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.