Charlie RoseIs there a way to do a high quality video interview with the interviewer and interviewee in two geographical locations easily? Well, “Rosetimes” may be the answer to that question.

Rosetime is the name given to the process pioneered by Phil Shapiro over the course of this past year, involving high quality video interviews. The name is derived from the famous PBS interviewer, Charlie Rose, and the video software that has initially been proposed to create the interview, Quicktime.

“The reason I invented Rosetimes is that there are so many people in this world with important things to say, but who will never be invited into mainstream media. Their ideas are worth hearing, and the most powerful way for them to express their ideas is in video form, via interviews with each other,” said Shaprio in a Newsforge article.

Mr. Shapiro has created a few screencasts to demonstrate how a Rosetime can be put together. It involves both parties video taping themselves at the same time while engaging in an interview using a free VOIP service. The video tapes can then be converted to a digital signal, if they are not using a digital camcorder, and put together using QuickTime. An alternative software (which is free), might be Avid Free DV.

QuickTime will allow you to pull in both video feeds quite easily and arrange them in different parts of the screen, so that you can publish a single video with both the interviewer and interviewee on the screen at the same time, even though they might be separated in space. It gives every citizen journalist the ability to conduct interviews just like Charlie Rose.

While the Rosetime method is a sure way to conduct on an online video, it is not without difficulties. Both parties obviously must have a video camera of some kind and a means of ripping the video to a PC, storing that unencoded video. Then, one of them has to have the technical savvy to pull them both into a singular video, possibly using Quicktime.

These difficulties are not insignificant, because they pose barriers to conducting video interviews quickly, easily, and without too much technical know-how, or hardware requirements.

But the development of Rosetime contributes to a very early dialogue of recorded video conferencing, which is what a recorded video interview really is. Other hardware and software solutions exist, and have been described in great detail over at Masternewmedia.org. According to their analysis, many of these solutions are fret with echo difficulties, and web conferencing software that attempts to record video have other issues including major feature limitations.

While the issue of recording live video conferencing is still in its infancy, with the rise of video blogging and the popularity of social networks involving video it’s only a matter of time before other hardware solutions (or, hardware and software solutions, or completely webdriven solutions) begin to surface.

In the mean time, Rosetimes have their place as a way for high quality interviews to be done and stitched together. I suspect, however, that it may be a niche process, because there are significant hardware and technical requirements for the casual user compared to using webcams and instant messaging software.

In the end, Rosetimes may be remembered as a process that contributed to the dialogue on recording digital video interviews, rather than the process that kicked off the online video interview craze — which may never even hit.

Dr. Tony Hung is a 3rd year resident in Internal Medicine with a strong interests in communication and social media. He blogs regularly about web2.0 issues at DeepJiveInterests.com