Nobody likes a close talker.

Keep your distance from the camera. If your vidcast involves speaking directly to your audience, make sure you’ve set a good distance between yourself and the camera.

Of course, if you’re too far away, the connection between audience and subject is difficult to maintain, like you’re straining to see someone from far away, no matter how high the video resolution.

But what’s equally annoying is watching a vidcaster whose face occupies too much of the screen.

WebbAlert is a perfect example of this. Even if you’re pretty like Morgan Webb, having your face that close to the camera just feels weird. Head movements feel exaggerated when that’s all you see. It’s like watching a floating face speak to you. There’s just something terribly eerie about that.

While she’s been in Tokyo and filming from her hotel room, she’s been farther away from the camera, making for a much more comfortable vidcast.

Look at the distance between the news anchors on CNN and the camera. You see enough of them that you don’t feel too close, but they fill enough of the screen that you don’t feel like you’re spying on them from far away.

We’ll have to wait and see whether tomorrow’s episode of WebbAlert will have her face-to-face with the audience again, but I’m hoping that she’ll have learned from her past few Tokyo shows, and will adapt her regular broadcasts.

If you could call it a debate.

Information and link to download audio of the debate are here.

Selected summarizing quotes:

“It’s not better, it’s the way it is.” — Scott

“The signal to noise ratio is going to change.” — Howard

Scott’s made his success by podcasting his novels, gaining him exposure and a loyal audience. This translates into book sales. Obviously, then, he’s in favor of releasing content for free.

Howard feels that, while this is all well and good for now, once publishers are no longer trying to stop authors from releasing things for free and, instead, force them to, there will simply be so many choices out there that it will become more and more difficult for authors to speak to a large section of the culture. And the publishers, as the moderator suggested, will expect authors to bring their fanbases with them, instead of using their clout and money to create an audience through publicity and distribution.

Howard may have a point, here, when it comes to the expectations of publishers. But Scott’s quote up above is really the best argument. The industry’s evolving, and Howard mentioned that evolution doesn’t necessarily mean that things will get better, they’ll only get different.

But that’s simply the way it is.

Authors like Scott Sigler and Cory Doctorow are on the leading edge, and they’re the ones that stand to benefit the most from this trend. Eventually, everyone will be doing it, and then no one will stand to benefit.

What will happen then?

Someone else will figure out a new way to make money, and others will follow. What appears to be so difficult for people like Howard Hendrix to understand is that, yes, trends can make some people suffer and some people succeed. But once everyone tries to cash in, it merely changes again.

Creative Commons may not, in fact, be the end-all-be-all, the one final answer to problems of distribution and fortune-making. It might just be a temporary fad with which some people will create large fanbases. But someone else, somewhere, someday, will find another way to create popularity and money.

Maybe some science-fiction author will try to get even closer to the fans than they’re able to with only a blog, and form an entire social network around themselves, or their book. Max Barry created the game NationStates to sell his book Jennifer Government a few years back. Will every author have to invest that kind of time?

Who knows? Maybe they will. And then they’ll all start doing it, it will stop working, and then, surprise surprise: Someone will do something else.

As Ian Clarke once said, loosely quoted, ‘If you’re selling water in the desert and it starts raining, it’s time to change your business model.’

Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, and David Prager’s Revision3 webTV network suffers from a number of problems that make the network disappointing and disjointed.

Offering an enormously wide variety of programming, from a cooking show to Photoshop tutorials, they certainly don’t suffer from lack of choice. If anything, they suffer from far too much of it.

The 37Signals people have often spoken of the problems with offering too many choices. Revision3’s viewer base is not so easily confused that so many choices may alone discourage them, but by spreading Rev3’s resources over so many programs, they’ve created many mediocre products instead of a few excellent core ones.

The cooking show Ctrl-Alt-Chicken hasn’t produced a new episode in months, and neither has thebroken, a show that preceded the network itself. And the production values vary widely between shows, with the Totally Rad Show featuring an impressively professional feel, while Infected’s feel is anything but.

The Totally Rad Show has its own problems, though, with most episodes having about 20-30 minutes of real content and humor, yet runtimes of about an hour. I often find myself fast-forwarding through the low points, wishing that their editor had taken care of that already.

The site also doesn’t offer very good donation arrangements, either. To become an “Upgraded Member” of the site, you can either donate $5 a month, $10/month, or $50/year. There is no option to make a single lump donation, and all donation plans offer the same perks (which really only amount to early video releases and access to their one ‘member’s only’ video, the Revision3 Gazette). Their monthly donation plans are a lot of commitment on the part of the viewer, without much commitment from the network. There’s really no guarantee that all shows will update regularly, so there’s no guarantee that you’ll get what you’ll pay for.

An easy fix for this would be allowing for single, lump donations, but since this isn’t offered, they can expect that most people won’t pay them anything. Clearly they’re hoping that those who would prefer to just donate once will see no other option and just sign up to donate regularly, but this won’t happen. Those people, like myself, simply won’t donate at all.

Offering exclusive content for members won’t do much, either, because there’s no preview of that content. I can’t see any of the Revision3 Gazette, so I have no idea if it’s worth paying for. It certainly doesn’t sound like it, so I’m not going to pay for the privilege of finding out whether I’ve spent my money wisely.

Revision3 needs to pare down their content or restart stagnating programs (like they did with Systm). The shotgun approach to content doesn’t work when there isn’t a steady stream of it, or at least of quality content.

And they really need to provide better payment options, with more perks. Most people want to support things they enjoy, but they’re not going to go out of their way to do it.

I’m pretty certain that many people will disagree with my opinions here, so please post your comments and I may do a followup post based on your thoughts.

While looking up information about how Panasonic’s HVX-200 performs in Low Light, I came across a tip from HVX-200 guru Barry Green suggesting use of a “MicLight”.

The MicLight is a round disc with 48 LED lights. It’s designed to fit around a camera’s mounted shotgun microphone, making it easy to get higher quality lighting in bad situations (particularly at night). The MicLight site advertises “Pro Quality 5600K LEDs” and says it is “equivalent to 50w camera light”. Powered by three AAA batteries, it’s also fairly long lasting. I’ve read some accounts suggesting it can run consistently over multiple days.

There’s one catch though - it costs a paltry $149. Yeah, $149. For a bunch of LED lights arranged in a circle.

Luckily for us though, Barry made another suggestion: “just search for 48 LED camping light.” Armed with that information I was able to find that, sure enough, the “MicLight” is nothing more than a rebranded camping light that’s usually stuck on umbrellas and that sort of thing. Clever, MicLight. Someone give these people an award for creative use of capitalism.

The unbranded MicLight is being sold for as little as $5 on eBay, but you can find a pretty stable supply online for about $10 a piece. This seems like a really good deal for what could be a really effective way to resolve some low light problems.