Some discussion has developed over at News Videographer about music copyright in Web videos. This issue is pretty hard to pin down.

As I’ve said before, if I use copyrighted music, I only use 15 seconds. Gannet lawyers recommend this but say under fair use there is no time percentage, only that the amount used must be fair to the “substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole,” as the copyright law reads.

I also only use music I record at the scene. I only let it play alone for no more than 15 seconds. I let the music continue playing quietly under interviews for as long as it remains natural sound. I repeat: the music is nat sound, not mood. I’ve heard many videographers use music this way — we’re all on a Gannett video listserv and this issue comes up a lot. Examples would be my videos about a ballet performance or a piano recital for a girl who has a disability. Also a video about American Idol candidates singing popular songs during their auditions would work.

These examples really just can’t be done without the music. However, they should be done with something besides music — interviews, other nats — or else they’re ripping of the musical work.

Things that are not OK (taken from the listserv):

• Event montages, i.e. clips laid over copyrighted music gathered from the scene, aka a “music video.”
• Any performance (played alone) of a work the performer didn’t create, i.e. high school band playing “Louie, Louie,” Elvis impersonator singing Elvis songs.
• Any performance in the public domain that is performed by someone with a copyright on that performance. For example, a Tchaikovsky piece as performed by the Boston Pops is probably copyrighted by the Boston Pops.

If you need random mood music, there are many ways to get your hands on music you have every right to use in its entirety. Final Cut Pro comes with music, as does Avid. GarageBand comes with loops and has more for purchase. If you get rights signed to use original music from local bands, then natch, that’s fair game too.

My alma mater’s newspaper, The Daily Reveille (LSU) has won the EPpy for for best college newspaper Web site.

Editor Justin Fritscher has been pushing breaking news updates and multimedia for a while now. In April, they pushed to have eight updates a day, and in March, individual page views had increased by 100,000. The site has done some innovative stuff with multimedia, including this fun shoes gallery (my idea), and at one point it was averaging three Web videos a day.

I can remember when I was a video stringer at the Reveille a whole year ago. Ah, college.

Congratulations to everyone.

Music performance pieces are always challenging to edit. Even performances that only involve music are pesky. Take a children’s ballet recital:

I was pretty satisfied with this piece. The project’s director provided details and the girls provided emotion. The piece had music and a variety of interesting shots, so it was interesting to watch. And I think it holds attention since it clocks in at only 1:19.

Here’s another one that’s not as good. You notice here I ran out of b-roll that would not look out of sync with my audio track, so I used some shots twice.

While I was editing the ballet video, one of the reporters came up behind me and asked how many people we sent to shoot. “Uh, one. Me,” I said. He thought that was pretty impressive, so I guess I did something right.

That’s the importance of getting a variety of shots. The problem with getting a variety of shots during a musical performance is that you can create gaps for yourself that are impossible to edit around. So here’s a list of guidelines:

• Press record, and leave it alone. Record the entire performance. This is not how you should shoot every story, but for performances with music, you need to capture the entire song in every number you want to use
• Get plenty of crowd shots. They provide emotion and are your savior when you’re in an editing bind.
• Think sequencing. Imagine how you’ll edit as your shooting. Try to get shots where your subject moves out of frame.
• Get very close shots. These make great cutaways for editing and sequencing. Try to get shots you can put anywhere, shots that are constant throughout the performance, like someone’s foot or the back of his head. Not a singer’s mouth or a pianist’s hands. You can use shots like these, but they have to match your audio track and you have to build everything around them.

When editing, lay down the entire musical audio track as well as the few video clips you have that match that audio track. Then fill the rest in with your out of sync cutaways. Keep the audio levels low in the clips that are not your main audio track, lest one part of a song interfere with another.

Finally, keep in mind that most songs are copyrighted. Gannett’s lawyers advise we include a voiceover of some kind in any track with music. Any one song should not play alone for more than 15 seconds. Doing so would be akin to creating a “music video,” which is infringement.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to do this and wondered if it were even possible. Well, it seems it wasn’t — until now.

Now you can embed Google Maps in Flash applications thanks to the Google Maps Flash API. HT to Google LatLong via Journerdism.

I’m kind of surprised this took so long.

Apparently with the API you can build Google Maps with ActionScript instead of JavaScript. This will be great for streamlining those projects that call for an interactive map as well as other interactive elements. Of course you could have always abandoned Flash for more HTML/CSS and JavaScript. The functionality would be the same and would certainly be more accessible to average computers. Maybe that’s why the Google Flash API took so long.

But it is always good to have options. Many newsrooms aren’t structured to allow constant fiddling with the backend from anyone who has the fancy. That’s where Flash and Google Maps come in handy. And now they can work together.

I’ve twice been on assignment to shoot town hall meetings, special gatherings where residents can voice concerns about targeted issues. These are some situations where the video could be good, say if everyone goes mad and chaos ensues. But they also have the propensity to be pretty average. In such case, I have to create a video of the event anyway because I dropped an hour or so of my day to be there.

But considering the video is good, what about audio? How in the world do you get quality sound from only the people who will stand up and speak at the meeting, and perhaps only the people who stand up and say something interesting?

You want to avoid audio like in this video I shot:

The only audio I got was from the camera’s front mic. Then I duplicated that channel twice to turn it up while avoiding too much hiss (rather than just cranking up the volume level).

My best solution is two-fold: First, mic the podium. Second, mic everyone else.

To do the latter will likely require some teamwork with the other videographers on the scene, if there are any. Gather them in a huddle, and suggest one of you carry one mic to each person who speaks from the crowd. Have all the videographers set their audio receivers to the same channel and voila. Cake.

You’ll need to ask the meeting’s organizers if this is OK. Chances are they may then decide to have one from their staff mic the audience for you so everyone can hear, if they haven’t arranged this already. Then all you have to do is plug into the sound board.

The problem with doing this in my example video is that the subject was kind of touchy. The meeting was held to discuss a murder in the neighborhood. Still, two TV reporters ran and crouched next to the speaker when she began. You can catch a few glimpses of them. If the media had decided in advance to work together to collect good audio, it wouldn’t have been such a circus.