Pod casting and vod casting made easy

Sorry I couldn't be at the two day Ingenious Women training in York but here is some advice on equipment if you're interested in exploring multi-media content and making podcasts or short films for a website.

Podcasts. The Zoom H2 is an inexpensive, lightweight, good quality digital audio recorder and easy to use. See reviews on Amazon. I've recorded material on this for the Planet Earth podcast and it's worked great.  If you don't want to learn how to edit the material (via free software such as Audacity for instance) then practice doing short presentations  (2-3 minutes) in one take.

For in-vision material try a Flip video camera. Tiny, lightweight and good quality pictures starting from around £70 upwards on Amazon. Again, make small short  presentations about your work so that there's no need to edit as it's all in one take.  So practice and rehearse. You can train it on yourself and then pan the camera to a bridge, piece of equipment, landscape etc as the microphone can pick up your commentary. No sudden movements so keep any tracking shots slow and steady.

The latest Zoom Q3 is capable of doing both the above. You can record just audio for a podcast and use it for video work too. We've just bought one of these and so far impressed with it. It's up to you what you begin with.  If you know you only want to make podcasts then a Zoom H2 is perfect. If both go straight for the Q3. 

For a great example of someone else holding the camera with a scientist giving a demo (all in one take) see http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/multimedia/story.aspx?id=851

This is an example of doing an intro yourself and then showing the landscape and focusing into the subject of an interview http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/multimedia/story.aspx?id=789 (Message to self, wear more make up next time)

And here's what you can do with video editing and the addition of commentary http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/multimedia/story.aspx?id=783

Remember, don't try to say or do too much. Focus in on one particular aspect. The aim of these is to add bonus content not to explain the entire story/engineering project. That's for a documentary to do. So think about something that warrants a closer look.

Hope this inspires you to have a go yourself and good luck!

Sue