Website Content: Video Tips

Great Content Helps Make Great Websites! Adding high quality short video clips to your website is one sure way to help educate and impress visitors to your website.

Although Cole WebMarketing offers local Charlotte, NC area on-site and off-site professional standard and HD video services, sometimes our clients might want or need to "shoot themselves".

Garbage In / Garbage Out is a phrase commonly heard in the Information Technology world, so here are a several Photography & Video Tips to help you provide us with good raw materials to work with.

Especially for home builders, new/custom machinery development, any business involved with refurbishment/restoration (before and after photos are a must!), etc. - it's best to capture and preserve daily/weekly (or major event) project progress.

POSITIONING: For best results, always use a tri-pod to mount the camera to avoid camera shake. It may seem minor during filming but it will be major while viewing on TV or the internet. Remember to shoot from several positions around project. Be sure to make those positions (tape on floor, stake in ground, etc.) to ensure you get the same angle/view each time.

SHOT FRAMING: It's recommended to not shoot ''too tight'' in regard to shot framing. "Backgrounds" can be helpful in providing reference to viewers, but keep the focal point obvious by avoiding too wide of a shot. Make sure you avoid cutting off body parts, sections of equipment/machinery, etc. - remember...garbage in / garbage out!

LENGTH: Unless absolutely neccessary, such as filming a process/event from A-Z, avoid LONG clips. It's usually best to shoot short (30, 60 or 90 second) vid cam clips. These short clips will be combined by us during the website video post production process. Our world today has a very short attention span (is this blog post too long?) so keep in mind that the suggested total length for informational internet video clips is about 3 minutes max.

PAN & ZOOM: It's OK to pan pan side to side, but go super slow. When you think you're panning slow enough, slow it down a bit more!

A common amateur mistake is excessive zooming. Try to avoid zooming in/out zoom while in record mode. Although wide-angle full scene and close up footage is good to shoot, transitions can be applied during post production by us, so it's best to zoom out - then record, stop, zoom in, record some more. If you must zoom while recording, do it very slowly and smoothly.

FILE ORGANIZATION: After shooting, transfer your "raw video footage" to your PC. To best organize your content, create folders - with clear and concise labels. Including the date is also helpful. I prefer this dating format: 2011-0217 (for February 17, 2011). Main folder example: SmithHome_2011-0217. Using this format style helps with chronological sorting later. Inside the main folder, create sub-folders, also clearly and concisely named. Smith_OutsideFront, Smith_OutsideBack, Smith_InsideLiving, Smith_InsideKitchen, etc.

BACK UP: And finally, it's always a good idea to make backup copies of anything shot. You want to preserve a back up of any and all "master originals". You can store a copy on another PC and/or external hard drive. It's also easy to burn to CD or DVD, and "off-site" storage is recommended.

CLIENT EDITS: We prefer that our clients don't edit videos on their end, other than trimming off excess at the beginning and end of video clips. You want to avoid downsizing the file. We sometimes get tiny video clips (180 pixels wide for example) and while a large video can be made smaller, increasing the size of a small video always results in significant degradation of quality. In post production we can make big small; but not small big.

VIDEO FORMAT: WMV, MOV, AVI, and MPEG are probably the most common, but we can work with just about any video file format. For website use, Cole WebMarketing always tries to follow current "best industry practices". The norm, at this time, is for website videos to be converted into Abode Flash (.swf) files. They're very compact in file size so they load fast (3 min. total length is "standard"), and can be viewed by most internet users. (the exception would be Apple portables - iPhone, iPod, iPad can not display Flash files). However, we can post a link on your site to an MPEG-4 version will allow Apple portable users to watch all your videos.

VIDEO SIZE: Videos included in websites by Cole WebMarketing are usually standard 4:3 format. Sizes for website use are usually standard small (320 pixels wide x 240 pixels high) or standard large (640 x 480).We'll also use "widescreen" (16:9 format) and sizes depending on the site layout and design.

FILE TRANSFER: To get your raw video clips in our hands for "post production" (editing, enhancement and conversion for use on your website, your YouTube Channel, etc.), we can help you to upload them, via ''FTP'', directly to a private location on your website server for our retrieval, or you can burn and snail mail a CD or DVD.

For more information about this blog post topic, please visit CarolinaWebsiteDesign.com and then call Cole WebMarketing at 704-503-7069.