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A post about my experience using the Nokia N86 8MP to videoblog and photoblog a film festival last weekend.
I’m just back from four days by the sea in Brittany, at the 20th Dinard Festival of British Film. 70+ producers, directors, actors and press were flown over by the Festival to network, sell, drink champagne and present their films to an eager French public. There were 7 cinemas showing 45 films over four days from 10am to 1am, and all the screenings I went to were packed.
The gig was a hand-me-down via Mike and Christian. McAinsh PR wanted someone to cover the festival ‘for Twitter‘ – to tweet during the festival and post video, photos and audio. That’s basically what I do – creative mobile videoblogging, at Twittervlog.tv – and I’ve been a short filmmaker for 15 years, with a keen interest in British cinema, so it was a good fit.
After my experience last month on the N86 Twestival Tour, I was a bit unsure about the N86. It appears to deliver everything I dream of – and the photo, video and audio quality *are* fantastic – but they’ve removed the video editor completely now (RAAAAAAAAA), mobile uploading was a nightmare, and the battery life was unbelievably bad.
There was a well-timed firmware upgrade last week, though, so I thought I’d give it another try – and WOMWorld Nokia (at 1000heads) kindly sorted me out with one to borrow for the weekend.
I’ll get my big gripe out of the way first – the battery life is still abysmal. I left home with it fully charged (honestly) at 6am, took and uploaded one photo, one 12 second video, spent 20-30 mins online on my laptop via Joikuspot Light – and the battery died at 9am, before I’d even got on the flight. Three hours. And this was not dissimilar to my experience of using it on the N86 Tour, when we all spent a lot of time stressing about how recharge and/or upload.
In this case, it was definitely Joikuspot that drained it (though I’d turned it off when I finished), so I stopped using it – but as I discovered over the weekend, the camera also sucks a *lot* of power. And uploading via wifi is pretty punishing as well – seemingly much worse than my N93, N95 8GB or N82. I spent quite a few hours plugged into the wall at the Palais des Arts while uploading, which kind of defeats the point of mobile videoblogging and wifi, n’est ce pas?
Once I’d got myself into a routine of recharging it constantly, though, I started to have a lot of fun. Since this is really for you geeks, I’ll stick to the tech stuff rather than the film stuff – you can watch my interviews with the filmmakers on the Posterous blog I set up:
http://dinard.posterous.com
- MY TOOLS: -
THE NOKIA N86 8MP
is my next phone, for sure. I was holding out to see if I wanted to get the N900 – but not any more. Even though I’m doing less videoblogging than I used to, the N86 is a wonderful all-purpose device, for family photos or video art.
Photo quality
The photos, while subject to the shake and motion blur that any cameraphone is liable to, beat the hell out of any other phone pictures I’ve seen. This snap of Sally Hawkins should never have turned out so well and so clear – I was gushing like a girl to her about how much I loved Happy Go Lucky. Then I sort of waved the phone in her direction, stabbed the button and ran away.
Video quality
The videos are – finally – an improvement on the colour and quality of the N93. I love my N93, but I’ve been bored of its muted colour reproduction for years, now. This is like a long drink for a thirsty man – videos shot on the N86 can look as good as those shot on a Canon Ixus/Powershot.
Low light performance
And the low light performance – always a huge flaw in Nokia video thus far – is phenomenal – perhaps as good as Canon. Nokia have thoughtfully included a proper lens cap, too – a massive relief after the nightmare snap-off-and-lose cap on the N93, the ridiculous capless N95 8GB which scratched to pieces in your pocket, or the recessed, dust-collecting and hard-to-clean N82. (Shocking that I should be so happy about something so basic, but they’ve been getting it wrong for so long).
Video settings
Having said all that about the colour and quality, I actually decided to shoot most of my videos at “Email High Quality (320×240 res)” rather than “TV High Quality” (640×480 res) to keep the file sizes down for uploading – giving a slightly reduced picture quality, but still pretty stellar for a cameraphone. I’m not sure I would have done this with a lower quality phone – I would have wanted to max out the quality for a professional gig like this.
