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.
Most high end video cameras, DSLRs, and even cell phones shoot at 1080p. You can edit 1080p video on a mid-range laptop. YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and most video hosting sites will gladly serve up gorgeous 1080p streams. Seems like if you want to serve up the highest quality video, you should deliver in the highest possible resolution, right? Not necessarily. On most corporate PCs and laptops, there’s little perceptible difference in quality between 720p and 1080p, and yet there’s a tremendous risk of viewers with weak Internet connections walking away from a video – even an excellent one – without viewing it completely if it buffers. The only way to ensure that 1080p video won’t buffer is to compress it at a low bit rate before you upload it – compromising visual quality (compression artifacts) in the name of, um, visual quality (resolution). Don’t make that mistake, and don’t take that risk. Deliver your corporate video at 720p and get more bit-rate bang for your buck.
Wanna know how to make a third of your market cap disappear? Follow up an egregious price increase by splitting a beloved, integrated service into two lesser, incomplete, separate services. Then give one of those businesses an almost impossible to spell name and lose a few million subscribers.
That’s exactly how Netflix spent their summer vacation. Game over, goodnight Netflix, it was a fun ride, see you at the fire sale, right? Not so fast. Netflix has built its industry-leading shipping and streaming operations around constantly observing, measuring and responding to information about the quality of its service. In this instance, strategy was just another service, and in an act as surprising and laudable as the company-splitting strategy was baffling, CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings this morning announced that Netflix was abandoning the decision, and that Netflix would proceed business-as-usual as a single service. Wow. Solid. Throw in some nice content-acquisition agreements, and all of a sudden Netflix is the belle of the ball again. Awesome win for responsive management, and an awesome win for consumers who love video.
The real loser in all of this? @Qwikster, the kid whose Twitter handle Netflix would surely have been forced to spend seven figures to acquire if they had followed through with the rebrand. Ouch. So close.
Like many editors, we’re working our way through a love-hate relationship with Final Cut Pro X at Rewatchable. On one hand, it’s missing a ton of pro features, can’t roundtrip with Motion (or anything else), and is packed with erratic behavior and inexplicable bugs. On the other hand, editing is remarkably faster thanks to the program’s emphasis on thumbnails and waveforms, and the scrubbing features allow editors to focus on story far more – and far more quickly – than traditional non-linear editors. When it works, it’s perfect for what we do. When it doesn’t work, we lose big chunks of time finding workarounds and recreating work in more stable software.
Just a few weeks ago, the first major revision to Final Cut Pro X (iTunes link) was released by Apple, taking the software from 10.0 to 10.0.1. Here’s what we’ve noticed since updating:
Pros:
- Much more stable. With FCPX 10.0, you could expect to crash once or twice an hour. Now, I crash once or twice a day. Can’t wait ’til it gets to ‘doesn’t crash’, but the stability improvements are dramatic and welcome.
- Full Screen View. It was insane that 10.0 didn’t ship with this. The new methodology behind Final Cut Pro X really demands one big screen, and you want every possible pixel of that one big screen available for editing, monitoring, and selecting footage.
- Multiple Clip Syncing. In version 10.0, if you selected a single audio clip and multiple video clips, they just wouldn’t sync. The resulting compound clip would just be a big pile of unsynced clips. Now, with 10.0.1, it works great. The ultimate testament to how well this feature is coming along is that it was able to sync some peaked-audio footage that Pluraleyes couldn’t. Can’t believe this fix didn’t make the release notes. For DSLR shops like Rewatchable, this was the biggest feature fix.
Cons:
- Still incredibly slow loading projects. If you have a disk with more than 3-4 projects on it, the loading of the project window takes far too long. I currently have six two-minute projects and one one-hour project on my drive, and it takes over a minute to go from launch to being able to work. That’s with a fast SSD and a Firewire 800 media drive. Unacceptable.
- Unpredictable output. Sometimes you’ll get a project looking perfect in the timeline, and when you export it, the resulting file has random crazy audio problems, kerning issues on fonts, or blips on transitions. Part of what’s beautiful about Final Cut Pro X is how simple the output process has become. Part of what’s infuriating about Final Cut Pro X is how little control or input you have when things go wrong with that output, even when using Compressor.
- Font issues. Occasionally, when you load a project, fonts will change. Weights. Faces. On their own. For no reason. We work predominantly on short-form videos, so it’s easy enough to check and repair fonts before final delivery, but if you work on longer videos consistently, I could see this being a real showstopper.
