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Create Video on Phone

Background: Creating Video Content on a Mobile Phone

What does this article cover?

This Mobile Media Toolkit section covers tools and techniques that will help reporters create video reports on a mobile phone. The article also covers how to use tools to live-stream video directly from a phone to the web.

The article includes information on selecting a phone for recording video, taking and editing videos on mobile phones, and how to share videos online.

Who is this article for?

This article is for:

  • Anyone who wants to record breaking news.
  • Video reporters who want a lighter, ever-present, and inconspicuous video camera.
  • Reporters who want to stream live video.

Why should you create video content on a mobile phone?

  • Video is a powerful medium for storytelling and reporting. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones and the fact that more and more phones have the ability to record video, video reporting is accessible to an increasing number of people.
  • Mobile phones are more discreet than conventional cameras and can thus be used more surreptitiously. This allows citizen journalists and reporters to capture events where a conventional camera might not be welcome.
  • Mobile phones are connected to a network, allowing for live streaming where available (and affordable). Live streaming refers to immediate transmission of mobile video content to the web over a mobile data connection.
  • Even though there are fewer video-capable phones than camera phones, the number of video phones is growing and capturing video is getting more sophisticated.
  • Knowing how to take video on your mobile may help in unforeseeable circumstances, such as when news breaks or when you witness an event that will be hard to recreate using other media.

 

Description: Creating Video Content on Mobile Phones

In this Mobile Media Toolkit section: Recording video on mobile phones, selecting a good video camera to do so, streaming video live from mobile phones, uploading video to online video-sharing sites, editing video directly on mobile phones.

Landscape: How is Mobile Video Content Significant in Journalism and News Production Today?

Today, most mobile phones can capture video footage. This has enabled both reporters and citizens to capture footage rarely seen before. In fact, the Polk Journalism Award in 2009 was awarded to a video from Iran captured on a mobile phone. More and more journalists are using mobile phones to record video, and are also using the mobile data connection to quickly transfer video back to their newsrooms. Below, we catalog a few particular ways mobile journalists are using video reporting.

  • Everyday reporting: Journalism students Nick Wynja and Ashley Rowe used their mobile phones, some additional hardware, and VeriCorder software to cover the Vancouver Olympics. Their efforts are described in this article. Wynja gives a good description of this mobile journalism approach in this video. He notes that mobile phones were a more convenient way to record videos on the go, allowing for greater flexibility at the event than a conventional camera could offer.
  • In areas without Internet connectivity: Voices of Africa is an organization that trains video journalists to use mobile phones in reporting (read a case study about them here). One of the most valuable things about mobile phone video journalism for Voices of Africa is being able to produce and upload reports to the web from areas without connectivity to the Internet.
  • Breaking news: Stephen Quinn, in his book Mobile Journalism in the Asian Region, says that mobile journalists can cover breaking news more effectively because they can travel lightly and quickly.
  • Live streaming: The Seattle Times, an online news organization, has used mobile video reporting and live-streaming in its reporting to compete with bigger organizations with minimal cost and staff. TV stations in Brazil have done the same.
  • Interviews: The Philippines's Inquirer newspaper conducts many of its video interviews with mobiles. See, for example, this interview of Steven Quinn by a Filipino journalist.

 

How to Record Video on Phone

This section will walk you through:

1. How to select a good video phone

2. How to shoot good video on a mobile phone

3. How to transfer video off the phone

4. How to edit and upload video to the Internet

5. How to organize your published videos

The focus here is on video reporting that is not streamed live. Live video reporting is covered in the next section (How to livestream video on your mobile today).

Step 1: Select a good video phone

You don't necessarily need a very high-quality video camera on your phone to do high-quality reporting. Often, it is the story that matters more.

Most journalists today use smartphones to capture video footage. The Vancouver reporters (described above) use iPhones with some additional hardware and software to edit video on the phone itself, while Voices of Africa uses Nokia N-series smartphones. Stephen Quinn uses both iPhones and Nokia smartphones.

In short, phone hardware is constantly improving and getting cheaper, with many affordable and viable phone options available. Even with an older phone, and before considering a new phone, you may consider video enhancement software, which can offer a cheaper way to get better quality video content.

For high quality video recording on a mobile, the best phones available today feature 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second. 320x240 pixels at 15 frames per second produces acceptable web-quality video.

