LongTail Video, makers of JW Player (which is an excellent choice if you must host your own video) have released their ‘State of HTML5 Video‘, detailing the overall and feature-specific compatibility of HTML5 video in today’s most popular web browsers. It’s a great report, but also sobering when you see the lack of across-the-board support for MP4 (the dominant and best format for really crunching down online video while preserving acceptable quality) combined with Google Chrome’s upcoming switch to the vastly less mature but more open WebM, it seems inevitable that streaming sites and individual hosts will have to support Flash players for at least the upcoming year.
But why does HTML5 video matter? What’s the big deal with having to fall back to Flash? We live in an increasingly mobile world, and mobile devices are only as good as their battery life. Flash, while ubiquitous, also has a reputation for killing the battery life on laptops, tablets, and smartphones, which is why companies like Apple have rejected it. Properly implemented HTML5 video (check out our homepage on an iPad or iPhone to see Wistia’s terrific Matador player in action) lets sites offer up video without compromising battery life.
Before and After Color Grading (click to expand)
One of the most important – and most often overlooked – components of video is color correction, or color grading, and last night’s State of the Union Address offers an unprecedented example of what poor color grading can do to reduce the quality of video.
During last night’s telecast, the primary camera feed was badly discolored. Note how President Barack Obama (center) appears yellowish-green, and House Speaker John Boehner (right), a man with famously orange, tanned skin appears to have normal skin tone. The problem didn’t seem to exist from any other camera angles, and appeared across all of the television networks (although it looked like CBS was attempting to compensate in the second hour), and so was likely the result of incorrect white balance in that one camera. For whatever reason (probably security), adjustments couldn’t be made live, and the capability must not have existed in the control room to adjust the image before it was sent out to the networks, and so the result was an evening with a president that looked like a nauseous Kermit the Frog.
So how does this relate to corporate video? Well, in the world of non-live video, we have the ability to fix and enhance these images after the fact using color-correction filters and specialty software. Most offices use some form of fluorescent light (or worse, mixed light), which can leave untreated images discolored similarly to the State of the Union. Light-skinned subjects appear to have a yellow cast, and dark-skinned ones look green. Getting good white balance during your shoot is key, but simple adjustment to a set of three color wheels can fix – even enhance – your images to return your subjects to their natural color so that viewers aren’t distracted and clients aren’t offended by the way they look. Take a look at the before and after picture with this post. If Barack Obama were your CEO, would you rather deliver corporate video that looked like the top image or the bottom? It took less than two minutes to grade the bottom image, and the difference in quality is night and day. Color correction is one of the easiest and most effective ways to add production value to your corporate video, and it’s fairly easy to get the hang of.
Want to learn more? Here are some good resources:
Vimeo Video School – Introduction to Color Correction
Prolost – Color Correcting Canon 7D Footage
Color Correction in iMovie – MacWorld
Add Subtitles & Transcripts To YouTube To Help With Video Search Engine Optimization
You can hope that Google and YouTube guess what your video is about or you can tell them! Video Search Engine Optimization is the process of letting search engines know what your video is about so the search engine can show your video based on your keywords. Every video you add to YouTube should include tags and a title that specifically describe your video. Google and other search engines will use those tags and titles to index your video.
Tags help but if you want Google to know exactly what is being said in your video you can simply add subtitles or a transcript to your video with the exact words being spoken. If you create a video about green tractors and the people in the video speak a lot about green tractors your video is much more likely to show up in Google and other search engines. If the subtitles / transcript has many instance of the words ‘green’ and ‘tractor’ Google will know exactly what the video is about.
Adding subtitles and transcripts is super easy. 1) Simply create a .TXT file that has the exact words spoken in the video. 2) Click on the “Edit captions/subtitles” button above your video. 3) Click on the “Add New Captions or Transcript” button. 4) Select “Transcript File” 5) Upload your .TXT file.
