Want to get more out of your videos? Follow these simple tips for increasing your reach and quantity of optimized content on the web.
Video is comprised of more than moving images. Don’t forget that you can optimize audio, copy, and screenshots.
You are transcribing your videos, right?
I’ve said it once. I’ll say it again. People consume content in different ways. Do your readers a favour and let them skim the transcription in your blog. Follow your copywriting rules and put in your H1 and H2 headers to make things easier to read. The added benefit to you is that search engine bots will have more to index if you put the transcription in the body of your blog post.
Once you’ve created your transcription, drop it into a .pdf, add some links back to your blog, your RSS feed and put your contact information in it. This may not give you any SEO juice, but if someone finds your content on Scribd, you’re giving them the opportunity to find you and come back for some more helpful tips.
When you’re in your editing software of choice, export out the audio track and then upload it to www.archive.org. Add a description of your audio file and add some appropriate keywords so that people can find what you’re talking about. You can also use it to add the audio file to Slideshare (see below).
Most editing software allows you pull out a screenshot from your clip. Export out some interesting frames and upload them to Flickr with the right keywords to give yourself some extra reach.
If your video is straightforward, or if it’s from a presentation you did, take that audio track that you created and make a slidecast on Slideshare. You also might try using some of your screenshots to drop them in the slideshow to save time and still give people some glamour shots of yourself. I’ve also noticed that URLs show up as hot in the Slideshare descriptions, so when you post to Facebook, you can get some traffic back to your site.
Last week, YouTube announced that it was automatically creating machine based transcriptions of videos.
Don’t rely on them.
If you’ve read through the captions you’ve seen that the service isn’t quite there yet. Some of the text is completely nonsensical. Not only is this annoying for the hard of hearing, but when Google indexes the captions, you may wind up in some strange search results.
Use your transcription to add your own caption file. That way YouTube isn’t putting words in your mouth and you’re getting indexed for something you’ve actually created.
Call it what you will – a documentary, a testimonial, a hero’s story – we love to hear tales about triumph and tragedy. When one person takes on a challenge and succeeds (or fails) we love to watch and share in her experience.
This type of video can take longer than an hour to shoot because you may need to follow a character around a bit. It can also take just a few minutes.
Thanks to YouTube, the world has unprecedented access to the cat video canon, and through our research we found one that elegantly exemplifies the hero tale in its simplest form.
Now, think for a moment about the last time someone started telling you about their cat. Even if you’re a cat lover, you know it’s at best a 50/50 chance you’ll be bored to tears a minute into someone else’s cat story. More people will spontaneously and passionately tell more boring stories about cats than almost anything on earth. (Dreams and children come first to mind.) Why are Maru’s struggles compelling? Even a dog owner can’t help rooting for him, at least a little.
In 1949, Joseph Campbell released “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” in which he outlined his theory of the hero myth. Essentially, Campbell identified the structure of almost every tale from Ulysses to Star Wars.
Almost universally (and I’m really reducing this), a hero begins in an ordinary world, receives a call to enter a strange world, faces trials, and then returns home to improve the world. Amazingly, this can be even further reduced to a simple formula anyone can follow to tell a good story.
In the case of Maru and the Box:
1) Introduce the Hero: This is Maru. He is inquisitive and cute.
2) Introduce a Challenge: This is a box. Maru absolutely has to get into that box!
3) Show the Struggle: He tries climbing on the table to jump higher. He fails.
4) Vanquish the Challenge: He pulls out a gun and shoots the box. (You watched the video right?)
You can describe almost anything that’s ever happened to any person using this formula. Just stick to the formula. There are two problems people often encounter when trying to follow this formula.
1) Adding unnecessary details to “fill out the story.”
People often want to add things that aren’t in the formula because they are afraid their story won’t make sense without it. For example, you could get hung up explaining to the viewer why the hero’s challenge matters. Don’t do it. If your hero is passionate about their determination to overcome the challenge, the viewer will except any explanation you give them–if you even bother to give them one. For example: What was the gold stuff in the case in Pulp Fiction? What was E.T.’s ship doing on earth in the first place? Why did Maru have to get in the box? The more you explain your story, the more time you give your viewers to wonder “Do I believe this?” Give them nothing.