Lower resolutions will look grainy and pixelated without software enhancement, and video below 15 frames per second will look choppy. On the high quality end, these are some good mobile phones with excellent video cameras:

Step 2: Shooting (good) Video

When it comes to shooting video on mobile phones, the major difference between mobiles and mainstream camcorders is that mobile phones have simpler (and smaller) cameras. Thus, it is important to understand what makes for good quality video given these limitations. Here are some tools that will help you shoot better video with mobile phone cameras.

The top five tips for video-recording on mobile phones that we have found in these guides are:

  • Camera stability is key. If you have a tripod accessible, use it. If not, work on a steady grip and a stable sitting or kneeling position (here are some tips). Avoid jerky movements, and pan as slowly as possible.
  • Use an external microphone if at all possible. Mobile phone microphones are built for call-quality audio, which is not ideal especially when you are shooting from a distance. You may want to look at the tips on our recording audio on mobiles article for more.
  • Think carefully about lighting. It is best to film outside in sunlight, but make sure to keep the sun behind the back of the person filming. If you are filming inside, be sure to use many lights to fill the subject from all sides. Low resolution videos look the best when there is plentiful light.
  • If you need to pan, pan slowly to avoid jerkiness in the video. Most mobile phone video cameras do not have a digital zoom, but if yours does, it is best not to use the zoom. It is better to walk closer to the subject being filmed.
  • If you are not going to upload the video directly from your handset, use the highest resolution and quality settings your phone offers. You can later compress the video on your computer if needed. If you are uploading video directly from your handset, you may want lower quality video so you get a smaller file size.

Step 3: Getting Video off the Phone

You can often directly upload your video to online video sharing sites. We have an extensive article on publishing multimedia for more detail on how to do that. The problem with uploading large files such as videos is that transmission over the mobile network can become expensive if you don't have a bundled data plan. It can also be very slow.

You can also transfer photos and videos from a mobile phone to a tablet device, using simple hardware, software, and workflow. This video from Glen Mulcahy explains how to do this. He uses hardware tools such as Fostex AR4i audio adapter and Sennheiser MKE400 mini rifle mic, as well as software on the iPhone4 and iPad tablet. 

The other option is to transfer completed videos to your computer, and then upload them to a more public site such as YouTube.

The biggest hurdle for transferring video from mobile phones to a computer is dealing with video file formats. There are many formats of video files, and converting them to work with different programs and publishing tools can be difficult. Here are some resources to help you understand video file formats and file conversion.

  • Mashable's Video Toolbox contains a list of video format converters with short descriptions.
  • Squared5 is a conversion software that works well on Mac and Windows systems. For UNIX users, FFmpeg is a popular open source tool for video conversion (the Mac version, FFmpegX, was error-prone in our tests).
  • Two popular formats for video shot on mobiles is .3G2 or .3GP video. This article describes what these formats are and software for converting them to other formats.
  • If you want to understand video more deeply, you will need to understand 'container video formats'. These are the formats you will most likely encounter. Here is a comparison of container formats, with links to descriptions of each format.

Step 4: Editing Video

There are essentially two ways to edit videos: directly on your mobile, or on a computer after you download the videos from your mobile.

1. Editing on the phone itself :

  • The iPhone 3GS has limited video editing built in. There are also third-party video-editing software packages, namely ReelDirector and VeriCorder 1st video.
  • There is a built-in video editor on Nokia N series phones. The editor allows users to cut clips, merge different clips, add text to the beginning and end of clips, and adjust volume on video clips. A how-to article is available at AllAboutSymbian.com. For other Nokia phones, Arcsoft makes commercial software that you need to pay for which runs on Nokia phones.
  • TrakAx mobile software will let you edit videos on Windows Mobile Phones. (Note that we have not tested this tool.)
  • We did not find video editors for Android, Blackberry or Palm Pre platforms.

2. Editing Video on the Computer: Since editing video on the computer after downloading it from the mobile is no different from editing any other video, there are plenty of tools and resources available.