NOTE: We find it is better/easier to select the “Transcript File” option rather than the “Caption File” option because the Caption File option requires that you also add exact time codes. The “Transcript File” option only requires the actual words spoken during the video. Google’s speech recognition software will figure out when to add the subtitles to match your video.
We have created a quick tutorial video to help with adding subtitles and transcriptions to YouTube videos. During our video, you will see we add a transcript file to a recent tutorial video we have created to help businesses embed video in HTML on their website/blog using Youtube videos. You can check out the original video How To Embed Video In HTML Using YouTube Videos and you can see a help page we created How To Embed Video
Add Subtitles & Transcripts To YouTube To Help With Video Search Engine Optimization
Rewatchable is a video production company based near Boston, Massachusetts.
Video Production Tip For Do-It-Yourselfer -Tip #1 – Quality Sound
Lots of marketing professionals would love to hire a video production company but just don’t have the budget for an expensive video production so they decide to go the Do-It-Yourself route. Unfortunately, video production is easier in theory than in practice. Every video production poses different challenges and opportunities and lots can go wrong.
At Rewatchable, we have scoured the web and seen it all from Do-It-Yourselfers. Amateur business videos (sounds funny doesn’t it?) run the gamut from great to awful. The biggest mistake we see is the “video producer” does not pay attention to sound quality.
The reality is most consumer grade video camera equipment has awful sound recording capabilities. In many cases, executive videos are ruined because the sound is inaudible or it sounds like the video production was done in a giant auditorium filled with echoes. The problem is twofold. The microphone on the camera is of low quality and it is just too far away from the person being interviewed.
For your amateur business video production, you really have three choices.
If you are lucky, your consumer-grade video camera might have an “audio in” jack so that you can plug in an external microphone. You can then plug in a high quality microphone and move it closer to the interviewee. One of our favorite microphones is the VideoMic from Rode. The VideoMic produces a great sound and is affordable at about $150. There are also a wide selection of wired and wireless lavaliere microphones available that can plug into a consumer-grade video camera with “audio in” jacks”
The second choice is to get your video camera as close as possible to the subject. Play back your footage during the actual video production to see if it sounds half decent. If it doesn’t sound good, cancel the video production and don’t waste your executive’s time and good will. Nothing will kill interest in future video productions more than when an executive says all the right things perfectly but you screw up the audio/video production.
The final option is to use a separate recording device to supplement the video camera’s bad microphone. You can get secondary audio with a high-quality audio recorder like a Zoom H4N or even a Flip camera hidden close by. The Flip camera won’t pick up excellent sound but it should be more than adequate as long as it is very close to the person being interviewed. The only problem with secondary audio is you will need to sync the audio yourself with video editing software like Final Cut Pro X or if you find that too difficult you will need to engage a professional video editing service like Rewatchable, Inc. You will pay less than you would have paid for a full video production but you will still need to budget for the audio synching and the end result can’t be guaranteed.
Rewatchable is a video production company based in Beverly, Massachusetts near Boston.
Netflix’s Watch Instantly is a great way to catch up on movies and tv shows, but sometimes it’s automatic selection of your video’s bit rate (quality) can leave you with something less than your connection can actually handle. To manually select your quality (and hence, force HD playback), click on the video once it’s started to ensure that it’s your top window, and then press:
Control + Shift + Option/Alt + S
Now, at Rewatchable HQ we have ludicrous-speed Internet, so I always just choose the lowest option to ensure that I’m pulling the best version of the stream that Netflix has to offer (most movies seem to top out at 1750kbps – a speed that even most cheap DSL lines can handle), but you can tune the manual selection to your available connection to find that perfect quality / performance combination that works for you.
Thanks to Jud Stephenson for the tip.
Boston Charity Event Video
We produce lots of business talking head videos, user conference videos, training videos, customer testimonial videos, marketing videos and more. We love each experience like our children because we get the opportunity to meet interesting people and we also get to learn about new businesses, markets and technologies. One day we might be in a chemical plant, another day we might be at a scientific user conference and the next we can be shooting a CEO video for a cool technology start-up company.
