Web Video For Businesses

Table Of Contents

YOUR RECORDING SETUP

CAMERAS: DOS AND DON'TS

THE FACE OF YOUR PRODUCT

LIGHTING

NOTES ON CHROMA-KEYING

PREPARATION FOR EDITING

THE TRUTH ABOUT EDITING

FUNDAMENTALS OF GOOD EDITING

MORE EDITING TIPS FROM THE WEB

ADVANCED EFFECTS AND WHEN TO USE THEM

SOLUTIONS FOR CREATING ADVANCED EFFECTS

ZS4

Transparent Video Effects

PAGE SETUP

PLACEMENT ISSUES

The Front Page Solution

The Embedded Video Solution

Auto playing

Side Pages: Yes Or No?

WHERE SHOULD AV CONTENT GO IN THE CODE?

GETTING YOUR CONTENT ONLINE

FLASH CONTENT

STREAMING MEDIA

DIRECT DOWNLOAD

GOING LIVE!

TESTING

LAUNCH ISSUES

THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE OF YOUR LAUNCH

Your Recording Setup

Depending on what your audio-visual sales concept is, you may or may not use the information in this chapter. But many of the best audio-visual concepts do involve video recording, even if it's just a quick product demonstration or a testimonial clip tucked into the midsection of your sales page. So even if you don't think you'll use this information with your current page, it's not a bad idea to quickly browse this information anyway. If nothing else, you may get a few good ideas for a more elaborate direct sales site in the future.

The Truth About Editing

Finding a good video editing software package is only half of the battle. No matter how easy it is to transfer footage from your camera to your editing program, no matter how easy it is to get the chroma-key effects you want, and no matter how intuitive your drag-and-drop interface is, you're just not going to end up with a good audio-visual project without a grasp on how to professionally edit video. This sounds a lot more frightening than it is. Editing isn't actually hard, and once you learn the basics it can be one of the most rewarding parts of building an audio-visually enhanced direct sales site. But you've got to learn the basics first.

Page Setup

Even the best-edited, most technically impressive video in the world isn't much good if your site doesn't display it to its best advantage. It's important to design your site in order to show off your audio-visual content without distracting viewers from important textual information about your product--and above all, without preventing viewers from converting their interest in your presentation into an actual sale of your product.

Getting Your Content Online

You've got a great audio-visual presentation for your direct sales site: now how do you get it into your customers' hands (or more appropriately, hearts?) As Betamax users the world over learned, the best video in the world is useless without a stable, usable technology to play it.

In the past, when video technology online was at a slightly younger stage than it is currently, picking the right technology to play your videos was a lot like making the critical VHS/Betamax choice. If you invested in Media Player X from company Y and made all of your videos compatible with and deliverable by that media player X, you ran the risk of having to redo all of your work once the "install base" for Media Player X dried up and migrated to New Technology Z. At present, the "file format war" has settled down to some extent, and there are only three core technologies you'll want to decide between: Flash, streaming video (albeit in a variety of forms), and direct download.

Whatever solution you pick is going to involve three issues:

Coding

Cost

Compatibility

In other words:

You have to worry about the development costs of integrating your media player software with your existing page code and server architecture.

You have to worry about the cost of your delivery technology on your server--specifically in terms of performance and bandwidth.

You have to worry about how easy it is for your end users to see your technology.

If you look at each of our three major strategies in the light of these three core values, you'll be able to make a decision that makes sense for your particular hosting situation.

Going Live!

It wouldn't be much good to design an excellent, audio-visually enhanced direct sales site and not to publish it. Once you have your content and you've implemented it, it's time to launch--but first it's time to test what you've done.