  • Since mobile video is often of lower quality than traditional video, basic video editing may be all that is necessary. For basic video, there are many free tools, which are reviewed in Robin Good's MasterNewMedia blog.
  • The Knight Digital media center has guides for video editing on iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and finally Adobe Premiere (all software that runs natively on computers).
  • There are numerous other guides for video editing, including this one on HowStuffWorks, and this one on about.com.
  • There are also many web-based video editing tools, which warrant special mention in this toolkit. While these tools are not accessible on mobile phones today, they are likely to be accessible on phones in the near future. The main reason these tools aren't accessible on mobile phones today is that Adobe Flash isn't supported on most mobile phones. But there is talk of Flash support on some smartphones coming up. Similarly, it is possible that many of these tools turn to other mobile-accessible front-ends (since much of the work is being down on back-end servers). A detailed review of some of these tools are at MasterNewMedia, and Hongkiat has a more recent tool round-up.

Step 5: Uploading your Video to the Web

The easiest way to upload video from your mobile phone to the web is to use your phone's data connection. There are tools to help you do this.

  • You can upload videos to YouTube using the web browser on your mobile phone, as illustrated in this how-to guide. YouTube's own guide is here. Videos uploaded to YouTube have to be shorter than ten minutes and smaller than 100 megabytes. YouTube will also censor graphic content, and content that uses copyrighted material.
  • There are other video sites that offer mobile uploads as well. If you are in South Africa, you should consider using Zoopy. Zoopy has a WAP site or a Java app that you can use to upload videos to the site. The videos are embeddable elsewhere on the web, and Zoopy is popularly viewed in South Africa. Blip.tv, which is popular among videobloggers, also allows mobile uploading using email. Blip.tv is ideal for those who upload videos on a regular basis, as they are set up to host regularly updated video shows for people.
  • Shozu and PixelPipe both offer a mobile video upload gateway to other video-hosting sites as well. With these tools, you can upload videos to almost every social media site that allows video uploading. You may want to look at our list of mobile blogging services that might do video hosting and mobile uploads as well.
  • We list many tools that let you stream live video in our how-to article on streaming live video. Almost all of those tools also allow for pre-recorded videos to be uploaded.

Another option for uploading videos is to transfer video to your computer and then upload. The advantages of this method are that you will likely pay less on data charges than if you were using a mobile, and that the upload will likely be faster. There are many online video sharing sites, as reviewed or profiled in these articles. MasterNewMedia reviews some of the online video publishing in this blog article, LightReading has their top ten video sharing sites and LifeHacker picks what they think are the best five video sharing sites.

Even when using a computer, you may be in areas where the internet connections are slow, unreliable, or expensive. In such cases, you may want to have a look at this guide to videoblogging in Cambodia, which focuses on low-bandwidth uploading tools and techniques. For low bandwidth environments, one of the things you will need to understand is compression techniques. Otherwise, keeping videos short and to the point, not using a lot of camera movement, and using simple shots instead of adding a lot of detail are good techniques to keep in mind for low bandwidth environments.

Step 6: After Uploading

After uploading your video, you will want to make sure that viewers can find your videos online. Here are some tools to help organize and aggregate your videos so they can be better found by your viewers:

  • Most video-sharing sites will provide you with your video "channel" (here is YouTube's definition of a channel) for broadcasting content. This by itself can be an important tool for sharing your videos.
  • Embed your video on your blog, website or social media presence. This simple how-to article will show you how to do so.
  • Build a video site with Miro Community. Miro Community is a platform that lets you build a video site with content from any online video-sharing site, with an admin interface that allows community members to submit and curate videos. Their feature list is extensive.
  • Use Youtube Direct to solicit video content directly to your website. If users have uploaded videos to Youtube, they can put it on your site if your site uses Youtube direct.
  • Follow Mashable's guide to video blogging, which has hints for creating an effective video blogging site.
  • Make your video mobile-accessible. To do this, have a look at our article on broadcasting Mobile Video.

 

How to Live-stream Video on Mobile Phones

This section will showcase the tools to steam live video (or "live-stream") from venues with data connections. Techniques for producing good video content are covered in our section focusing on coverage that is not live; this section will focus on tactics and tools for live coverage.

Step 1: Make sure your mobile phone is up to the task

In order to stream live video, you will need to run a specific live-streaming application on your mobile phone. You will need to make sure that your phone works with the desired live-streaming tool (see the comparison matrix below). For streaming live video, it is not as important to have a high-quality video camera on your phone. High quality video requires more bandwidth to stream, and depending on the connection at your desired venue, you may need to stream low-quality video. It is more important to ensure that your phone can record video at low quality settings if needed.

