Heaven in a half-fried dough shell from Josh Chin on Vimeo.

In the same way Americans swirl madly around food fads (Atkins, South Beach, etc.), Chinese tend to go crazy over specific food items—and often over a specific food item as prepared by a specific food provider. It has to be said, “The People” do not always know what they’re talking about. There’s a yogurt stand in an alley not far from my home in Beijing that every weekend attracts lines to rival the TSA back-up at JFK Airport on Christmas Eve. Why, I have no idea. I have tasted that yogurt and it’s not as good as the yogurt at a perpetually empty stand twenty feet to the south.

But sometimes they do know what they’re talking about. The restaurant that appears in this video, Xiaoyang Shengjian (小杨生煎), is a case in point.

Xiaoyang is widely regarded as Shanghai’s best producer of shengjian baozi (生煎包子)—a half-fried, half-steamed pork bun that arguably ranks third behind only bacon and prosciutto as an expression of the beauty of pork. Having missed on out them the last time I was in Shanghai, I was eager this time not only to gorge on the buns, but to gorge on the best iteration available. An Internet search revealed Xiaoyang to be the consensus destination. But with the yogurt shop in mind, my inclination was to look elsewhere. I wanted a transcendent bun, not a bun any sucker on the street might eat.

In the end, Xiaoyang prevailed on convenience, being just around the corner from the hotel. The branch I visited (there are several Shengjians spread throughout the city) did not look promising: Jammed in next to an anonymous noodle shop at the back of a mall food court on the heavily touristed Nanjing East Road pedestrian street. None of the remote, hole-in-the-wall charm one usually associates with world-class Chinese snack shops. No charm at all, in fact.

But line was long, which is always a good sign. And the the baozi at the end of it: my God. Perfectly crispy and golden on the bottom, tender on top, cradling a gorgeous nugget of just-firm-enough ground pork in a bath of salty, scalding-hot broth. They were, to borrow a phrase from a foodie friend in San Francisco, like crack. And nearly as cheap: If memory serves, it was a whopping $3 for a quadruple order (16).

Are they the best available? Not being resident in Shanghai, I’m be hesitant to say. But of the six or seven versions I’ve tried over the years, no others come close. Hence the video.

Sometimes, it pays to study the masses.

[Gear Geek Alert: This post concerns the logistics of multimedia news production and has only marginally to do with China or any other topic of interest to normal people.]

When the video editors at the Wall Street Journal called last month asking for a video to go with a print story on the dangers of electronic bicycles (a.k.a. e-bikes), it gave me a chance to do something that I’ve been aching to try for quite some time: Mount thousands of dollars’ worth of somebody else’s camera equipment to a moving vehicle.

Lest anyone accuse me of recklessness upon reading further, it’s important to note at the beginning that this was not the original idea. The original idea had been to profile someone who’d had a serious run-in with one of the bikes (China recorded more than 2000 e-bike-related deaths, and thousands more injuries, in 2008). Then the editors decided to take the print story in a more tongue-in-cheek direction and suddenly I was tasked with doing something “funnier.” And so the decision was made—I had no choice, you see—to slap some cameras on one of the bikes and force the print reporter to ride it around in Beijing’s sub-freezing weather while providing play-by-play (or, rather, street-by-street) commentary.

Like a lot of first video experiences, this was a tremendous amount of fun, and highly instructional.

The first issue was what camera to use. Much as I would have loved to put the bureau’s 3-chip CCD camera into play, it soon became clear that e-bikes were indeed accident prone, and in the end, I decided it might be less-than-wise to risk losing a $4000 piece of gear for the purposes of a 3-minute video. Luckily, the bureau had an older Sony Handycam lying around, the loss of which, although unfortunate, would not be tragic.

But because we wanted two shots—one of the reporter riding the bike, and one showing what the reporter was seeing—we needed another camera. Enter the Zi-8, a pocket-sized HD gadget Kodak rolled out last year to compete with the likes of the Flip. WSJ is testing the Zi-8 as a tool for its print reporters to capture simple interviews with news makers (CEOs, government officials, etc), but its size and affordability made it an attractive option for this as well.

The second issue: How to attach the cameras to the bike?

The Internet is full of ideas on how to do this, some of them beautifully simple and some (like this steadycam mount) seemingly beyond the pale. None were an option in this case 1) because the bike in question was shaped like a scooter, with limited bar space on which to screw a genuine mount; and 2) because we were working on a tight schedule.

