Extracting Value from Media

During my holidays I've been contemplating what to do with music, photos, and video footage. It occurred to me that most of what I do with media now is essentially catalogue & archive, and how incredibly pointless that is.

Music needs to be listened to, so for that, I bought an Airport Express (coolest device ever) and now I can really easily make use of my music in my house. I could of course listen to music on my iPhone, but usually I'm listening to podcasts on the commute. Maybe I should mix that up a bit more.

Photos are tricky to get long-lasting value out of, so I think speed is the key. As soon as possible after taking them, get them into iPhoto, delete the crap ones that I don't particularly want to look at again, do the Faces & Places stuff, edit them to make them interesting. Then, I do 3 things:

1. Put them on a memory card so they can go straight onto my digital picture frame in the living room.
2. Make albums in iPhoto and publish to Facebook, Flickr and MobileMe. Send an email from the MobileMe one to anyone who might be interested. Again, speed is key.
3. If it's a really large set of photos, make a book - possibly multiple to send to people as presents. If the event was really not significant enough to spend money on, just make a slideshow video and send that to people instead.

Beyond that I think it's difficult to get more value out of photos. They're always there on the iPhone for casual browsing anyway.

Videos are killers, since they take up lots of space, and are surprisingly uninteresting in the raw footage form. Again, speed is key. I need to get them into iMovie, set myself a time limit, and just crank out an edited video as quickly as possible. I heard somewhere that as a rule of thumb you get about 5 minutes of usable footage from 1 hour of home video. I think with the new image stabilisation in iMovie it's probably more than that now, but still, the point is you don't get much.

So I have to extract something useful from it quickly, make a nice movie, and delete all the (now) useless footage to save space. (Actually I'll keep the footage around for a little while, in case I decide to make some changes - maybe just until next time I need to make a video.) Once I've got a video, upload it to Facebook and MobileMe, and tell people about it. It's also good to keep a copy in the iPhone to watch on the train or show people randomly.