Why “video blog entries” are evil
Jun 5th 2008Wallabyasides & rants
There’s a disturbing trend at a few of the sites I follow, or used to follow: Video posts. Regular entries that would’ve lasted for a page or two of text get replaced with a wonderful multimedia version - visual effects, animation, pictures, with voiceover commentary by the video creator. Or, someone used a webcam to record video of himself reading the text he would’ve posted. There’s three reasons why I dislike that:
1) I do not care what you look or sound like. Your facial features and vocal characteristics are completely irrelevant to the humor or content of what you had to say… or else they’re not, in which case your amusing review of that particular movie gets obscured by the fact that you sound like a duck. Which do you want people to remember - your insightful comments or your dorky haircut?
2) It takes longer to watch the video than it does to read the text. Even ignoring the extra time for the video to load, I can usually read it faster in my head than you can speak it.
3) Reading the text is easily interrupted by work. (Or do I mean “work is easily interrupted by reading text”?) If you post it as a video, then either I have to dig out the headphones and hope that the boss doesn’t wander in at the wrong moment, or I save it for later. “Later” may never come.
But… but… “I worked hard to make that video!” Great. But if it took you three hours to make the video, instead of 10 minutes to write the text … how much does the video add to the humor or insight? If the answer is “not much”, then you wasted the three hours… or you could’ve spent it making the text that much better.
“A picture’s worth a thousand words, so 30 fps must be incredible!” Not really, because those 30 frames per second aren’t really showing different things. Wouldn’t it be easier to include a series of pictures? That flash animation is great, but we can probably get the gist in six panels of cartoon. (Including a clip of that one scene from that movie that someone else already posted on YouTube is different.)
So please. At least give us a text option, and feel free to include warnings about how much better it is when we can hear your very own voice quacking your very own words.