Video Insights from Crystal Cruises

We are aboard the Crystal Serenity as it makes its way around the world. We're running video courses on board for the guests.  This is in partnership with The Travel Channel.

Although we've run sessions with Vail Ski Resorts, we've never done the cruise ship thing before, and it is different.

Most people who come to the TCA want, in some way, to be TV producers. The people on Crystal Cruises just want to make better home video, particularly when they travel.

And as they are travelling around the world, they have a chance to make some compelling stuff.

Over the past two days we've had an interesting kind of focus group - a chance to be exposed to people who are not aspiring videojournalists, but rather regular folks with video cameras.

And they all say the same thing - so it is worth listening to.

They shoot tons of video when they travel but they never watch it at home.

Let alone inflict on their friends and family.

The reason is they shoot in real time.

And they end up with endless hours of dribble.

Since its inception, photography has been easy to edit.

Even in the days when you sent the photos to Kodak for processing, you might put two or three in your photo album, and you discarded the rest - or stuck them in a shoe box, never to be seen again.

In those days, you only got 36 exposures to a roll, or 24, so no one really shot all that much.

As digital came to dominate, the limitation imposed by film went south, but the ability to edit did not. in fact, it was enhanced. Now, all you had to do was delete. Or more likely, you would email the ones you found interesting, and the rest eventually just vanished, or were simply never seen again.

With video, it was different.

Video was linear. 

And editing was almost completely uknonw.

For these folks, it still is.

But I think there is something here. If people can learn to a) shoot with economy instead of recording every single thing that happens, and b) learn to use some very basic editing software, then I think we can change the way that home video is used.

And maybe lift the curse of Home Movies forever.