China based DSLR News shooter Jonah Kessel discusses the issues he faced with language and translation on his latest DSLR video shorts

The Fate of Old Beijing: CH. 1 – A Disappearing World from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Working in foreign countries journalists encounter many problems with language barriers. However, video journalists face even more cross-cultural communication obstacles to hurdle.

I’ve worked in a number of different countries; however, a recent project taught me more about language issues in relationship to video production in a foreign country than any project I have been part of in the past.

The core of this project was three videos all shot on Canon DSLRs with a combined running time of about 18 minutes. 18 minutes of cut video from about 320 GB of footage covering redevelopment and cultural heritage areas in China’s rapidly modernizing capital. While colleague Kit Gillet and myself speak some Chinese (he, far better than I) when doing interviews we require translators to make sure we understand what is being communicated to us accurately. This is normal; however, its just the tip of the iceberg in the process from street interview to streaming video.

Translation as it relates to video production breaks down into a couple different areas of core concern in my mind. Live translation, transcribing, the decision of subtitling vs. voice over and accuracy.

LIVE TRANSLATION: While we hire native Chinese speakers to work along side of us while we do interviews, the key in video interviews with translators is to make sure they aren’t speaking when you’re subject is speaking. This can be extremely difficult when a conversation is going on. You have the choice to let the subject speak for long periods of time, followed by a lengthy translation — in effect, ruining the possible flow of conversation you might have with your subject. Or, you can have them translate after every statement, breaking up the video into twice as much content as you need as well as the possibility of having messy In’s and Out’s in your video clips. Often, our translator would be telling us what was said — when the subject jumps in and began talking again. Now you have multiple voices in multiple languages at the beginning of your clip. So training your fixer or translator in video journalism is extremely helpful here, but even the best of them can’t stop a subject from speaking while they are translating. In this production a lot of clips came out unusable with events like this.

TRANSCRIBING: Sometimes I tell people I do this and they think I’m nuts. However, let’s say you just completed 15, 20 minute interviews. That’s a lot of information to process and to create a smooth narrative over 18 minutes, it’s pretty helpful to have everything typed out. At that point you can lay everything out and start piecing together the interviews like a puzzle. This means all interviews need to be translated and transcribed. While I know plenty of people who don’t do this, for me its very helpful to know all of my assets in storytelling — and every bit of recorded information is an asset.

The Fate of Old Beijing: CH. 2 – David vs. Goliath from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

SUBTITLING vs. VOICE OVER: After finishing this project a major (unnamed) newspaper enquired about republishing the series. However, the style of this newspaper is to use voice over rather than subtitling. The normal thing you see here is the voice starting at full volume and within one second dropping down to a hardly audible level so the English voice can be heard easily. While this makes information accessible to people who can’t be bothered to read, it creates a lot of problems which makes me lean strongly toward subtitling:

• Immediately by using voice over you might say: you are taking away your subject’s voice. When we started in on this project, one of our big goals was to give the Chinese residents of this issue a voice – or a venue to speak. In past video coverage of the issue, the people who mattered the most had often been left out. So when the the unnamed newspaper requested a version with voice over, I was against it. Even if people couldn’t understand the language, they can understand tonality and learn about a subject based upon the sound of their voice. At the end of the second movie, one of our subjects cries. I asked my colleague, “Does the person doing the voice over have to pretend to cry? Is it possible to make this believable?” The answer we decided, was – no.
• The next thing I learned very quickly, it doesn’t take the same amount of time to say something in one language than in another language. Therefore, you are put into the position where you essentially cut the actual voice of your subject whenever the English happens to be done speaking. In many ways, this makes video a little less honest.
• By using subtitles you make information accessible to people who speak both languages, not just a single audience. When thinking of the 1.4 billion possible audience members in China, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to make the information inaccessible to them.
• On the extreme downside by using subtitles, you clutter the screen. With moving visuals and multiple languages going on this can make it either difficult to read or pay attention to the video.
• However, in some cases voice over can work well when the person doing the voice over has an accent from that country. A great example of this done well, is in Dan Chung’s video Mongolia Racer. The voice of the racer with the Mongolian accent makes the voice over fit in much more naturally and arguably adds to the production rather than harming it.

The reasons above pushed us towards subtitling, be it ruining chances to be published in certain venues but being a little more true to our goals. Once you go down this route you encounter another world of problems technically and grammatically. Having to fit a lot of words on the screen in a short time, or not having enough words during another moment — subtitles can really be tricky to fit into your edits. Furthermore, to line up the words with what subjects are saying, when they are saying it can be difficult if not impossible due to varying sentence structure of languages.