Black and white video
I also shot a bunch of stuff in black and white. Both pictures and video. I decided to do the interviews with filmmakers in black and white for a few reasons, but mostly just because I thought it’d look nice and a bit different. I’ve been playing with black and white phone videos on Twittervlog for years. Those that weren’t shot in black and white (mostly exteriors & scenery) were often shot with the Vivid colour setting, which makes the primary colours really pop – it was good on the N82, and even better here, with a better lens & processor, I guess.
Custom black and white stills settings
There’s a custom Scene setting for stills photos, which allows you to play with things like exposure and contrast, and also add some effects. I just created a custom black and white setting that would give me nice blacks – you can see how well it worked in my photos of director Shane Meadows & producer Mark Herbert, and my photo of the winners on stage. The latter was in a dark auditorium, on my knees, crowded in among press, without flash. If you go really close in, you’ll see motion blur and ‘grain’ – the lines aren’t clean – but at medium size, it looks lovely for a photo that was shot in the phone and sent straight up to the web.
Panoramics
And the panoramic feature is *fun*! I shot some scenes of the beach, and of various press calls. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and the quality is really fantastic.
Audio interview with John Hurt
I missed my big opportunity to interview John Hurt on video because of my battery shenanigans, which was awful. And my second chance was thwarted because he had a cough and cold (which he’s given to me! I have The Elephant Man’s cold!) and didn’t want to appear on video. So I recorded an audio interview using the Nokia Voice Recorder. The mic on the N86 is OK, and it picked up his quiet coldy voice while we sat in a bar. But the files are recorded in AMR format, and I needed them to be in MP3 to post to Posterous. I couldn’t find a mobile app to do this, frustratingly – there must be one out there! – and didn’t have a laptop with me to convert them – so they’re still on the phone, awaiting conversion. (It’s a boring interview anyway, only really worth uploading at the time). Does anybody know any better solutions for recording & posting audio interviews on an N86?
What I really wanted was Audioboo, of course – but I don’t have an iPhone (and I can’t afford to sign up for a long contract with O2 or Vodafone or Orange just to get one, to do one single Audioboo interview). It’s irritating that there isn’t an Audioboo app for anything other than iPhone. Nokia have, what, 45% of the smartphone market? iPhone has about 10%. If you know the people at Audioboo, tell them to get with the program and come on in for the big win.
THE BIG WIN
Oops, I almost ended my thoughts on the N86 with a rant about audio. When actually, the real takeaway from this experience is that the N86 is now the ultimate mobile videoblogging tool. If not the ultimate videoblogging tool, full stop. With a spare battery in my bag, it will be my weapon of choice.
As for the rest…
POSTEROUS
was a revelation. The perfect movlogging counterpart to the N86.
It’s pretty much a polished pre-packaged version of what I’ve been hacking together for years with Blogger and Wordpress and Blip.tv and Flickr and Twitterfeed – to allow me to videoblog direct from my phone to my blog and to Twitter. It’s Twittervlog 2.0! It was such a relief just to be able to set it all up in quarter of an hour and let it run.
And it’s very well SEO’d, too – within half an hour of creating the blog, it in the top 15 Google results for Dinard Festival, and top for Dinard videoblog, Dinard video, Dinard blog, etc. So when people asked me where I was posting, I could just say “Google ‘Dinard videoblog’ ”
PIXELPIPE
is my other new favourite mobile videoblogging toy. Basically, it’s a tool for uploading to *everywhere*.
It didn’t work for Vikki or me on the N86 Tour – videos would stall, then appear to upload, and then disappear – and we wasted a massive amount of time trying in vain to fix it. But this time – and perhaps it’s something to do with the Firmware upgrade – it was AMAZING.
It integrates with the Nokia Share app, so you can upload media to multiple destinations in just a couple of clicks. And the progress shows on your phone desktop.
I used it to upload by default to Posterous, Blip.tv, Ovi Share, Viddler and Myspace. Posterous then in turn autoposted to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr and Twitter. Over the 4 days, I got about 3000 page views on Posterous, and then about another 1000 via the other services. Which is exactly the kind of breadth I think the Festival wanted from online coverage.