Sometimes though we get to produce videos that are particularly fun. Just a couple of weeks ago, we shot some video at the 2011 Riverfeast for Boston radio station The River 92.5. Riverfeast is an annual charity event banquet, silent auction and concert to benefit The Greater Boston Foodbank. It is held at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. The event was a blast and featured some great music from Bob Schneider and Scars On 45. We had lots of fun shooting and editing a short video montage that will be used by The River 92.5 to promote next years event.
The video is only about 30 seconds long. If you love great music perfomances and good times check out the event video and definitely check out the real event next year.
Scars On 45
Bob Schneider
Rewatchable is a Boston Event Video Company
Customer Testimonial Video – Special Pricing $1,200
Your best salesperson might well be your customer. Customers are allowed to rave about your business in ways that your salespeople just cannot. Even if your salesperson is raving about your products, services and company, they just are not as believable as a real client because they are paid employees. Customers on the other hand can speak from the heart about real-life customer experiences while praising your business.
Ask yourself this question. Do you think propsective employees would be more likely to do business with your organization if they heard from happy customers? The answer is OF COURSE. Prospects are usually nervous about doing business with new vendors and need to get the “warm and fuzzies” before they get too involved in the sales process. Customer testimonial videos are a very powerful way to establish credibility and to reassure prospective clients.
We want to help Boston area businesses sell more in 2012 so we are offering special pricing on our customer testimonial videos. We will visit either your office or your client’s office and capture video of your customer raving about your company, your service or product.
The process is very simple. We will first research your company and develop questions appropriate for your business and industry. During a 30 minute shoot, we will simply ask your customer open-ended questions and let your customer speak for themselves. We will also help them relax so they come off well on camera. Next, we will edit the best answers that show off your customer and your business in the best possible light. Finally, we will color-correct the video, add b-roll & text graphics and generally polish the video so it looks great for your website, social media and email marketing campaigns. The entire video production process can be completed in a couple of weeks.
Any customer testimonial purchased before the end of December, 2011 is now specially priced at only $1,200. The customer testimonial shoot must be scheduled before January 31st, 2012. The video production needs to take place in the Greater Boston area. To receive the special pricing just mention the “Sell More in 2012 Special”
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL VIDEO EXAMPLE
Wistia Customer Testimonial Video
Rewatchable – Customer Testimonial
Video Production Quality Tips From Marketing Firm HubSpot
HubSpot is a marketing automation firm based in Cambridge, MA. They are a leader in all things internet marketing so we watch their blog for inbound marketing tips. We thought our readers might be particularly interested in today’s post 12 Tips to Instantly Enhance Video Production Quality
The blog post has some great video production tips plus some interesting factoids like “”by 2013, 90% of internet traffic is expected to be video.” Below, we have consolidated the video production tips but we encourage you to read the full post. 12 Tips to Instantly Enhance Video Production Quality
Top Pre-Production Tips:
1. Be original.
2. Plan it out.
3. Be selective when choosing video subjects.
4. Carefully consider the set.
Top Production Tips:
5. Be cognizant of sound quality.
6. Set up lights.
7. Use a tripod.
8. Focus.
9. Obey the ‘rule of thirds.’
Top Post-Production Editing Tips:
10. Align the flow of the video with the emotional response you want to evoke in viewers.
11. Leverage b-roll
12. Optimize video text.
HubSpot is a marketing automation company based in Cambridge, MA.
Rewatchable is a Boston based video production company located in Beverly, MA
Here’s a quick tutorial (not client work) we threw together on how to remove photos from Photo Stream in Apple’s new iCloud. In an industry where we’re often working with screen capture and screen grabs, hopefully this will prove useful to other folks using iPhones, iPads, and iCloud in general.
