The Essential Difference
The Difference:
Is it Live or is it recorded?
by Glenn Koenig
Consider your experience at a meeting or presentation.You probably don't sit rigidly staring just at the presenter the whole time. Your eyes wander to other people or parts of the room. You may whisper with your neighbor in the next seat. You might review the printed materials that were handed out to supplement the presenter's message. Perhaps you take another sip of your beverage or nibble at what you were snacking on at your table (if there is one). Maybe you take notes or get ready to ask a question when the time comes.
Now consider a video of the same thing. Most video recordings made by people
signed up at the last minute are recorded with a single camera. If the person
isn't experienced in audio recording and elects to use the microphone on the
camera for sound, then so much the worse.
You're very likely to end up with a single close-up shot of the presenter, as
a talking head, (head & shoulders shot, we call it), that goes on for extended
periods of time with no change, accompanied by echoey sound, interrupted by
other noises in the room, such as air conditioner noise, people talking, coughing,
moving around, and so on. There is often no video showing the other audience
members, so you have no other 'feel' of what it was like to be there. You may
get to hear some laughter or applause, but that's usually it.
You don't get any of the hand outs and you're not allowed to talk to anyone
there or ask questions or share in anything else provided there. Your job is
to just sit still and stare at the screen. A screen, by the way, which is showing
you nothing new (the same face, talking) after the first few seconds.
Compare this to the kind of television most people watch on a daily basis for hours at a time. It's like night and day. No scene stays on screen for more than 5 seconds, on average. The sound is carefully recorded and mixed to make the voices stand out while other sounds or music are mixed in at a lower level. There is a great variety of things to look at and a pacing of what you are watching designed to keep you focused on it as much as possible, no matter how short your attention span might be.
Compared to that, the video recording of your meeting is very, very, boring. Not only is it difficult to concentrate on, listening to the sound is taxing. Your brain has to do extra work just to hear what the speaker is saying simply because of the difficulty in making out the words. Sure, you can pause and rewind a bit to try again, but that just makes the whole thing take that much longer to watch.
But there's more. For the meeting that you attended in person, you made a commitment to be there in the first place. You blocked out the time, probably had to register or sign up somehow, traveled to get there, etc. But often it's "somebody else's idea" that you watch a video of that meeting if you didn't have time to go. You might like to hear a synopsis, but to see the whole thing, now that it's past history, is somehow usually quite uninspiring.
Even if you record the event and then hand out the "tapes" for free to those you think should have been there, to watch them, chances are, there were good reasons why they weren't there in the first place. It doesn't just depend on lack of interest in the topic or the presenter, but on the hundreds of decisions we make daily on how to spend our time. We are forced to give up numerous things that we "could have" or "would like to have" done simply because there isn't enough time to do everything. To then have to "make time" by carving two hours (or whatever) out of our busy schedules to watch a single image of a talking head is rather a lot to expect.
Given the uninspiring nature of watching a video of a meeting versus actually being there, the chances that someone who wasn't there will watch a video of it all are vanishingly small.