Making Digital Video for Your New Business

Creating digital video for your website need not be an expensive endeavor. In fact, you can probably do it yourself. If you do decide to produce the videos for your online business presence you will learn a LOT and it will be knowledge you can use for years to do it again and again.

Video is quickly becoming the preferred media for showing website visitors important facts. Branding your business is easy with video – because you can re-shoot a hundred times if you want until you get exactly the right tone and style you think accurately depicts your business.

Creating digital video for your new business need not be expensive. If you have a digital video camera right now you can give it a shot. I’ll list the basic steps below, with some tips for creating high quality video for internet use.

1. Create a spreadsheet (Excel sheet, or Google Apps spreadsheet) and outline your video.
Some Important considerations:

• Length of video
• Size of video on the website – large videos mean big files. Ours on this site is only 300pixels wide. Is that big enough?
• Where will you host the video? We use YouTube because it’s free and because they are the 2nd most used search engine online – even beating Yahoo. Other people interested in incorporation can find our video there and visit our site because we have links to it in the video and description.
• What will “talent” wear?
• Where will you shoot? Is lighting excellent?

2. Once you have an outline of what you need to consider shoot the video. The format your video camera uses will likely be either .avi or .mpg. There are camcorders which record video in .mp4 and other formats. If your digital video camcorder shoots .mp4 you’re in luck – you can upload that directly to YouTube if you don’t make a file over 1GB in size.

3. Edit your video. Add titles to the beginning and end. Consider adding some titles throughout the video if they can help explain something. If you use charts – beware of small characters and lines because when video is compressed it destroys the fine details. I use Windows Movie Maker for many of the videos I create. If you’re just starting out you should too. It creates great movies and allows some manipulation of the effects, transitions, and even brightness and speed of your videos. It’s quite intuitive and easy to learn. Spend some time and learn this program. You’ll have fun doing so.

4. Once you put the movie together in the timeline in Movie Maker you can ask a friend to preview it and see what they think. Often times your own assessment about what looks good is skewed. Get some other opinions.

5. When you create your file make it as large as you can – and as large as you can stomach uploading. For me – files of 250MB and larger are difficult to do because I don’t have access to a very fast internet connection. If you do – 1GB won’t seem like a pain and that will be your max because as of today – YouTube’s max is 1GB unless you’re in their partner program. I usually use 640×480 size video with a bit rate at “high quality” custom setting in Movie Maker. This is about 4000 bits per second and is a good quality video that YouTube renders nicely – and gives you the “HQ” button for High Quality viewing so anyone can see the video in higher definition.

6. After you’ve finished uploading to YouTube play the file there and grab the “embed code” that is just to the right of the video. Choose the asterisks looking icon to the right of the embed code option so you can choose the size of the video window you’ll put on your site. And, if it’s not the right size – you can edit that embed code to make it smaller. For our business videos we use 300 wide by 250 high settings and it works well.

7. Embed the code in your website.

8. Use Twitter, Facebook, and other places to tell others about your new movie. Try to get some feedback. You might need to change parts of the video. If you’ve saved your video project in Movie Maker you’ll be able to edit it easily – replacing clips, titles, and transitions easily before you rebuild the video.

9. Go back to YouTube and add “Annotations” which is text on top of your video in which you can put hyperlinks leading to your website. This is a good way to bring more visitors to your site.

10. Do it again! You’ll get better with practice…

Editing Digital Photos for Your Business Website

Digital photo editing is a skill that takes a long time to learn at a very high level, but it isn’t that difficult to learn enough so you can do your own digital photo editing in a pinch. There are a couple of amazing tools that help you do this.

First of all, how do you find photos to use for your business website if you’re not shooting them yourself?

1. Stock agencies like Dreamstime.com have them for sale. You can search millions of images by keyword and buy the rights to use the image for your business for a few dollars per image. Yep, it’s that easy.