2) Thinking their industry is too technical/specialized/boring to make a good story–even with Joseph Campbell’s formula .
This is not true. Ever. The more technical/specialized/boring your industry is, the lower the bar your story has to get over–for the right viewer. That’s because the smaller your niche is, the fewer stories your video has to compete with. When the right viewer watches your hero video they are going to be so excited to see a story about something they care about they won’t care if it’s perfect. They’re going to feel like you wrote a song about them. That’s the best!
For example, check out the tale of the Kenmore 90 series Washing Machine and the Broken Coupler:
Was that amazing or what? Did you watch the whole thing? The first time I saw it I watched it at least five times. Let me break down the story:
1) Introduce the Hero: This is Weston. He thinks he is “handy.”
2) Introduce the Challenge: This is Weston’s Kenmore series 90 washing machine. It stopped producing clean clothes and now makes only a bad sound.
3) Show the Struggle: Repairmen are expensive. (Weston is also “frugal.”) It is impossible to compare the sound he hears the machine making to the sound the repair blogs write about.
4) Vanquish the Challenge: Weston fixes the machine with a couple of wrenches and his bare hands. (and a laptop looping the above video)
The only thing more powerful than a video that tells a great story by itself is a video that helps viewers tell the story that matters to them.
Have you ever heard someone sing a song or read a poem about something small that you knew a lot about like your school or your work or your family or you? It didn’t matter that it was terrible because it was about something you cared about. In fact, it was even better that it was terrible because it meant someone cared enough about what you cared about to risk looking stupid singing a song they wrote about it.
We’ve all (hopefully) heard someone tell a story that had us catching ourselves holding our breaths at parts and laughing out loud at others. You’ve likely also had the experience of trying to re-tell a great story you heard to a friend only to have them stare blankly at you and say something like, “So they couldn’t find the right printer paper, but then they found it.”
From the smallest feline to intergalactic cowboys, heroes come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve been telling stories about them for a very long time. By integrating this classic structure into your videos, you not only help your viewers solve their problems, but you help them become a hero as well.
You want to use video in your marketing campaigns, but hiring a production team for every YouTube video can be a costly endeavor. The Video Marketing Boot Camp will teach you how to plan, produce and edit compelling visual stories.
The Video Marketing Boot Camp is an intensive two day class designed to help marketing, public relations, and social media professionals create educational, entertaining, well produced videos so that they can create larger audiences, improve website traffic, maximize time on site, and increase conversion.
Marketing managers, content marketers, inbound marketers, public relations professionals and social media marketers who have content production responsibilities.
At the end of the video marketing boot camp you’ll know how to:
· Choose and operate a camcorder
· Set up a simple 3-point lighting system in any environment
· Capture crisp, clear audio
· Edit video for compelling story-telling
· Choose the right compression (codec) for online distribution
· Optimize your video for the web (SEO)
You’ll need to bring –
· Your video camera
· Laptop
· Editing Software (preferably Final Cut Express or Adobe Premiere)
· Tape
· Headphones
If you have any questions about equipment – contact us.
$650 for the 2-day seminar
If you are unable to attend and don’t plan to send a substitute, you must notify us five (5) business days prior to the seminar date to be entitled to a full refund.If you cancel or transfer within five (5) business days of the event,there is a 15% cancellation fee.
The “how-to” video is the quintessential video for content marketing. By creating a video that solves a problem around a particular keyword set you not only show yourself off as a thinker but you create extra inbound marketing bait.
This is probably the most important part of the process. Have you identified a solution to a problem that you’ve haven’t found online yet? Are you looking to get some traffic around a particular set of keywords? Take some time and research YouTube for videos about topics that are important to your audience. Look at the competition and see if there are some gaps they haven’t covered yet. You may discover that you have the opportunity to build an entire channel that didn’t exist before. If you’re SEO savvy, do some keyword research using your favorite tool and see which terms are the most searched in your area. If there are 200 searches a day for “make organic dog food” and you do just that, you may have found your topic.