Rewatchable videos are edited on Apple computers connected to Apple displays. We use Apple Final Cut Pro X to edit our videos, Apple iPads as slates, teleprompters, and note-takers on set. We communicate using Apple iPhones. We deliver our videos in Apple Quicktime H.264. Take away these tools, and our videos – our entire class of videos – can’t exist. As amazing as it sounds when you consider Apple’s expensive reputation, you simply can’t create professional videos in our price range without the Apple products that Steve Jobs ushered into existence over the past 14 years.
So thanks Steve, and everyone he’s inspired, for everything.
Vimeo recently announced its Music Store, a service which allows you to pay as little as $1.99 per track for a personal license, or $98 per track for ‘limited commercial use’ (read: everything you’d probably ever want to do with online video).
Introducing Vimeo Music Store from Andrea Allen on Vimeo.
So what’s the big deal? Vimeo Music Store addresses a lingering problem in the world of corporate video. The music that comes with production software like Final Cut Studio, Logic, etc. is all over the place in terms of quality, tone, and length. These free libraries are a nice starting point for production companies, but you’ve probably heard the half a dozen or so good tracks in hundreds upon thousands upon millions of online videos and tv spots. The next step up from these tracks has traditionally been to license music from commercial music producers. Unfortunately, the largest of these shops determined en masse that online use should be more expensive than corporate/industrial use, and perpetual licensing typically started at around $2000/track. If you’ve got a $20,000 production budget, that’s all well and good, but when you’re trying to produce quality two minute videos in the <$5,000 range, you can’t afford to drop 40% of your budget on a jingle.
Music can be a powerful tool for creating mood, adding production value, and smoothing over rough spots in corporate video. Resources like the Vimeo Music Store and iStockPhoto (which has even better pricing but is horrendous to search) are a great start for bringing sanity to the market and increasing the quality of corporate videos everywhere.
Video Based Landing Pages
Serious marketers are always looking for ways to increase web conversions. Probably the best way to juice up conversions is by creating great landing pages with compelling calls-to-action. At Rewatchable, we are always looking for innovative ways businesses are using video marketing. That’s why we are super interested in a new offering from Concord, MA based KnowledgeVision. The new service is called Talking Landing Pages. KnowledgeVision Introduces the Talking Landing Page for B2B Marketing and Lead Generation The name of the service really speaks for itself. KnowledgeVision is helping marketers enhance static landing pages by adding dynamic video presentations.
“Business-to-business marketers are constantly looking for high-performing ways to convert web visitors into leads. Until now, they’ve done this through good copywriting and illustration on ‘landing pages’ – that is, static pages designed to capture vital contact information from visitors to a website. With KnowledgeVision’s Talking Landing Page, web visitors are greeted with a multimedia experience that delivers the marketer’s message with much higher impact. This leads to higher conversion rates and a more memorable experience. The Talking Landing Page is a distinct competitive advantage for innovative marketers.”
Michael Kolowich CEO and founder of KnowledgeVision.
At Rewatchable, we are big, big believers in web marketing video so we love the idea. KnowledgeVision offers services that helps businesses create presentation videos from camera-based video along with PowerPoint decks. We predict businesses will soon start to see an increase in conversions when the are using web video on landing pages. We also predict the question will soon not be “why use video on landing pages?” but “why would we not use video on landing pages?”
Rewatchable – Video Production Boston, Massachusetts
Vimeo Wants To Host Your Video Production
Vimeo is a wonderful video hosting company that has been around for several years. Vimeo.com is the first choice for many video producers due to its reliability, easy-to-use interface and excellent video quality. There’s always been something strange about Vimeo though… Until recently, they did not want to host your video production if you intended to embed your video on a commercial/business website. They were not just concerned about websites trying to make money directly off views of the video. Vimeo simply didn’t want to be used by any business websites. Got a hair salon video production? No! Got a restaurant video production? Too bad! Want to embed a customer testimonial video? Forget about it!
Vimeo was only interested in working with individual users and video producers like Rewatchable. All that changed this month, as Vimeo started offering Vimeo Pro accounts. For the first time, Vimeo wants to host your video productions! Of course, they are charging for the service but the rate is very reasonable. The video hosting service costs only $199 per year and allows a business website up to 250,000 embedded video plays and 50 GB of video storage.
Rewatchable – Boston, MA Videographers
