Way back in the previous century — the late 90s, to be more specific — I worked for my very first startup, which was one of the fairly rare ones of that era that raised VC money without leaving Portland.1
That startup produced online MBA courses in partnership with actual business schools (Univ. of Adelaide and Univ. Texas Austin, IIRC) with a mix of written, interactive, and multimedia content.
That’s where I came in. My nominal job title was “Media Production Assistant,” which meant I was supposed to maintain the casting list, production schedules, scripts, and asset library we used to make the audio and video clips that went along with the online classes.2
This was also the period when MiniDV cameras and Final Cut Pro were dropping the cost and learning curve associated with video production. I ended up developing a proposal and then taking the lead on building us a PowerPC + FCP + Canon GL-1 kit to do fast-and-cheap production of short-form videos.
So for a brief period I got to do not just the production planning but the editing and post-processing needed to get our videos ready to ship as part of new courses. (Several months later I was poached by the dev team once they found out I knew Java, but that’s a separate story.)
I haven’t really gone back to video production since then, but multimedia creation (photography in particular) has stuck with me. Back in the early to mid-2010s I did a fair bit of event photography for political campaigns and activism groups I volunteered for; now I’m hoping to dip a toe back into the video space to do something similar for the modern online media ecosystem.
Enter my latest bit of gear, acquired in trade for some unused Fujifilm kit that had been collecting dust in my photo cabinet:
Video is an entirely different practice and ecosystem of tools and gear from still photography, despite the cameras themselves being increasingly converged. The GH6 handles very much like my G9, which means the physical control layout is easy, but even something as fundamental as focusing requires re-learning a lot: using MF for mid-distance, not just close-up, synchronizing sound and video feeds, and wrangling an order of magnitude more raw data.
Building out the kit is basically catnip for a gearhead like me, but getting to a point where I can produce reasonable video content is going to take a minute.
Footnotes
Section titled “Footnotes”-
The founder was a first-time startup CEO, and made a lot of the kinds of choices (good and bad) you’d expect of someone handed a big pile of money on the eve of the OG dot-com crash. I made it about a year, and the company folded not too long after I left. ↩
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This being the 90s, most of our customers were still using dialup, so there was no way to reliably stream the hours of video that went into a given class. So we shipped a CD-ROM full of media files with a Macromedia Shockwave “player” that could weave together XML fetched from our servers with the local content. It actually worked shockingly well. ↩