Good Ol’ Fashioned copywriting rules apply here when you’re choosing a title. You want it to be mind-tingling and SEO friendly so that both your audience and Google love it. Consider using the Cracked.com formula of headline writing – “Number Adjective Noun That Noun Verb”. Really. It’s a successful formula. You can also use “How To” in your title. If someone sees that they’re going to believe they’re going to learn something.
Keep this simple and straightforward. Introduce yourself, who you’re with and then tell us what you’re going to do. Shoot this as a separate segment so that you can get it right. Afterward, you’ll be able to edit it in to your clip.
If you’re doing something complex, you’ll often have a list of supplies that your viewer will need to gather. Remember that people consume content differently, so rather than only taking shots of each item for your video, consider itemizing the list in your blog post.
When you’re designing the video, it helps to break out your story into its component parts.
Video: Obviously, video is best for conveying action and dialogue. Which shots do you want to use for this video?
Images/Graphics: Which images convey your message. Will you be using photos or are you better served with drawings that you can cut in.
Text: Which pieces of text can you use? This will probably come in the form of titling or may be even itemized lists in your video.
Audio: You want to be heard. You’ll need a voice. You’ll may also need music and sound effects. Consider where they may go in your clip.
You have a couple of options here for shooting your how-to video.
Shoot all at once: Shoot your entire video at once so that you get a nice continuous piece of audio and video to use in your timeline. Audio is a critical piece of the video since you’ll use it to structure the story. Various shots can be added as needed if you have a solid structure.
Shoot in segments:Record each step of your “how-to” video individually. Doing it this way insures that each piece is polished as possible. Plus it keeps you in the flow of each segment giving you confidence each time you repeat yourself.
In order to keep things lively, you’ll need b-roll. That is you’ll, need individual shots of either your materials or separate closer, detailed shots of you working on something. You’ll add these shots into your timeline to give your audience something to look at besides just a long speech on fixing washing machines.
In this post, we outline some of the things you should consider when creating screencasts.
Want to download this as a pdf? We’ve put it over on Scribd for you.
If you’ve found these posts to be beneficial, please subscribe to our feed. We’d appreciate it.
Screencasts are a very easy way to do training or to show off new features of an online product. They’re particularly useful if you’ve noticed a gap in the “how-to” market for your particular set of keywords. Putting up a screencast demonstrates your knowledge as well as gives you some extra SEO content out there on the web.
Pre: 20 minutes of scripting out your bullet points
Production: 20 minutes to allow for re-dos
Post: 20 minutes in post production
There are a variety of screencast tools on the market.
PC users have access to:
- Camtasia
- Jing
- Adobe Captivate
For the Mac you can try:
- Screenflow
- Camtasia for Mac
- iShowU
Screenflow and Camtasia run about $99.00 and both allow you to edit your screencasts in a timeline which gives you plenty of flexibility.
Distribution: Think about where this video is going to be seen. Are you doing it just as a quick one-off for your own blog or are you building it for your company’s site. The answer to this question will determine how much you put into your screencast.
Scripting: Brainstorm and outline your screencast so that you cover the 3 – 4 main points that you want people to get out of your project.
Consider this approach to the script:
I. Introduce yourself, role title, company
II. Tell your audience what you’re going to show them
III. Show your audience 2 – 3 points
IV. Provide a summary
V. Restate your name and your contact information so that they can get in touch with you.
Storyboarding: Remember that screencasts take a nice big screen down to a little bitty player on someone’s desktop. Sketch out the most important shots or images that you want your viewer to see and synch them up with your script.
Editing: You can get as fancy here as you want. Keep in mind that you’re trying to make an impact, solve a problem or educate someone. Make sure that the tricks you use support your goals.
You’re going to notice that you mumble, stutter and say ‘um’ an awful lot the first few times you create your screencasts.
Practice what you’re going to say, or even better, record your audio separately so that you can edit out any unseemly pauses.