More importantly, you will want a mobile phone that supports either Wi-fi or 3G HSDPA networks (popularly known just as 3G networks). In our tests of live-streaming applications, only one application worked with the AT&T EDGE (EDGE is part of the 3G standard, but popularly differentiated from the term 3G; EDGE is faster than standard GPRS; AT&T EDGE features an average of 100kbps download) connection in New York City, while all services worked on AT&T 3G HSDPA (which features an average of 1 Mbps download) and Wi-fi.

Step 2: Prepare for Live Coverage

Remember that when you are covering something live, mistakes are not fixable. So, you need to prepare in advance.

For quick tips on how to prepare for live-streaming video from mobile phones, these guides about similar experiences are helpful: tips for live-blogging conferences and tips for live-streaming from a computer. The two guides stress three main things: advance preparation, making sure audio works well for video streaming, and familiarity with tools.

Bambuser submitted these ten tips on live streaming videos from a mobile phone:

  1. Audio: A good audio is what your viewers will perceive as most important. Try to get close to the audio source or even use an external microphone.
  2. Steadiness: Keep the camera as steady as possible – it doesn’t have to stand still but should be as steady as possible - this will prevent the video from getting too pixilated.
  3. Title: Set an appealing title on your broadcasts - this will help viewers to find your broadcasts and it will also help you to keep track of them in your personal video archive.
  4. Lighting: A general rule would be "the brighter the better".
  5. Interact: Interact with your viewers. Encourage them to leave comments and make sure you respond.
  6. Check connection: Don’t forget to check the screen for a status of your broadcast once in a while. Are you still connected, is the streaming quality still the same... Keep an eye on what Bambuser calls the "stream health". The stream health indicator – a feature on the Bambuser app – tells users how much of the video the network allows to transmit in real-time. If the percentage falls below 60%, the viewer will get a somewhat choppy experience. Consider changing the resolution or video quality under settings.
  7. On Demand: Check the quality of your on demand broadcasts and possibly enhance. On Bambuser this can be done by allowing the app to upload "complement data" after the live broadcast is finished. This way any dropped frames will be re-inserted in the video for on demand viewing, providing a smoother and better viewing experience.
  8. Location: Make sure you enable the app’s map-functionality when broadcasting. This is especially relevant and useful for streaming events such as live concerts or from a trip abroad. This way viewers can easily pinpoint where you are streaming from.
  9. Audience: With your audience in mind, make sure your broadcasts are entertaining and interesting – often, the shorter the better unless you are broadcasting a whole event for people who couldn’t attend.
  10. Permission: Should you be filming others make sure you have their consent. Even if you are not using your material commercially others still might not want to be part of a footage that can be accessed by thousands online.

For a more in-depth look, SeattleTimes.com associate producer Joe Ruiz's hour-long presentation provides many lessons and caveats from experiences live-streaming events around Seattle.

Step 3: Stream It!

To live-stream video, you need an account at one of the several platforms that let you host live video streamed from your mobile phone. When getting the account, you will be prompted to download an application to your phone.

We tested some of the most popular services that let you live-stream video, and have constructed a detailed comparison matrix comparing relevant features. A few things to note:

Livecast is the only service that worked with the AT&T EDGE network (with 100kbps download on average). All other services require a 3G (with 1Mbps download on average) or WiFi connection. KyteTV is the only one that supports languages beyond English. Supported languages in late 2009 included German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Czech.

Mobile Streaming Video Matrix Tool: Matrix Tool

 

Limitations of Creating Video Content on a Mobile Phone

  • Video uploads require data connections, which are not available everywhere even as data coverage is expanding worldwide. Where you do have a connection, video uploads generally require large amounts of data usage, which can be costly on metered plans. Video uploads can also be very slow.
  • Live streaming requires a good data connection with high bandwidth to work properly. We ran tests on AT&T USA's EDGE and HSDPA (colloquially known as 3G) networks. Only one tool in our experiments worked with the EDGE network, the slower of the two. Even high-bandwidth connections may only let you stream low quality video.
  • Video-editing software that works well on mobile phones is hard to find. Web video-editing tools are mostly Flash-based, and inaccessible on most phones.
  • Mobile video recording tends to be battery intensive, which the journalist needs to be prepared for. Videos usually also take up large amounts of storage.
  • Basic mobile phones can only record low quality video. For high quality video, you will need to invest in a high-end phone.

 

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