Jun 24, 2009 2:16 pm US/Eastern
WFOR's New iPhone Challenge
Click Here To Watch "CBS4 Producer Shoots Story On New iPhone 3G S"
By Gio Benitez, I-Team Producer
DORAL (CBS4) ―
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A long line of customers waits for the Apple store at The Falls Shopping Center to open Friday morning so they could be the first to get their hands on the new iPhone 3G S.
Gio Benitez/I-Team Producer /CBS
While it's been said that "necessity is the mother of invention," being innovative sometimes requires a leap of faith and some hot new technology.
Case in point - last Friday
CBS4 made history when we aired a news story which used nothing but video from the latest generation of iPhone which was released that day. Using his brand new iPhone 3G S, I-Team producer Gio Benitez created a story about the people standing in line outside of an Apple store waiting to get their hands on the new phone. The video, including interviews and 'scene setters', was then edited into a news story and put in the evening newscast.
Response to the story, both inside and outside the media, has been overwhelming.
Twitter was all a-twitter with the news that
CBS4 in Miami was the first to use iPhone video to create an on-air news story. It was also a major topic of discussion on a number of blogs that focus on the media. Even the Poynter Institute, a school and resource for journalists, mentioned the innovative use of the iPhone 3G S applications to create a story in their daily podcast about what in the media was making news that day.
Click Here to listen.
At
CBS4, we've received hundreds of emails and comments in the newsroom from viewers who were amazed at the quality of video when compared to images shot on professional cameras. By Tuesday, more than 10-thousand people had viewed the story on
CBS4.com; the following day that number had jumped to more than 17-thousand.
Taking the next 'innovative' step is going to require more than a 'leap of faith' and the latest in technology, it's going to require you – the
CBS4 viewer who owns a new iPhone 3G S. We'd like to do a follow up and include your responses to our use of an iPhone to create a news story. But here's the catch - we want you to shoot your responses on your new iPhone and email them to us.
If you're up to the challenge, email Gio at
GBenitez@CBS.com.
If you just want to leave a comment, you can contact Gio on Twitter at
@GioBenitezCBS4.
News Director Adrienne Roark is also tweeting at
@AdrienneRoark.
Now if you missed the original story here is the background on how the new iPhone 3G S was used to produce the first all iPhone story for the news and in the process make television history.
Benitez's assignment began as a personal mission to get an iPhone 3G S. He woke up early on Friday, around 4:50 a.m., and rushed over to the Apple store in The Falls Shopping Center in Miami-Dade County. Within an hour the line was packed.
Somewhere between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., he started snapping photos for
CBS4.com. Once he had purchased the new phone, he began shooting some video and short interviews with some of the folks standing in line with the intention of having them posted on the website. But that is when
WFOR's news director, Adrienne Roark, had a more innovative idea: shoot an entire story with the new iPhone about the lines for the new iPhone.
Benitez said he found the 'shooting' easy. The phone has a "touch focus" feature that lets you focus any part of the video just by hitting it with your finger. He used this feature when shooting close-up interviews with some of the customers standing in line. Oddly enough, not one of these Apple fans found it strange that a television station was shooting video with an iPhone!
The quality of the video and sound was impressive on the phone, but many presumed it would be less so when put on TV. They were wrong.
Once back in the newsroom, Benitez plugged the phone into a computer and iPhoto popped up with all of the videos he had recorded that morning. After "dragging and dropping" the videos into the Final Cut Pro editing program he was ready to put the story together. No advanced techniques needed to extract the video.
Sure enough, as people walked by the dit suite and looked at the video, they thought it was shot with one of the station's "professional" cameras. The quality had not suffered in the transfer to a TV screen. It was remarkable.
A few hours later, the story was on TV in WFOR's 5 p.m. evening newscast.
Watch the video here
Our iPhone video experiment was a shot in the dark, but an historic success.
Little known fact: The iPhone's "Voice Memos" application was used for Gio's my voice-overs. The story really was entirely shot using an iPhone.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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