Back in the day making a paddling video pretty much comprised of bringing your oversized video camera and umbrella on the river, and later firing up windows movie maker to add your favourite SUM 41 soundtrack to it. The up side was that it took one or two hours tops, the down side was that lacked production value.
Today, its a different affair, HD head cams, alternating angles, panning, soft focus, time lapses, multiple cameras, Adobe premier, after effects, all night rendering, sourcing a unique creative commons song to match the tempo of the video. In short, a lot of effort.
Dont get me wrong, as you can see by the video thread, I'm a huge fan of highly polished online kayak movies and think its great for kayaking and kayakers. But there is a down side, its lot of effort for something that most people will only watch once, on a tiny little window on their computer screen. And do some people put off uploading their videos because they feel that its should be perfectly edited and produced? Afraid that its not up to todays high standards? I know I'm guilty of this, always putting it off until I have time to edit it all together in to one kayaking master piece(I never do), as a result the world has been denied some quality footage and some great carnage. And I think this is widespread. I think a lot of people are sitting on a lot of footage.
Raw footage has some merits of its own over edited footage; Often high production value kayaking videos are seamless, making it appear as if paddlers start at the top of a river and don't get out till the end, raw footage gives you a feel of the pace of a river. The sound of the water is often removed from produced videos, and its the sound of white waters' base rumble that gets me going. And the whoops and calls of paddlers trying to communicate their excitement or danger, give us a sense of what the people in the video are experiencing.
So here is my request; If you have footage and you don't think you'll end up producing it (lets face it most of us wont), edit the out the minimum amount of stuff shaky, blurry parts, don't bother with a soundtrack and just upload for all of us to see. You can always go back and make it into a masterpiece afterwards.