This post is part of a series that we’re writing for social media and inbound marketers over at @SMBAustin. If you’ve found these posts to be beneficial, please subscribe to our feed. We’d appreciate it.
Want to download this? We’ve turned it into a pdf for you over at Scribd.
Pre: 15 minutes to get your questions together. Even less if you’re just running down the hall to get the breaking news from your CEO.
Production: 5 – 30 minutes depending on how structured you want to be.
Post Production: 5 – 30 minutes. If you’re just going straight from iMovie to YouTube without any extra goodies then you can be in and out on the blog in minutes.
Distribution: Up to 60 minutes. Again this can be 4 – 5 minutes if you’re not doing any editing. Assume that while you’re uploading your video, you’re tagging, doing descriptions, SEO, creating pdfs and blogging.
Camera: Use anything from your iphone, Kodak Zi8, Canon HV40 or on up the spectrum. Ultimately, don’t be afraid to just shoot with what you have. Your customers care about YOU not the quality of the video (yet).
Audio: If you’re using the Zi8 or a more expensive camera, please shoot with a microphone. All on camera microphones are terrible. Again, the caveat here is – Produce First. Ask Questions Later.
Editing Tools: We’re Mac fans and recommend iMovie for straight captures and Final Cut Express for more detailed editing work. Final Cut Pro after that.
If you’re on a PC, there are loads of inexpensive tools out there:
- Sony Vegas
- Pinnacle
- Adobe Premiere Elements
- Roxio Creator
There are free online ones too:
- www.jaycut.com
There are a variety of interviews that you can shoot quickly and easily.
Breaking news, right now: Did you just get the latest results in on a poll? Did a competitor do something your CEO should comment on? Run down the hall, now!
People Around The Office: Your co-workers may be annoying, but they are interesting. Sure they’re good at their jobs, but they’ve got hobbies, families, commutes and things to talk about other than the latest TPS report. Your customers and friends will think that’s great stuff.
The folks over at Pet Relocation.com have some great anecdotes about customers who have seen their videos of their crew.
Sit Downs With People You Like: Grab a few minutes with a person that you just find interesting in your field. Chris Brogan has latched on to this with this kitchen table talks. You can also use your new camera skills to grab people in your industry.
We talked with Kyle Flaherty over at Breaking Point about the things he’s trying using this technique.
Hey, I’m with…!: At the bar after a great seminar? Pick up your camera and ask your partners for their feedback on what they just learned.
Interviewing can be a difficult skill to master. Keep your subjects in the loop with the questions you’re going to ask and make sure that they know what you’re going to talk about.
Keep it down to a few key points to make things easier on them, you in post production, and your viewing audience later on.
Produce First. Video is about people sharing their stories. Get out there and shoot.
In this post, we show you how to shoot a video book review that shouldn’t break your already stretched time commitments. You can download the pdf over at Scribd. We’ll be improving the package as we add more posts to this series for the folks over at @SMBAustin.
Here’s a rough sketch of the time it takes me to do a video book review. Your time commitment will depend on how much you put into post-production.
Maximum, I spend 2 hours on book review. That includes uploading. If you’re a better multi-tasker you’ll get these things knocked out more quickly – literally in 5 – 10 minutes without a lot of post.
Read the book: This depends on your style.
Get Your Bullets: 15 minutes
Shoot The Review: 5 – 10 Minutes
Edit: 5 -15 minutes
Export and Compress: 10 – 12 Minutes
Upload: Up to 60 minutes depending on file size
Tagging/Descripting: 5 Minutes
Writing Blog post : 10 Minutes
Transcribing: 2 Minutes
Scribd: 3 – 5 Minutes
Keep your book reviews short and to the point.
People tend to stop watching videos that are over 1:30 long as it is. You want to speak from the heart, but only say the 3 – 4 things that you really want people to know about the book.
For examples of people who do it well, take a look at www.chrisbrogan.com and read Chris Ming Ryan. Chris is a professional storyteller and offers great insight on how to keep things zipping along.
Also check out Brand Autopsy’s dramatic readings, they’re definitely a different spin on the genre.