The Fate of Old Beijing: CH. 3 – Beyond the Alleys from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

ACCURACY: Foremost we were worried about accuracy of the translation. However, this is very difficult given the nuance of language and the fact that direct translations don’t make sense. So the language has to be cultural adapted to a certain degree to make sense to the audience. This is a problem for both visual and print journalists. Back when I used to work at Chinese state-controlled China Daily I’d see a copy editor completely change the quote of a famous politician, even President Hu Jintao. While you would never dream of changing a quote in the West, my Chinese colleagues would say something like “Well, he said this, but in English he meant this.” While this might sound ridiculous, sometimes its impossible to avoid. Let me give you an example:

Our subject who opens the first video says to us: “我刚来北京的时候，胡同里都乱七八糟的.” We are interested in the phrase toward the end “乱七八糟” or — luan qi ba zao. This literally means “messy seven, eight rottens.” If we were to insert this into the sentence you would get something like:

“When I first arrived in Beijing, the hutongs were messy seven, eight rottens. They’re in much better shape now.”

To turn this into a logical English sentence, we then have to get someone who understands Chinese and English both technically and culturally to help us understand. We need them to not only literally translate but culturally translate what the phrase means to our audience. In the end, it turns into:

“When I first arrived in Beijing, the hutongs were a mess, very disorderly. They’re in much better shape now.”

To complete this project with accuracy, we hired a native English speaker fluent in Chinese and native Chinese speakers, quasi-fluent in English. Dozens of hours translating, transcribing, subtitling, thinking and arguing about what something actual means were spent at the wee hours of the night. This process has made me a bit wary of international reportage when it comes to quoting accuracy in both print and visual products (be it subtitle or voice over). Trying to figure out the cultural and possibly historical meaning of a language on a deadline is a scary thing.

---

ABOUT THE FILMS: “The Fate of Old Beijing: The Vanishing Hutongs.”

In the face of China’s rapid modernization, the world’s most populous country is struggling to preserve its cultural heritage, and nowhere is this more visible than in the ancient alleyways and courtyards of Beijing.

Once a ubiquitous feature of Beijing, the hutongs are more than simply housing; they are actually a way of life. Entire families live in single, crowded courtyards, often with no bathrooms. Yet despite the lack of modern amenities, the communal aspect to life within the hutongs means that few want to leave – even as their neighbourhoods are being demolished and redeveloped. UNESCO estimates that more than 88 percent of the city’s old residential quarters are already gone, most torn down in the last three decades.

In a three-part series, filmmakers Jonah Kessel and Kit Gillet explore the vanishing world of Beijing’s hutongs, the realities of life within the narrow streets, and the future for these culturally-irreplaceable areas of China’s capital.

– Jonah M. Kessel is a Beijing-based freelance visual journalist and interactive art director specializing in photography, video, print and Web design.

– To see the greater project “The Fate of Old Beijing: The Vanishing Hutongs” click here.

G-tech were showing off a working demo of Thunderbolt technology in action on a new Macbook Pro. If the demo is anything to go by I think we will be seeing a lot of video editors changing over to the tech very soon. G-tech have a line of Raid drives on the way with Thunderbolt compatability.

They also showed their new G-Drive Duro rugged drive which will come in 500GB and 750GB capacities starting at around $149.99 USD. Designed for field use they seem to be a good alternative to the popular Lacie Rugged models.

Video by Seppe Van Grieken and Johnnie Behiri.

Apple showed off their latest incarnation of Final Cut Pro at the FCPUG meetup at NAB last night. It’s a complete revamp of the editor with losts of new features and surprisingly a new price point of just $299. It is fully 64 bit now and has new full color management using Colorsync. All very exciting.

Check out some screenshots here.

Below is a clip from Dan Rubottom from the event.

FCP X sneak peak at Supermeet 2011 from Dan Rubottom on Vimeo.

This landed in my inbox this morning. FX Factory are giving away Manifesto, a free plug-in that looks to be very useful for Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Motion and Adobe After Effects. It claims to offer a simple way to improve on the inbuilt title and crawl plug-in. Grab it here.

According to the company’s website
“Manifesto comes in two variants: a static title generator and a title roll/crawl generator. The static title generator offers a unique way to create and adjust simple one-line titles without leaving the parameter inspector. More complex titles and styles can be entered via a separate text editing window. Manifesto lets you match the duration of your title rolls and crawls to the duration of the clip, thus eliminating the need for keyframes.”

Cameraman & Editor Simon Lee test drives Avid Media Composer 5 using Canon 5DmkII footage.

Avid is competing more head on with Apple Final Cut Pro these days which hopefully means better, cheaper tools for editors as the competition intensifies. Whilst the newly released Avid Media Composer 5 is not a total small studio solution, it’s an elegant and powerful piece of software. A major selling point is the newly improved Avid Media Access (AMA) which Avid claims now works natively with file based media from XDCAM and RED cameras as well as with Quicktime codecs like Apple’s ProRes and H.264 recorded by HDDSLRs. The ability to edit natively with these formats should mean new workflow possibilities and valuable time saved.

Avid has set the standard in non-linear editing and once dominated the market. In recent years Final Cut Pro slowly knocked Avid off the top spot in terms of market share, due in part to it’s lower price point coupled with its openness to 3rd party hardware and ever expanding toolset. It now seems Avid has been making concerted efforts to regain some lost ground. Avid has not only dropped it’s once high price, MC5 starts at $2,295 US, but it also starts to free users from expensive proprietary hardware, allowing economical HDMI monitoring with the Matrox MX02 mini. Add the fact that Avid is now releasing upgrades in a matter of months rather than years and you’ve got a behemoth on the move.