12SECONDS.TV via custom Pixelpipe routing tags
I also set up a custom Pixelpipe Routing Tag (more info here), so that I could bypass the default destination settings for short 12 seconds videos. I created a custom tag “@12″, which sent my 12 second video clips to both 12seconds.tv and Blip.tv, but nowhere else.
Actually, thinking about it now, I should have just uploaded those to Posterous, too – but I didn’t want to spam my Twitter timeline with posts from both 12seconds and Posterous. Whereas actually I should have just turned off the 12seconds Twitter notifications. By the stats, I can see that lots of visitors to the blog missed out on all my 12seconds videos. I think what I’ll do now is embed a 12seconds player on the Posterous blog. At the very least, I should have embedded a sidebar 12seconds player on the blog, like I’ve done at Twittervlog.tv
POSTEROUS PICTURE GALLERIES via email uploading
Occasionally, I used Gmail instead of Pixelpipe to post pictures from the phone to Posterous (and so to Flickr) so that Posterous would group them into one of their cool little galleries. As it turned out, I had some rotation issues with Portrait pictures – the N86 wasn’t recording Portraits as such in the EXIF data, it seems – so I ended up having to replace most of my Posterous galleries with Flickr embeds. (you can’t edit or even rotate your pics in Posterous – hmm)
QIK LIVE STREAMING
I have to say, I’ve always really hated Qik – and this experience has not changed my mind. Why would I want to do a shitty quality live feed, when I can do a great quality video with great sound and upload it almost immediately afterwards? Most of the time, the Qik stream doesn’t work Live for viewers, anyway – it stutters and buffers, and they end up having to watch it later if they can be bothered to return. I did a Qik of Phil doing free hugs in Helsinki on the N86 Tour, which got a couple of thousand views, so I thought I’d give it a try for the opening ceremony of the Festival. It rendered the French/English banter of the hosts completely unintelligible, and made a glamourous gala event look like a school play shot on a first generation LG video phone. I’ve heard Phil and Vlad enthuse about Bambuser – is it significantly better quality? Because I certainly won’t be using Qik again in a hurry.
GRAVITY
I normally just use the Twitter mobile web site on my own N82. I’ve heard everybody raving about what a great Twitter app Gravity is – but on the N86 Twestival Tour, I didn’t get on very well with it at all – I think I was being a bit stupid, because it took me about 10 minutes to figure out that I just needed to start typing in order to Tweet. This time, though, it was indispensable – I needed to monitor replies and DMs (invisible via the mobile web site, for some reason) and tweet on the run. I’ll be using it on my own phone from now on. I had to pay to install it on the borrowed N86 and register its EMEI, so I’ll have to buy it again, I think. But it’s worth it.
BLIP.TV
is by far the best video sharing service. I copied all my videos to Blip.tv as well as Posterous and 12seconds, so that I could use Blip’s amazing Show Player to easily share them all together. It allows you to create a Flash player with a custom playlist of videos, and a list of episodes on the right hand side of the player for viewers to browse through (see below). You can custom brand & colour it, and either make it run off a custom Playlist, or just show your latest episodes. You can also set it to show your last video first, or your first video first. I’ve embedded one in a post on Twittervlog – which meant my regular subscribers (most of whom probably wouldn’t be particularly interested in Dinard) could keep up with all my videos from within one single post if they wanted, without having the feed spammed with dozens of separate video posts, pushing all my regular videoblog posts way down into the archives.
Blip Blog Autocrossposting
One other great thing about Blip for mobile videoblogging is that they have a mobile autocrossposting feature. I didn’t use it this time, because I was using Posterous – but if you’re using something else, you can set Blip up to receive your video file via Pixelpipe, and once it’s finished processing Blip will autopost it to your blog (all major types supported) as a Flash player in a post, with Subject, Description and tags – and they’ll include the original file as a link & podcast enclosure.
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OK. That’s enough about my tools. Thanks for inspecting them. I hope that some of this is useful.
Please be forthcoming with any questions, comments, additional suggestions for tools, or criticisms of my methods as unsound.