To reduce time, I also shoot with a Canon HV40 right into iMovie on my laptop. This keeps me from having to record to tape and then import later. I despise iMovie for editing and move into Final Cut Express when there’s real work to be done, but it’s great for getting the video shot quickly.
You don’t HAVE to shoot with a microphone, but it sure sounds a whole heck of a lot better. On camera mics are terrible. Plus, people will stick around if they can hear you.
I’ve been using the Audio Technica ATR-3550. It’s wired, easy to use and produces a sound good enough for a quick book report.
Not everyone wants to watch your whole review. They may just want to skim it.
Transcribing your videos not only helps your readers consume your content the way that is easiest for them, but helps seed your post with fresh, SEO tuned content.
I’ve been using SpeakerText with some great results. For $20, you can get several videos transcribed. They usually cost me .33 to $1.50 a piece depending on how verbose I am. Another reason to keep things pithy.
One warning, SpeakerText is in BETA and at times it can take a while for them to find your YouTube video. Don’t get too addicted to the juice just yet – they’re still working out the kinks. UPDATE: Matt Mireles, CEO SpeakerText, and Bjiorn Liljequist were extremely fast and helpful in fixing the problems I had.
It’s all about production and reach these days. While YouTube is your most trafficed video site out there, I highly recommend that you try TubeMogul for launching your book reviews. This can take some time to set up, but you’ll be happier when you see your shining face show up in random places.
Remember that distribution doesn’t just mean video – you’ve created a lot of text-rich content as well. I like to use www.sribd.com to load up my transcriptions and build links back to my videos.
More social media savvy authors will already be listening for mentions of their books. Be sure to tell Twitter what you’ve just created and there is a good chance that the author will comment, respond and even debate with you about your points.
So that’s it. The trick is to just get the video up and work your way into your own style. As you produce more content, you’ll develop patterns that will help you move along more quickly.
In this clip, @Talmadge shows you how to convert the h.264 codec from the Zi8 into an Apple Intermediate Codec that plays well if Final Cut Express using a free tool called MPEG Streamclip. This should cut your render times way down and give you more time doing the creative video work that you really love.
The Zi8 records video to the h.264 codec which is a finishing format, not really a production format. It’s great for sending files up to YouTube, but not good for editing. Plus Final Cut Express only supports DV, HDV, and AVCHD footage, so in order to work with a file from the Zi8, you have convert the file to something that it supports natively.
1) Download MPEG Streamclip from Squared5. It’s free.
2) Import your file from the Zi8.
3) Open your file in MPEG Streamclip. File > Open Files.
4) Convert your file to Quicktime. File > Export To Quicktime
5) Choose these settings:
Compression: Apple Intermediate Codec
Quality 100%
Frame Size: 1920×1080 (HDTV 1080i) or whatever you shot in
Click Make Movie
6) After you have your movie, bring it into FCE and you’re done!
Check out VideoCamp Austin for more tips on becoming a faster, more creative web video storyteller.
We recently loaded up a video for our customer Morris, Craven & Sulak, Austin personal injury attorneys and I wanted to share the two day results here.
On Monday, we released the video on YouTube in the late afternoon.
Tuesday, the video had not indexed in YouTube or in Google Video search.
Wednesday, our video was ranked # 3 in Google Video search and # 1 in YouTube for the keywords that we had defined.
Screenshots of the results are below.
Oh, and if you want to see the video, it’s here!
Three point lighting is a simple technique that still photographers and videographers alike use to set their subject off from a background and remove any unwanted shadows often caused by direct lighting.
As you can see from the snapshots below, lighting makes all the difference:
Often, when you’re shooting video in the office you don’t have access to multiple lights or a high-dollar light kit. What follows are some tricks that you can use to create pleasant lighting when you’re grabbing video of your cube-mates and executives.
Key Light
The key light is your main source of light. It sits in front of the subject and illuminates your subject directly.
Fill Light
The fill light does just what it says. It fills in shadows from the key light. Normally, it sits to the side of the subject a little lower than the key light and is a softer light. Often you can use a reflector to bounce light off of the key if you’re looking for something softer.