The differences between editing software are continuously diminishing – a good storyteller and able craftsman should be able to use pretty much any system and create credible work. Each has their own strengths of course and choice often depends on budget, workflow needs and individual preferences. Avid’s editing tools are some of the finest around. Some notable functions include the indispensable top and tail, which accomplishes an editorial task with 1 keystroke compared to FCPs 3 or more. Then there is the ability to load entire sequences into the source window, view it in the timeline and edit it into the record sequence. This is very useful when working with hundreds of clips from file based media. There are also some excellent effects included like Time Warp with Fluid Motion – this is just excellent for speed changes and since Avid is already harnessing the GPU there’s more real time performance. Avid also takes the organizational headaches away from the editor with it’s well developed media management. I’m just scratching the surface here and those who’ve worked with Avid know they get a high performance editing solution designed to meet tight deadlines and work well in collaborative environments.

For the purpose of this blog, I tested out 23.976p material from the Canon 5DmkII with a trial version of Avid MC5 on a Macbook Pro, Core i7, 2.66Ghz, 4GB 1067 Mhz DDR3, Nvidia GeForce GT 330M, 500GB 7200rpm HDD.

To begin with, I set up a new 1080p 23.976 project and plugged in a usb cf card reader and card with footage from the 5DmkII, asked Avid to connect to the AMA volume and selected the DCIM folder. The footage shows up in a bin with the name of the formatted CF card, in this case EOS_DIGITAL. Playback from the card in the source window at real time was stuttery so I copied the H.264 footage to the internal hard disk which seemingly improved things, though it still wasn’t slick and playback was consistently problematic. For playback at 2x or more the problem was simply pronounced. Whilst I could, technically speaking, edit and finish with the native footage, it certainly wasn’t a straightforward or smooth operation. Editing with H.264 is processor intensive so I’m very interested to find out how this is working on more powerful workstations.

For good performance I found it necessary to transcode to one of Avid’s DNxHD intermediate codecs. For the DNxHD 175 X 10bit variation, the storage requirement is similar to that of Apple’s ProRes 422 (HQ). Transcode times were as follows, DNxHD 115 ~ video length x 2, DNxHD 175 ~ video length x 1.5, DNxHD 175 X ~ video length x 1.7. Not exactly great if you’re on a tight deadline but slightly better than transcoding to ProRes 422 on the same machine with Final Cut Pro’s Log & Transfer tool, which came out at ~ video length x 2.2 for ProRes 422 and ~ video length x 2 for ProRes 422 (HQ).

Once transcoded, everything works as it should and playback is exceptionally smooth at all speeds. Poking around in MC5′s interface revealed some new features which are similar to Final Cut. Most surprising for me, since i’ve been away from Avid for a while, is the ability to select everything left or everything right of the playhead. You can now also drag, drop, ripple and roll without the need to select individual tools. Other features include the ability to bring up audio waveforms on individual tracks in the timeline and insert up to 5 RTAS Protools audio plugins per track, which is very similar to adding effects in Soundtrack Pro.

On the downside it’s still not possible to adjust the audio levels in the mixer on the fly and color correction hasn’t really improved. The scopes don’t react in real time when making adjustments and there’s not a great deal of grading power. In this regard, you might want extra plug-ins to compensate or have the need to move to another application with more creative control.

In conclusion, editing with native H.264 is a let down on the Macbook Pro, but once transcoded to DNxHD it’s smooth sailing. It’s a joy working with the newly improved interface and toolset. On the AMA front, I already briefly tested some XDCAM EX footage in MC5 and was floored by how quick, easy and smooth this seems to work. Working with AMA media seems very similar to working with media in Final Cut. To enjoy Avid’s famous media management capabilities you still the need to import or transcode to one of Avid’s codecs. I’m sure Avid will continue to improve upon AMA and add features which will appeal to Final Cut users and a broader market. It’s going to be interesting to see how Apple responds to Avid’s and Adobe’s recent offerings with it’s next Final Cut Pro release.

To connect with Simon please visit www.emotefilms.com.

Intro To Magic Bullet Mojo from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

Here’s a great tutorial by Stu Maschwitz about Magic Bullet’s easy to use Mojo colour treatment software which can give your video more “Hollywood” look. I’ve been using Mojo’s sister software Magic Bullet Looks for a while now and can recommend the company. While I would personally draw the line at using this on live hard news videos, I think for some feature work it is acceptable and can really enhance the feel of a piece. Indeed, quite extreme colour grading is seen in television documentary all the time.

If you are going to use colour grading software on your DSLR please remember to dial back the in camera saturation, sharpness and contrast settings using Picture Profiles to get the best results, I would recommend you do this all the time but I know a lot of news shooters don’t as they worry more about speed. Here’s another good tutorial by a guy called Luka on the subject.

How to increase the Canon 7D dynamic range (Tutorial) from Luka on Vimeo.