, just to convince you not that the sound is beautiful but actually
just that it’s there – because as soon as you start plugging external gadgets in you
find that bits of wires stop working and actually you’ve recorded zero rather than
bad sound, which is the worst form of audio distortion I think, silence.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Thank you for sharing that! Somebody at the back with a question.
Audience member:
It’s actually not a question but just to add to that if that’s okay. We’ve just been
making films using a digital SLR and obviously the problem is the same with that
because the in-built audio on a digital SLR camera is terrible. We’ve just been
using a small fairly cheap digital recorder, an Edirol, which you can just hold up to
the interviewee or use a clip-on mic, and then there’s a fantastic piece of software
called DualEyes which syncs your video and your audio together for you.
2
Q&A with Mark Batey
Bill Thompson, chair:
Now does this make your professional heart quail?
Mark Batey:
No, I think I’ve heard about this – they’re a great plan. And that last bit of video
was actually shot on a Canon 5D-2 I think, and the picture quality is astonishingly
good. Actually one of the weird things with using digital SLR to shoot video, and
I’ve seen this happening myself, is that when you’re filming people what they do
instead of carrying on is they pose! They think you’re taking a still photograph of
them. And this can be a real issue because people all react to cameras in different
ways, but people react to digital stills cameras in the way... they stop.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Do you think there could be a trade in buying up old defunct cameras like this and
turning them into digital SLR cases so that people think you’re seriously filming
them when in fact you’re just using a Nikon!?
Mark Batey:
Or just a big sign saying “This is a video camera”! That would work as well.
Bill Thompson, chair:
You could pay someone to stand behind you with that sign!
Mark Batey:
Yes, good idea, maybe the intern.
Bill Thompson, chair:
I think they’re a bit busy with the flip camera. What about the idea of separating out
the soundtrack, of recording the sound separately?
Mark Batey:
3
Q&A with Mark Batey
It’s really the only way of doing it on digital SLRs, but as you say, until these bits of
software came out which did the syncing-up of taking the sound, which is on one
bit of kit and taking your pictures on another bit of kit and marrying them together
in the edit – it used to take a long time just to get your material ready for editing.
So it slowed the process down.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Thank you. Question here.
Audience Member:
I don’t know what people can recommend for editing something from a Flipshare
or from an iPhone on your PC. Very basic software, I don’t know if you can use
that.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Final Cut 10 Pro obviously(!)
Mark Batey:
I always feel nervous about recommending any particular editing platform.
Because anything I say, someone will say “Oh no, Version 9 didn’t work, you
should try the other one.” I think one of the things you should look for is something
that has got something with a recommendation for being easy to pick up, but is
large enough and well-established enough to have a bit of a community out there
that you can ask questions of. Because you’ll get stuck with it, no matter what. And
if there are active forums which you can either do a search of, to try to find out how
someone’s solved your problem already, or if it’s really something you think is a
new one that no one else has posted about – there are thousands of willing geeks
who will be delighted to answer your problems. So look for that community of
support.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Did you want to add to that, Rich? Are there any open source examples of video
editors that you like?
4
Q&A with Mark Batey
Mark Batey:
No, but there are effective free ones, aren’t there? iMovie on the Mac is practically
free, Windows Movie Maker is practically free. They’ll all let you cut pictures
together – not very sophisticatedly but they’ll do it. As soon as you start spending
about £100 on Final Cut Express or Premier Elements or whatever, it’s not a huge
amount of money and you’re starting to get really pretty sophisticated with that.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Do you want to add to that?
Audience member:
We’re also finding that some of the files we’re recording – we record poetry
readings – are massive. Massive! We can’t actually email them to each other. And
we can’t zip them! On a smartphone it’s extraordinary.
Mark Batey:
Video is big! You shouldn’t expect to. You get an hour on this and it’s 11GB. It’s
un-emailable. The only way of doing it if you want to share stuff, I think, is to
YouTube it on a private link and look at that.
Bill Thompson, chair:
There are services which will let you move very large files around, you send it to a
dropbox.
Mark Batey:
But even they won’t do gigabytes of stuff, they’re about up to 100MB if you want
the free one.
Audience Member:
On a smartphone it’s extraordinary.
Bill Thompson, chair:
5
Q&A with Mark Batey
The growth in file size is becoming an enormous challenge in terms of moving the
stuff around. That’s why you have industry initiatives like Sohonet where the
production houses in London are linked together by fibre so that they can move
these multi-gigabyte files around, why the BBC invest so much in Reef, its
backbone network. Is that going to start to affect the capabilities, the aspirations
that organisations can have about their video?
Mark Batey:
This is what file compression is about, turning your movie into something that goes
on YouTube or an H.264 movie that keeps the video quality pretty high, but lets
you move it around in a size which will go via you sending it or something like that.
But there’s no two ways about it, video takes up a load of space. You can squash
it down a bit but there comes a point where you can’t do it any more without losing
quality badly.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Any more questions?