Back Light
The back light sits opposite the fill light and a little behind your subject. Its purpose is to set your subject off from the background by providing highlights or a “rim” along your subjects contours.
You always want to light your subject and you want to get your lighting right the first time. But without a light kit, what do you do?
It bears repeating that there are a couple of good rules of thumb about light:
• Fluorescent lights are bad.
• Sunlight is good.
• In the daytime, always be on the lookout for a window next to which you can shoot your subject.
Before you get shooting, do yourself a favor and take note of the lighting in your office. Do you have fluorescents? Have a window handy? Do you have direct inset lights in the ceiling?
Ideally, look for a window and use that as your key light. For a fill, use something reflective to bounce light back onto your subject. This can be foam core, aluminum foil, a reflective car sun visor…
For a back light grab whatever’s handy around you. Clamp-on work lights make great hair lights–but just about anything will work. The trick is to just get a nice little glint of light off the top of their head to give it a little more depth. But don’t waste time on it. All you really need is a key and a fill in a pinch.
Always use whatever natural light is available whenever possible. Don’t believe people when they say there is no natural light at their office. Look around for that window with the boring view that everyone’s forgotten about because they’ve got too many fluorescent lights blaring down at them.
Turn off the lights and practice unpacking your gear in the dark while your eyes adjust.
If the light’s too low, see if you can kick it up a little with a light of your own to keep your ISO from going too high.
Those clamp-on lights do come in handy though.
@BigManWeston used one as a key for an interview where the only natural light was straining its way in through a small 1.5′ x 2′ window near the ceiling. That ended up being the fill. It looked great.
Some caveats to all this:
Don’t be such a sun worshiper that your ISO creeps up and your footage ends up a grainy mess.
Buy good light bulbs for that clamp-on work light. They need to have at least a 90 CRI (color rendering index–to give you vibrant color) and a color temperature around 5000-6000K (to match the tone of natural light).
You can get them here:
http://www.naturallighting.com/web/shop.php?crn=565&start=1
These kind of lights cost between 4 and 10 times as much as the ones you pick-up at 7-11 on a whim–more than that clamp light cost you. They are worth every penny. If you don’t want to spend that much on light bulbs, leave the clamp on light at home.
Did you dig this post? Leave a comment or subscribe to the feed. Thanks! You’re the best.
Images thanks to Wikipedia, FromTheNorth, and Sheba_Also.
Our friends at Phurnace Software asked us to help them create a show that highlights their ability to automate java application deployments. Phurnace builds software to help companies automate the deployment of J2EE applications and configuration of WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss or WebSphere Portal.
Shot on a Canon HV30 and performed by Larry Warnock and Jessica Gass [...]
Our friends at Phurnace Software, who make Java application deployment software, are gearing up to announce a new “rollback” feature in their Portal Deliver product at the next Websphere Portal Excellence Conference.
They asked us to put together a quick promo piece to invite people to their booth.
We are gearing up for a great [...]
We put together a book trailer for the book “Smoke Screen” by Sandra Brown.
Ms. Brown isn’t a customer of ours, but we felt like playing around a little with graphic animation, and intrigue. You can find out more about the book and the author over at Barnes and Noble.
The Pink Slip Festival in Austin, Texas provided free live music, family fun, cheap beer and hotdogs for Austin’s unemployed families. Dan Dillard of Amplify Financial created the Pink Slip Festival as an Austin styled response at to the down economy. The Pink Slip Festival was held at the Spider House coffee shop and featured [...]
It’s no big secret that @bigmanweston and I like to eat.
My wife is a killer cook and Weston’s culinary paramour, @girlblake, can make a mean Sunny Side Up-Cake.
So when she decided to take her cupcakes on the road to the Cupcake Smackdown 1.0, we thought we’d tag along with a camera.
There were many entries. [...]
This is a promo piece that we shot for our friends at Amplify Federal Credit Union.
The 30 second commercial aired in Austin captures Rob Harbison’s testimonial about Amplify’s new “Free All ATMs” campaign. That’s right. All your ATM transactions are free with Amplify.
Go Amplify!
