Fedora promoting videos

Colby Hoke choke at redhat.com
Thu Aug 14 14:26:12 UTC 2008


Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 4:33 AM, Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora at nicubunu.ro> wrote:
>   
>> I think you understand that Fedora being a community distro such a video
>> should come from the community, namely from you, me and others like us....
>> So if you want such a video, start working to make it happen: maybe write a
>> script, maybe shoot some footage with your camera, maybe do some editing
>> with video software...
>>     
>
> I think a 'truth happens' for Fedora coming out of the Red Hat side of
> the fence would not be a bad thing as long as its done right.  There
> are video production experts over there, and they do have mad skillz.
> As long as we are willing to accept that to make a video like that we
> aren't going to be dog-fooding our our video tools.  If this is
> something 'we' want I'm sure there are ways of approaching the video
> gurus inside the Red Hat fence line.
>
> If they were going to take on such a task at the behest of our
> community marketing group, I would ideally like to see some sort of
> partnership evolve such that community produced material was
> incorporated but gave the video experts a lot of creative control on
> how to use the material...including choice of digital tools to use.
> But that's just me talking.
>
> And I should clarify since I know people lurk on this list, I have
> said in the past that I don't want the Red Hat side of the fence
> leading an effort to get a Fedora community video production process
> up and running. I've said that primarily because I am afraid that the
> quality of the work they typically do is orders of magnitude above
> what we can do with in-distro tools and having them jump in early and
> gifting us with very nice, well produced videos for us to use would
> taint the discussion concerning our own toolset. Banging our
> collective heads on creating screencasts and interviews using the
> in-distro tools is an important part of a community push to move this
> toolspace forward and I didn't want to see that short-circuited by
> setting the bar on video quality for the community too high with a set
> of initial video drop.  But we have a process in place now, and it
> could be time to think about how we deal with the need for high
> production quality videos meant for re-use as marketing pieces that we
> know we don't have the toolset to build in-distro...yet.
>
> -jef
>
>   
Being one of the people that has been making the Fedora videos at Red 
Hat (there's only a handful of us), I wholly agree with Jeff on this. I 
guarantee that I will continue to make videos that highlight the 
features of Fedora and it's something I always fight for in my job. I 
totally understand what Jeff is saying by not wanting us to lead the 
charge on this. I think it's something that will need to come from the 
community and I'm working at doing stuff using OSS - it's just not where 
I need it to be for my daily job.

But, I do think that the community can make videos as good as the ones 
we make at Red Hat and I'd be willing to give advice (I recently had a 
talk with Paul Frields about shooting video, though I didn't have as 
much time to help out as I would have liked) to anyone looking to start 
shooting. My one piece of advice for everyone here right now is: audio 
is king. Bad audio and no one will care about the video. I'm much more 
willing to watch anything if I can hear what's going on.

Anyway, feel free to send me messages if you have questions - I'll try 
to answer them as quickly as possible.

Oh, and film everything! You never know what you might catch at an 
event, speech, interview, or whatever you might be filming.

-- 
Colby Alexander Hoke

Corporate Marketing
[ Producer ]

919.621.8802




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