2. If you don’t even want to spend a few dollars you can get some great images for free at Flickr.com. At the bottom of Flickr pages is a link to Creative Commons photos. Go there and have a look. You’ll see groups of CC images that you can choose from, but be careful because only a couple are OK to use on your business website. I always use the “By:” attribution photos because I can edit the photos as I like too – within the limits of the license. Search the 13million + By: attributed photos and find some great shots for your website. Make sure you credit the author. I use (Photo credit: Flickr.com user, usersnamehere)

If you’ve shot images yourself and want to edit them easily you should really invest in an old version of “Paint Shop Pro”. This is a Photoshop type program that has thousands of options, but that is MUCH easier to learn than PS. It just makes a lot more sense.

Edit your image in Paint Shop Pro and save it as a .jpg or .gif file and then go get “xat.com’s JPEG Optimizer” program which will help you shrink the file size to a more internet friendly size. I’ve used JPEG optimizer Pro for about 9 years now and it’s still amazing. I use an old version so it’s free!

There are tutorials for Paint Shop Pro and JPEG Optimizer that will teach you how to do simple graphics changes.

Good luck!

Creating Video for Your Business Website Cheaply

I’ve used this technique to create online video for sites doing multi-millions of dollars in sales each year and I’ll probably continue using it for a another couple months until I splurge and buy a new digital video camcorder, Canon’s GL-2 or equivalent.

There’s a couple things about web video that you should know.

#1 – Nobody is doing it right. To do it right would cost a lot of money and involve a company that specializes in shooting web video for online businesses. If companies in your niche are producing world-class digital video – you should too. Probably you’re in a niche that doesn’t require t.

#2 – You don’t have to break the bank.

Sony Cybershot cameras have been offering for a few years the ability to shoot 640×480 resolution video at 30 frames per second. I bought a 4 megapixel Sony Cybershot a few years ago and started using it for all my web video. Guess what? It works, and it works VERY well for the cost.

The DSC-W series of Sony Cybershots have Carl Zeiss coated lenses and you can manually manipulate the focus while shooting video – essential to good video. Digital video’s weakness is usually in the focus – and you’ll find that especially with Sony’s cameras.

Tip 1: Preset the focus manually to 3 meters and zoom in to fill the frame with your body or face. This will eliminate the wide-angle distortion that takes place without zooming. It will also blur the background slightly – assuming you want that to put the emphasis on the person in the video.

Tip 2: Use diffuse lighting – if you’re outside shoot in the shade. If you’re inside use many lighting sources from different angles. Use white panty hose stretched across the lights to soften the light.

Tip 3: Manually choose the lighting type on the camera. My Cybershot allows for 5 settings, don’t use auto as you can probably pick one that more closely matches conditions when you choose manually.

Tip 4: Put a 2 second space of not speaking before and after each clip – as you shoot. It will make it easier to edit and use transitions.

Tip 5: Use a tripod – always, for every shot! There are a couple reasons for this. 1. You’ll not annoy your audience with bouncing around. 2. When you compress the video into MPG, WMV or MP4 you’ll be able to shrink it quite a bit more when on a tripod. Less bouncing around means less color changes – and smaller file sizes.

Tip 6: Rather than stopping the video and restarting over and over for re-takes, just keep it rolling and say the lines again. It’s easy to cut the bad parts out when editing. A child could edit video with Windows Movie Maker.

Tip 7: Practice with Windows Movie Maker. First you import video – and you can import pictures too – to use slides, or other shots in your video as stills. Once imported they pop up and you can drag them onto the timeline below to create your movie. As you preview your movie on the right side is a “split-clips” button that helps you split the clips where you wish – editing out the bad parts. Use transitions to ease the splicing of 2 clips together. Use video effects to lighten or darken your movie, or create special effects like sepia toning. We’ll offer a video course here you can take that will show you step by step how to go through shooting and editing a video into a web movie for your business website.

Tip 8: When you choose “Save movie file” from the File menu save your movie as “High Quality Video Large” which will give you a large file at 640×480 resolution and 30 fps that is optimized for YouTube. Upload to YouTube and then choose “embed code” from YouTube’s options for your new movie and embed that code on your website. Let YouTube host your video. If you follow the instructions I have here – you should have a nice video at YouTube even after they compress it. After YouTube is done compressing it they will offer you a button to download your new video as an MP4 file – which you might want to go ahead and do so you have it. You could then offer that file on your website to iPhone users – which can read the new Mp4 file formatted videos.

Tip 9: Return here and sign up for our digital video training course to get step-by-step training.