Everyone will be famous for 1 megabyte

How to fold your laundry, how to braid your daughter’s hair, how to train your dog, and how to remove parking stickers from the car window ― these are all special types of know-how that housewives have mastered throughout the years and now they are being posted as videos on online video sites like YouTube, Pandora TV, Mgoon and TV Pot.
These UCCs, or user created content sites, are the latest talk of the town and it’s easy to get involved. No camcorder at home? Not a problem at all! The video function on a digital camera or a mobile phone is good enough. With the blogs and Cyworld mini homepages already well equipped to accept video clips, housewives are lining up to show off their special skills in front of the camera!
Kim Mi-jung, a 39 year old housewife who takes jazz dance classes at Kimpo Women’s Community Center always carries her camera to her lesson. She has been filming her class and posting the results on her own internet channel “Kimpo Women’s Community Center Jazz Dance Class” (www.pandora.tv/40465) for the last three years. Strangely enough, the site has become very popular.
“I couldn’t keep up with all the dance moves from simply attending classes. So I started filming the class on an analogue camera and I reviewed the steps at home. Sometimes, I would lend the tapes to other women who were taking the same class with me,” said Ms. Kim.
But circulating the tapes from house to house was much too cumbersome. So in the spring of 2005 Ms. Kim purchased a digital camcorder and set up a channel at Pandora TV, which provides a popular video uploading service that’s free to members. What started out as a channel for her classmates to share now attracts up to 400-500 visitors a day, the majority of whom are not enrolled in the dance class.
Kim Jung-mi, a 31 year old housewife is well-known as a Ggami momee online through the dog-training videos she has posted on Daum’s TV Pot”and Naver’s Play. When she found out that untrained dogs are frequently abandoned, she became determined to spread her “effective dog training” techniques. Using her dogs Ggami, Turry and Lulu as models, she posted eight videos of her training them to sit, go to the bathroom and shake hands. These eight videos have been viewed more than 200,000 times so far, and have saved many dogs from abandonment.
Cooking videos are some of the most popular UCC online. Jeon So-Young, a 25 year old housewife who has been married for two years has been posting cooking videos on her blog called “Delinquent housewife’s cooking notes” (blog.daum.net/happydays1) for the last month. Ms. Jeon wanted to show off her cooking skills to as many people as possible, so she changed what used to be simple recipe postings with text and pictures into a video posting. Ms. Jeon compiled the pictures she took on her digital camera, added subtitles, and edited it into a video clip using Virtual Dub and Multikit to edit. “There are days when the number of visitors per day reaches up to eighty or ninety thousand,” she says. “It feels really great when I have a lot of visitors on my blog.”
The need for constant coverage of everyday activities and know-how seems limitless. Out of the 84 questions that Netizens requested Daum, a Korean portal site, to answer using UCC videos 46 were related to everyday activities like tying shoelaces, wrapping presents, and making homemade hodduk, or Korean style sugar filled pancakes. Daum has announced that they are going to “start a search service where replies to such questions are posted as videos starting sometime in the middle of this year,” with “multiple functions that could help housewives with clever ideas that will make it easier for them to post their answers.” Daum expects to create a large number of new UCC “stars” with its project. Although American artist Andy Warhol once said that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” it seems that must be updated. Now everybody can be famous for 1 megabyte. For those seeking UCC celebrity here are a few tips on how to make your own video:
Choosing a program ― An editing program is imperative for making a UCC video. Window Movie Maker, Magic One and Virtual Dubs can all be downloaded online at no cost. Adobe Premier or Vegas Video are also commonly used, but they aren’t free. Magic One is very convenient to use with a simple process for clipping videos and inserting music and subtitles but it is only available in Korean. To be able to use these programs, your computer needs to have at least a Pentium 4 80 GB hard drive and 512 MB of memory.
Inserting subtitles and narrations ― For subtitles, use Photoshop on a transparent or blue screen background, and open it through the editing program. For narration, record your voice on a camcorder, transform it into a voice file, and open it as an audio channel on the editing program. Be careful not to speak too close to the microphone when you record, because that can cause a crackle.
Uploading ― When you digitalize your video image, it automatically creates an AVI file. Use a video compressor like Window Media Encoder to compress the files into a WMV file, since AVI files are too large to upload on Cyworld mini homepages or blogs.
Special cases ― You can make a video with image files. On every video editing program, there is a video channel and an audio channel. Repeat the process of calling up still images to the video channel and apply transition effects between the pictures for a soft transition. Call up either WAV or MP3 files on the audio channel for the audio.
You can also make UCC videos through educational institutions that help film and edit videos, or through specialized UCC studios like Arirang Media Center, Mediact, Pixcow or Star Korea. The price for such services range from 40,000 won to 100,000 won ($43 to 107).

By Lee Ji-young JoongAng Ilbo [estyle@joongang.co.kr]