Audience member:
It’s just a very quick question. Can I enrol in the BBC Academy?
Mark Batey:
I’ll pass you over to my colleague Eddie on that one.
Eddie Morgan, Head of College of Production, BBC Academy:
The plan is to have a series of workshops based on these six seminars, and we’d
really love to find out afterwards, either me being around, or Kim, or Jane, what
kind of practical skills you want. I think it’s been an amazing session, but I think
Mark could be talking for three days and still only be touching the surface of things.
The BBC is slightly limited by the fact that we legally can’t freely provide training to
all-comers because the private sector commercial providers of trading would
rightly and understandably cry foul at that. The BBC has to have very careful
regard to existing markets. But through this partnership we’re hoping – in a kind of
6
Q&A with Mark Batey
Trojan horse kind of a way – to create the space, the moral and legal space, to
provide training, hands-on craft training, to a wider population of people than BBC
staff. So I’m really glad you asked that, we’re working on how to do that for the
sector because we’re aware that in the absence of sessions like the last hour,
there is a risk that this partnership, which is only 18months long, might feel quite
abstract, might feel quite good but like a lot of strategic forums. We want to get
real with this craft, hands-on training. Because it’s just fantastic.
Mark Batey:
I would just add on training that it’s quite difficult to – I mean, I can’t recommend
trainers out there, I really don’t know the market – but I think what you could do is
ask potential companies which you think might be useful to you, ask them what
sort of training they do. A lot of media skills training in the past has assumed that
you already know quite a lot about television or video-making. In the first half hour
of day one they will say “Right, here’s how you do the white balance on your
camera”. And actually that’s not something to worry about for ages. The toughest
task when you pick up a camera is not “What do all the knobs and buttons do?”
because actually these cameras, when you’re starting off – switch them to
automatic and 90% of the time they’ll do a better job than you will.
What’s hard is what do you point the camera at, for how long, and why, and then
what’s my next shot going to be? It’s that constructing of sequences, framing of
interviews, how you craft the look of your stuff – you need to be making sure that
anybody that’s training you is gripped on that side of thing and not just the
technicalities of cameras.
Audience member:
I’m just wondering, if the BBC are saying that they can’t build that platform, I’m
wondering if the Arts Council has any plans to facilitate what the organisations who
are coming to these events can already do for each other. For example, the
company I work with – we produce our own video, build our own website, make
our own apps, all that sort of stuff, and yet maybe some of the stuff we don’t do so
well is reaching the audiences we’d like to reach. So we could sort of skill-share
with other organisations and we would be very happy to do that, to come in and do
video training in return for helping with marketing for example. Those kinds of
things that the Arts Council could do rather than giving us money to do it – building
those bridges.
7
Q&A with Mark Batey
Bill Thompson, chair:
Thanks for that suggestion. There’s a response...
Audience member:
Sorry I probably said this earlier as well. That actually there’s a whole host of
community media organisations that have training at the very core of what they do,
and I’d really like to be involved in a conversation about BBC Academy training
because one of the things we’re looking at is the local community media
organisation – setting up a series of training. It is mainly focused on audio, and it is
mainly focused on radio, but there are some community film makers out there who
have really strong skills and that’s part of what they want to do.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Someone else..?
Eddie Morgan, Head of College of Production, BBC Academy:
I should also say the BBC do have two free informal access training websites
which are College of Production, which I run, and the College of Journalism.
They’re not intended to be intensive, deep training, but there are some really good
tips there on everyone from how to set up a tripod to how to produce a podcast
and I’d really urge you all to go and look at that for entry-level information.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Thank you for that. There is the Building Digital Capacity for the Arts website
where links to all of these resources and to other organisations will be made
available to share that with you. All of these will be made available and there will
be links. That sort of conversation and collaboration and skill-sharing is a very
important part of what this whole initiative is trying to achieve. I think that the thing
that Mark was saying that strikes me in terms of getting content onto your website
is about scaling the project. When he’s found the website I want to ask him the
hard question which is that - there was some guidance in his talk about the size of
the project and what you need... Apart from just looking at how much money
you’ve got to spend, which is what many of us are forced to do, how do you start
8
Q&A with Mark Batey
making the decisions as to what sort of project this is going to be? How do you go
from “Oh wouldn’t it be great if we had some video about artists?” or “Wouldn’t it
be great if we had some material about the new project we’re doing on our
website?” How do you start making that hard decision, getting from that idea into
a budget?
Mark Batey:
Back to our first point I think. What do you want to say, and why do you think your
audience is going to be interested in it? So if we get back to the intern using their
iPhone to shoot stuff for the gallery – how long do you think an audience will be
happy to put up... People have turned up to the gallery, giving their views on what
they’ve seen there – how long could that movie be?
Bill Thompson, chair:
Probably about 90-100 minutes.