So I was forced to use what I had on hand: a Joby Gorrillapod, some packing tape and a cheap bungee-like cord bought for a buck at the convenience store down the street.

Here was the final product:

Handycam and wireless mic receiver, mounted to handlebars with Gorillapod. and bungee cord.

Handycam-rig secured with packing tape.

[More images, plus verdict, after the jump:]

Kodak Zi-8 w/ mini-tripod, mounted using tape.

Finished e-bike rig, reporter's-eye view

Precarious-looking, I admit. But it held up relatively well. The Gorillapod was surprisingly robust, and the tape and bungee cord held fast. There was a frightening moment when the quick-release mounting plate under the Handycam loosened, which sent the camera rotating sideways, but there was never any danger of the whole thing coming loose. Next time, I’ll just make sure to tighten that plate all the way.

The real problem came from the cameras themselves, particularly the Zi-8. Almost all of the footage from that camera (and some from the Handycam) suffered from the rolling shutter effect—a defect of the CMOS sensors used in smaller digital video cameras that can cause the picture to skew and wobble when the camera is vibrating or moving quickly. The effect on the brain of the person watching such images is decidedly unpleasant. In the case of the Zi-8 on this shoot, it was positively nauseating.

Luckily, increasing the playback speed–something I’d planned to do anyway–mitigates the puke-factor a little, as does watching on a little Web-sized screen (which you can do below). For anything bigger or slower, though, I’m not sure this is the way to go.

For best results, click on the link below the video and watch it in HD.

7D for Christmas (test) from Josh Chin on Vimeo.

[Note to gear heads: I'll post a review of the 7D and it's uses for news video once I've had a chance to use it in the field.]

Second, a vox pop video I did for GlobalPost on Obama’s visit to China managed to get picked up by the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer–the first flowering of what GlobalPost hopes is a long partnership with NewsHour. While I never imagined I’d win an Emmy, I admit I have fantasized amount making it onto the NewsHour, so this is even cooler in a way.

Proof this actually ran on PBS is here.

This one’s been a long time in coming. Abby is one of that rare but thankfully growing species of artist bridging the Pacific from West to East. She’s probably most famous in the US for her collaboration with Bela Fleck (who appears in the video), but she’s better known over here as the girl who actually, against all odds, made Mandarin bluegrass work. I originally filmed this in August for the Wall Street Journal, but it got lost in the post-Olympics, pre-Election shift away from China coverage. Luckily the GlobalPost took to the story and decided to put it up.

Abby makes a powerful argument both for and against “world music” (a genre I have to say I’ve never much liked): “It’s such an interesting phrase…because it really represents fusion music. It’s about taking this aspect of Arabic culture and this aspect of Eastern European culture [and throwing them together], whereas I think the future of global music is in having human beings spread across two cultures, or several cultures, and combining the music internally before it even comes out.”

I certainly hope so.

Enjoy.

Her website is here. And the website for Casey Driessen, the mind-blowing fiddle player who also appears in the video, is here.

As this video suggests, my tenure as a hired gun on the Wall Street Journal’s Olympics video team is essentially over. Three weeks lugging a camera around Beijing by day, staring dry-eyed and drooling at a computer by night…If only I were a full employee, I’d have the health insurance to pay the team of chiropractors and opthamologists I’m going to need to turn me back into a functioning human being after I pack up my gear and drag it back home.

Having said that, the pain had its pay-offs: We managed to produce 27 videos, more by far than any other US newspaper. And I now have a much clearer sense of what a strange dance these American titans of print are doing with multimedia. I’ll try to write more on that score after I’ve had a chance to recover…

Another video done in cahoots with Loretta from the Wall Street Journal. This one covers a book, Civilized Etiquette (文明礼仪), supposedly distributed to all Beijing residents four years ago as part of an effort to keep the city from embarassing itself in front of foreign guests during the Olympics. The book got a lot of play, including on the WSJ website, in the pre-Olympics coverage.

One part of the book that didn’t get much coverage was the fashion chapter. We thought it was a bit dubious for a government led by men in ill-fitting suits and clunky gold wire-frame glasses to be telling others how to dress, so we decided to do a story on it. Enjoy.

I helped Loretta Chao from the Wall Street Journal produce this video on a kid from Henan she saw filming a protest on Tian’anmen Square yesterday. A fantastic, fascinating character. High on China like he’d injected some sort of narcotized liquid patriotism. Wish I could have used more of him, but Internet attention span research tells us to keep everything to under four minutes. Alas.