Power of Video Editing and Distorting the Truth

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Great article on NPR about Ron Shiller, the NPR executive who resigned left after an embarrassing undercover video came out about him last week. This story talks about exactly how the video editing manipulated what was said through simple non truths or withholding information.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134525412/Segments-Of-NPR-Gotcha-Video-Taken-Out-Of-Context?ft=1&f=3&sc=17

Misc info from the Calumet sound workshop with Richard Newman

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Note that most of this is correct terminology but some is, well, my paraphrases with terms that make more sense to me.

He says that the chain Guitar Workshop has good audio equipment at good prices.  In SF and El Cerrito.

His workflow for video editing:

1-complete the editing in Final Cut – do all the cuts, etc, that you’re going to do before you move on.  [You can do this in iMovie, too.]

2-export the sound from the video to Garage Band [or other audio editing software] where you fix the sound quality,  add sound effects, etc.  [iMovie, obviously, is designed to do this.]  You can’t cut (or expand) either of these or they won’t sync any more, so it’s critical that you don’t do this until you’re completely finished with edits.

3-then re-combine the new sound and the video in Final Cut.  [If you can’t remove  the original audio track in whatever software you use, you can turn the volume down all the way and add the new audio track.]

He uses a dog clicker and keeps the click on both sound and video tracks till the very end –so that he can use it to sync the sound and video.

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For March 16

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a. Finish presentations of student work from last week

b. Semiotics, more:

Barthes, R. (2003). Rhetoric of the image. In L. Wells (Ed.), The photography reader. London: Routledge.  (Not my scan)

c. Editing

We are all used to editing ourselves, such as when we write papers.

We also do a form of editing when we forward information – posting, retweeting, whatever we do to pass on information from a source other than ourselves.  This is similar to the kind of editing that, say, news media editors do in deciding what stories to cover, what to print (or post), where to place stories on a page or a timeline, and so forth. Editors make decisions about both content and emphasis.

In creating multimedia products we are editing, in several ways. We do a form of editing when we decide what media content to make: photos, video, interviews.

We do another form of editing when we make selections among the available content. We may take 10 minutes of a person talking and reduce that to two. We decide what’s most important (for our purposes) in what they said. With photos, we not only pick images that tell our story, but we may pick those in which our subjects (human or not) look the way we want them.  We may pick flattering images, or unflattering ones.

We also make editing decisions in our post-processing of media. In audio, we take out their pauses, their “ums” – we may make them sound better.   In processing images, we make decisions have to make decisions in the processing that affect how subjects look – e.g., the infamous OJ Simpson news magazine cover images.

Finally, we make editing decisions in putting all the pieces together. We’ve talked about the power of sound; and about montage and the meanings created from sequencing.

This week we will look more closely at editing.  It is a part of our decisions about how we interpret and present what we observe.  It also has implications for our relations with our participants and how we represent them.

Most of the discussions that I found about this topic relate to ethics – clearly an important aspect of this topic, but not the only one relevant to us.

  • Liz Danzico. 2010. BETWEEN THE LINES: The art of editing: the new old skills for a curated life. interactions 17, 1 (January 2010), 16-19. This overlaps with the topics of interest for us.
  • Barrett Golding,From Edit to Air. November 16th, 2001. Special Feature w/ Hearing Voices. A concrete example of editing for radio.

Abstract: Below are three versions of a radio script for Savvy Traveler, the fifth part of a series about bicycling the Lewis & Clark Trail. The left-hand column is the first draft. The middle is the revision based on the comments of the SavTrav Editor, Celeste Wesson. On the right is the final broadcast version, revised after one more editing session. AX stands for actualities (field recording of interviews, sounds, musics); TRAX are my narration tracks. All AX times are actual; times for TRAX are guessed in the first two drafts, and actual for in the final.

Below are from the perspectives of journalism and oral history, not social science research. But very useful.

Tutorials on Media-Making and Tools

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This is linked from our blog but I had forgotten —
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/
They have online tutorials on Final Cut Pro, audio editing including Garage Band and Audacity, Photoshop, Soundslides…and so forth.

There are also tutorials on making media, not just tools.  I skimmed through the one on making video — started really obvious, but had some good advice, points I hadn’t thought about.  I think it’s worth going through their tutorials (which it’s easy to to quickly) for various media, just to see what they may say that you don’t already know. Especially, tof course, for whatever media you plan to use, but others as well.

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In class, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about the ethics and privacy issues of showing people in photographs and the various workarounds that people have come up with.

Yesterday, I was reminded about something that I saw on the Cooper website. I can’t find the detail that I was looking for, but this is similar (http://www.cooper.com/#approach:scenarios).

It looks like they take a photograph (with the person in it), and then draw over the person.  I believe that one of the reasons that they do it to make the image more generic for prototyping purposes, but I think it’s a great way to show a person within an environment without making that person identifiable.

Of course, this technique depends on your drawing skills, but I wanted to put it out there as an option.