Mark Batey:
Absolutely! I mean, we’re talking a minute or two at the most. You can’t stand
much more than that, no matter how fascinating it is. So those are the sorts of
thinking you’ve got to get into.
Bill Thompson, chair:
Two questions at the back – we’ll take Marcus first.
Marcus Romer, Pilot Theatre:
Just to say, AudioBoo is a great tool for recording and putting it straight onto
iTunes. It’s one-click and geolocated and also photographs. I was just wondering
whether people still use that or if it’s fallen out of favour. How many people here
use AudioBoo? How many people haven’t heard of AudioBoo? Right.
Bill Thompson, chair:
We’ll show you later. There’s also iPages and SoundCloud which will let you do
similar things. So there are a number of services which will let you cheaply record,
9
Q&A with Mark Batey
occasionally edit, and upload audio material with still images. Obviously there’s
YouTube and Vimeo for video material.
Audience member:
I thought it was a good point that compression is becoming more and more
important with Google and Apple and Adobe battling it out for formats. It’s
something we’re coming across always today – Broadband is an issue still, and
rurally you have to be very careful if you’re going to start uploading video, that you
do it in code to suit the delivery. I think that’s one of the most important things
about your delivery. Because we can produce very high quality, high definition
video online, but it won’t stream to everybody. So in terms of that production value,
that’s very important to remember, that some of your audience – you have to think
about the bit-rate they can get and the streams they can get.
Bill Thompson, chair:
And I think that’s why you have to be very careful about hosting your own video on
your own website rather than using an established service like Vimeo or YouTube
who are set up to do it and know how to do it. I know it’s not quite as cool to have
a link to YouTube or an embedded link, but hey, at least you’ve got a better
chance of it working.
Audience member:
And also, the technology is making that much easier. So with Vimeo if you pay for
the premium service you can limit the domains you can embed the video in, so it
looks a lot more like it’s hosted by you, people don’t actually have to go through to
Vimeo, because you’re paying for it. And this comes down to – increasingly, if
you’re willing to pay for the services, you will get the thing that will be tailored to
your needs and there’s someone to complain to when it doesn’t work. If using a
free service you will get what you pay for. Of course, the BBC invests an
enormous amount of engineering expertise in delivering video material to people
on the widest possible range of devices. Fortunately that expertise is shared with
the wider community; they can’t buy it from the BBC because that’s part of the
standard-setting process. And that’s why it’s becoming increasingly possible to
expect that video can be delivered to whatever device people have in their hands.
Do you have any particular advice for people who are developing for mobile?
10
Q&A with Mark Batey
Mark Batey:
I would say just that my mobile is the same as anybody’s. You get outside of a WiFi zone or out of a city centre and you can forget video. It only really works if
you’re somewhere urban.
Bill Thompson, chair:
And of course only 3.9% of us have iPhones. Okay, one final question.
Audience member:
It’s more just advice, I suppose, on the hidden costs. I mean obviously there’s a
cost to set up, capturing and making your digital content. What we’re finding is
we’ve now got a growing archive of digital content and the hidden cost is storing
that, keeping that. We’re currently making about two terabytes a month. So
obviously it’s growing quite a lot in terms of how much footage we’ve got.
Mark Batey:
Why are you keeping all your raw material?
Audience member:
There are copyright issues: Liverpool Philharmonic for example, if we’re recording
an entire five or six camera shoot of an orchestral concert we’ve got an hour and a
half of footage there which is used in various archives - it’s put into future
productions’ DVDs etc. It’s just really how trustworthy, because it’s quite new, the
remote servers, the storage, the guy in Texas who’s got a server and is renting a
space – how trustworthy is that? You get told you buy drives now – they’ll just
corrode, they’ll wear out. What’s the advice on that?
Mark Batey:
I mean data security is a nightmare, isn’t it? I’m not quite sure where you start with
it. If you want to be absolutely sure you need a mirrored RAID at home, and a
mirrored RAID in a safe somewhere, and you’d need it up in the cloud as well. So
you’ve got to ask yourself to what extent you’re prepared to pay for all that stuff,
and to what extent you’ve just got to keep it for legal reasons – in which case
11
Q&A with Mark Batey
maybe you want to spend some money on squashing it up, compressing it and
making it more manageable. If you actually want to reversion it then you need to
keep it in its full uncompressed form and that’s expensive – are you sure you really
need to do that? Maybe you do...
Bill Thompson, chair:
Datatape – LTO 4 Format is very nice. You can buy yourself a robot who will
manage all your tapes – really cool!
Audience member:
Retrocartidges.
Bill Thompson, chair:
I think the question of data formats is too big for us this afternoon. I’m going to
draw things to a close there. Mark, thank you so much for bringing the tech, for
posing some really interesting questions and I hope for framing people’s
discussions as they’ve move forward about how they want to engage in making
video material. So thank you very much Mark Batey.
12