I did a quick reedit of the video I did early today based on some of Chris Amico’s suggestions.

It took at most 15 minutes, including encoding and uploading to Viddler. I think I personally prefer this second version, because it’s tighter, more immediate. I could polish it up a bit, because I did this reedit really fast, but it shows you how quickly you can take the same clips and do a different concept with them.

A lot of journalists are concerned that Web video will eat up a lot of their time.

It doesn’t have to. In fact, in most instances it shouldn’t. The Return On Investment for spending a lot of time on Web video just isn’t there.

There is a lot of advertising money available for broadcast news. Online advertising is a much more competitive landscape (just like online advertising is much more competitive than print advertising). Keeping this reality in mind, Web video can’t afford to be as polished (overproduced) as broadcast news.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

For instance, I covered an event today at the Vietnam Wall. Several new names were being added to the Wall, and one of the widows spoke. I was able to shoot video, edit it and produce a 4 minute piece in about 3 hours. This is keeping in mind that the even itself lasted about 45 minutes.

And let’s be clear here: video is not my strong suit. Writing is my original journalism skill, while Web design is my original Web skill. I also don’t do a lot of video, yet. I’m sure with more practice with Adobe Premier Pro (I was trained on Final Cut Pro), I could get a quicker turnaround.

But the point is we were able to produce a perfectly watchable video that has a point within a few hours (Someone else wrote a short written story, which is quicker to complete than a audio voice over, and he also did a photo gallery. We sell prints of our photos, which increases the ROI on photo galleries).

Note: click here for the reedit I posted later.

The point is no amount of additional production would have made this video that much better, especially from a ROI perspective. Sure, I could have spent a few more hours polishing this piece up, perhaps adding a TV-style narration to it (or we could have skipped the time spent on the written story and photo gallery and put it into a glitzier video package). But that would have just left me unable to do other things to, like write a story on a different subject and do some work on our Web site.

The biggest difference is that content is king online, where production is often king on TV. I call it guerrilla video. It’s about the immediacy and impact of the video, not the production quality.

And while it might be about good enough when it comes to production quality, it’s still high-quality journalism when it comes to content. That’s ultimately what matters.