It’s one in the morning and after joining your friends for an ill-considered round of tequila shots you decide that it might be fun to recreate the “Tequila”/Bowling Alley scene from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. You wake up the next morning with only a dim recollection of what you did, but there was something about dancing on the bar, trying to juggle lemons, and a guy holding up a cell phone.

Then you check your email. There’s a hot new video from YouTube being passed around and I don’t suppose I need to tell you what’s on it.

We’re in the age of instant video – the result of the availability of broadband Internet connections, handheld devices with built-in video cameras, and affordable editing software. If you make a mistake in a campaign speech or at a family reunion, within hours you can be seen by pretty much anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Unlikely? Ask Michael Richards or the third runner-up in the Miss Teen USA pageant.

Twenty years ago you needed a fifty thousand dollar camera and a half a million dollar production facility to be in the video business. Now you can get perfectly good, professional quality pictures from an under $5,000 camera and do some pretty decent editing on an iMac. You can even view the video on your phone.

But having a good camera doesn’t make you a shooter. And having editing software doesn’t make you an editor.

Good shooters know how to paint with light, compose a picture, and get decent audio (big problems on a video shoot are more likely to be audio ones than video ones). Editors need to have a feel for pace and drama, and more often than not in the pro world, the skills of a graphic artist. The same holds true for producers, writers, sound recordists, and the rest of the crew.

No matter what the technology, you’ll still need talented and experienced people if you want to effectively tell your story and get attention in an environment that is awash in pictures, sound and motion. Ideas and expertise still matter.

Contact us at tvg@vandivergroup.com or send comments to blog@vandivergroup.com.