OnlineVideoPublishing.com

Strategies, tips, how to's and best practices for online video publishers

Why is Video Important to Your Business

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Excerpted from: Why Is Video Important To Your Business – What Can A Professional Say On Video? | Dr. Marc Kossmann and Charlie Seymour Jr PersonalSuccess Marketing

For many businesses, there’s that Shakespearean moment when it comes to marketing, and that is: “To use video, or not to use video, that is the question.”
It can be a daunting task to decide what to say and how to say it, when most people don’t really have the experience of producing a video. In this video, online video marketers Dr. Marc Kossmann and Charlie Seymour Jr share why video is so important. Video, at it’s core, is about communicating a message, and for businesses, it can be a way to answers questions about the products and services and present a brand message.


Video is everywhere, and if you are not using video to tell your story, if you aren’t producing quality videos that show who YOU are, your competition will beat you every time.

Video Production for Streaming: Improving Your Video Quality

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This video from Streaming Media East features Jan Ozer, Principal of Doceo Publishing, who provides an overview of video production for streaming. Jan is also publisher of Streaming Learning Center Streaming Learning Center and 2010 Streaming Media All Star, He included lots of helpful information, useful stats, and strategies to improve your video quality for streaming.

The topics covered are:

  • Setting the scene (background and clothing)
  • Lighting
  • Shooting for streaming
  • Editing/Preprocessing
  • Choosing your target,
  • Avoiding/correcting aspect ratio issues
  • De-interlacing
  • Encoding
A101: Streaming Production: Improving Your Video Quality
You’ve got the video production basics down pat, but you’re still concerned that somehow your streaming quality just doesn’t measure up. From camera selection to choosing an encoding tool and encoding parameters, streaming consultant Jan Ozer details the most common production pitfalls that unnecessarily degrade streaming quality. Come learn at least three or four ways to make your video look better.
Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo Publishing

Download the presentation here: Video Production for Streaming (.pdf file)

Video Production Tips for Interviews

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This post covers the basic tips for shooting video interviews. There are a few golden rules to follow to achieve good results and better looking and sounding video. The specific areas you should focus on are: Camera placement and movement, Lighting and Audio. Also, knowing your location and having plenty of time to reduce distractions is particularly important, to advert any audio and video issues. It’s better to get it right when you shoot your interview, to save yourself from “fixing it in post”. The following presentation serves as a tutorial to help you get started.

Camera placement and movement

  • Use a tripod
  • Avoid zooming and panning of camera
  • Get physically close to your subject
  • Place your camera at eye level of your subject
  • Frame your interview to give your speaker with enough head room
  • Select a neutral background for your interview
Lighting 
  • Make sure you have enough light for a good quality picture
  • Do not place your subject in front of a window (avoid backlight)
  • Close curtains, blinds and turn on room lights
  • Don’t mix daylight and indoor lighting
Audio
  • Avoid distracting background noise (HVAC, TVs, music)
  • Stay close to your interview subject
  • Use an external microphone when possible (clip on lavaliere microphones)
  • Use headphones to monitor microphone if possible

Interview techniques

  • Be a quiet, active listener (be empathic, nod, don’t talk, no “uh huh”)
  • Allow subject to complete answers before speaking (no crosstalk)
  • Ask interviewee to phrase your question in their answer (for context)

Know Your Location 

  • Do a site survey (Look for and reduce lighting and ambient sound issues in advance)
  • Reduce distractions
  • Make sure you have directions
  • Lots of time (for retakes)
  • Sweat the small stuff
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Kodak Zi8 Video Workflow Tips from OnlineVideoToolkit.com

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Veteran Internet marketer and video blogger Jim Kukral has produced a series of educational videos he calls the Online Video Toolkit, which he says is, “a free guide that will tell you everything you need to do to make high-quality web videos… without having to spend a fortune to get it done! The best part is… it’s totally free!” He covers all the bases for you to get your video blogging studio up and running on a shoe string budget, like choosing a camera, lighting tips, set design, indoor and outdoor shooting, editing, attire, audio and more. He’s used the Flip Video camera, but now
recommends that Kodak Zi8 HD pocket video camera for its external
microphone input)

In his recent email newsletter, Kukral shared how he has produced a series of videos using his brand new Kodak Zi8 HD pocket video camera and iMovie to promote his new book. His straight forward approach to the video production process can be applied to any business that wants to get involved in online video for Internet marketing, e-Commerce social networking or any application.

The following is republished with his permission:

“Today I made a bunch of videos to promote my new book with my brand new Kodak Zi8 camera. Want to see one of the videos? Here you go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_bfS9UmwX0”

“Pretty simple, yet somewhat complex. Here’s how I made this video.”

  1. Get a Kodak Zi8, link here: http://www.buytheflip.com $150 or so.
  2. Get a lavalier lapel mic. http://bit.ly/9qEuXW This is only $22.39 on Amazon now.
  3. Get a tripod. Preferably one that can adjust height.
  4. Find a room with windows that have blinds. Put the light to your back when filming. Adjust blinds to let in just enough light.
  5. You can also mess around with the lights in the room. The point is to get a good balance of light on the person being recorded.
  6. Mount the camera on the tripod. Plug the mic into the camera.
  7. Pull the mic and clip up inside your shirt/jacket/blouse so the cord can’t be seen. Clip it on.
  8. Hit record on the camera, go sit down. I taped my video in 1080p which is HD.
  9. Now, on my video, I’m pretending that there’s a person in the room with me interviewing me. There wasn’t. I picked a spot on the wall behind and off to the right of the camera and talked to it as if it were a person. That gives the video a nice look.
  10. I had 7 questions and answers prepared ahead of time. I would review each question briefly, then record an answer. Without stopping the recording. You can edit it apart later. Get through all your points.
  11. When done, I stood up and stopped the recording.
  12. I took the camera and plugged the USB into my Macbook Pro and copied the one large file to my hard drive. It will be big in HD.
  13. I opened iMovie and imported the video.
  14. I edited the part of the video I wanted and saved it.
  15. I then exported the movie in iMovie via Quicktime.
  16. That was it. I could have added a bunch of text or music or titles but I wanted to keep this one simple.

“Now, I know that looks like a lot of steps, and it was, kind of. But in reality, it was really cheap, and easy to do. There’s no reason you can’t do it yourself. Give it a go!”

Jim Kukral.
Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 8:45 PM

Encoding Video for the Web – Video Replay of ReelSEO Webinar

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Thanks again to everyone who joined us a few weeks back on May 5th for the very first Reel SEO webinar event on  titled, “Video Encoding for the Web.” As I previously mentioned, the webinar was very well received with 263 attendees from all over the world. A big thanks to my co-presenter Robert Reinhardt, the @flashfreaker, who shared some fantastic tips on how to compress video using x264, the free library for encoding H264/AVC video streams. An enormous thanks as well to Mark Robertson who not only moderated the session, but did an amazing job working numerous hours with Robert and me to pull together the program. Mark also spent a considerable amount of time editing the video from the webinar to make it available for those who may have missed it or want to review it. An additional thanks to Ian Sneed and the team at vzaar video platform for sponsoring the free webinar. You can see the previous posts with our bios here and the slides here.

Look for more Reel SEO webinar events in the future. Thanks again to everyone for your continued support and interest. We greatly appreciate it!

RSS Online Video Publishing [dot] com by Larry Kless

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