Using my Samsung Galaxy Nexus S for Interviews

While at the last Linaro Connect event (LCE12-Copenhagen), which was co-located at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark with UDS-R I wanted to find ways to do interviews that didn’t always require the need to set up the lights, cameras, and film crew.  Of course the one thing you almost always need to find is a quiet place where no-one is going to walk through your shot or yell in the background. (Even when you hang signs which say “quiet interviews in progress” people still walk into the room talking).

While I was there it dawned on me that I could use my phone as I was looking over the Linaro Member list and I asked myself, “I have a Samsung phone*; why don’t I use that for some of the interviews?”

So I did 🙂

I interviewed David Rusling, my CTO at Linaro.  He was a great sport about it and had a lot of great things to say about the LCE12-Copenhagen event, the ARMv8(64bit), Android, and big.LITTLE mini-summits as well as the new Linaro members (HiSilicon and LG) and LEG (Linaro Enterprise Group) announcements.

A couple things I noticed that will help with using my phone for interviews going forward will be:

• an external mic
• a tripod (while video isn’t too bad; trying to hold it still for 7 mins was difficult)

I also used an android app called AndroVid to trim some of the video, but I wasn’t willing to pay for the pro version to test things like fade and other features. What I really want to find is something that will allow me to “top” and “tail” the video  before I upload it.  I am still looking for that.

If you have any suggestions let me know.  Thanks in advance for your feedback.

ps – this was the only interview it did using my phone; however, in my Look who’s talking now – Interviews from LCE12-Copenhagen blog post you can find links to the other interviews from Connect and UDS.

* It is my understanding that Google has discontinued the Samsung I9250 Galaxy S 16GB (unlocked) phone and the replacement is the Nexus 4.