The correct equipment means lights, cameras and then its action time and ensuring you get the basics right and avoiding making the basic mistakes.Video blogging isn’t for everyone. You need to have the right equipment, commitment and passion.

This is the last article in a three  part series where we look at how to put together a professional looking video on a budget.

The Post-production

Now that all the filming is done, we will look at how to compile and package your video so that it is professional and pleasant to watch.

Video blogs need to be set out like an article. It will have a main topic and then subsections within this.

A video blogger needs to be prolific; it can’t take hours to package your video each time so we recommend that you create a series of templates that you can reuse to define your subsections, title background screen and so on. These templates are made up of graphic elements that will give your videos a recognisable style and can include branding and contact details.

Templates

Remember that these backgrounds and templates can only work if you have shot the video with a blue or green screen chroma-key background, which can then be keyed out and replaced with graphic elements.

To begin with you can create your opening title screen backdrop. Remember to keep your introduction short and informative. Then you can add an animated title backdrop that introduces the speaker. This can be used for guest speakers too.

Talking Heads can be Boring

Most video blogs will use the “talking head” style but this can become visually uninteresting so create a series of backgrounds. Obviously they need to be relevant so you can make a neutral one that just has some texture, otherwise you can add pictures, video or a slideshow.

When making a list you can create bullet points next to the speaker, or even cut the speaker out completely and just keep the audio while listing the points. But what the speaker is saying and what you show doesn’t need to always be exactly the same, you could add an infographic, for example, that will enrich your point. Keep in mind the audience’s assimilation rate. This is how long it will take to absorb the information on the screen. You need to find a balance so that the viewer is happy that they have had time to understand what’s on the screen but not so long as to bore the viewer.

6 Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

There are a few simple things that can make all the difference to your video.

Sound is another import thing to focus on. First I want to focus on music and then I’ll just list some tips on how to adjust your audio in post-production. Adding music can give your video a lot of texture and an ambiance that can be very effective. But there are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Firstly, be careful to find royalty-free music. It’s illegal to use copywritten music without paying a usually hefty royalty fee.
2. Then you need to consider that the relationship between the subject matter and the speed or style of the music has to match. If I’m being really serious and talking quite slowly having something jaunty and fast in the background isn’t going to work. In the same way, if I’m talking excitedly about a subject I’m passionate about and this slow, poignant music is playing, it changes the whole atmosphere of the piece.
3. If you are putting music behind a voice, you need make sure that it is soft enough so that we can still clearly hear the person speaking — if it’s too loud, the video is really messy. But it also can’t be too soft, which sounds like somebody left the radio on the other room.
4. When there’s a pause in the narration you can push the music up. But also don’t be afraid not to have music. You can have silence when the speaker is on and then just use the music to bridge the sections.
5. Really importantly, you need to make sure that the music corresponds with your subsections. Often people will put a song on, let it run and end and then add another, but it’s really jarring if this happens randomly in the middle of a section. Rather work backwards; put the end of the song at the end of a section and just fade the music in at the beginning, even if you are starting in the middle of the song. This sounds less jarring than ending in the middle.
6. Make sure that your audio levels are consistent; they shouldn’t fade in and out or change at all and if you have picked up some ambient noise, try to soften it in postproduction.

That’s it for our tips for packaging an online video blog professionally. I hope you have got some good ideas out of this. Happy blogging!

Image by KTVee

[Jeffbullas's Blog]

The rumours and predictions that Facebook would  be the death of blogging seems to have been greatly exaggerated.

Blogging has instead evolved into a media rich ecosystem that is performed by individuals and companies to great effect.

Blogging platform startups such as Tumblr (founded in 2007) that emphasises ease of use, have seen serious traffic and growth

• Site averages  more than 2 million posts every day
• It is currently the 10th largest social network
• Attracts over 27 million monthly visits – which is up 218% from July 2010

Blogging can position  people as experts and thought leaders. It provides a home base portal that can provide a resource for their viewers and readers.

Blogging is not just about writing articles, as the advent of broadband networks available on mobile and fixed devices has seen the rise of video bloggers from cooking to travel. Visual and video communication is now quite often preferred to reading.

So how do you put together well produced videos as a blogger?

This is the second of a three  part series where we look at how to put together a professional looking video on a budget.

Lighting

Now that we’ve dealt with getting the correct equipment to produce a professional blog video, we will look at how to set up lighting and audio to create the best quality, professional looking and sounding video.

Three-Point Lighting

You will need five lights to create the perfect lighting scenario. But you can get away with less. In fact you can get away with one light, a window and a reflector board. Three-point lighting is a common technique used by both videographers and photographers. It is used to give life and texture to the face, to define the body and to light the backdrop evenly.

Key light

The first and most important light is the key light. This light is placed at a 45 degree angle and is higher than the camera. This lights the side of the subject’s face. If the light is focused directly on the face of the speaker, you will lose all definition, sense of texture and dimensionality, blanking out the face. The key light highlights the person’s features. If you only have one light, use it as a key light. You can place the subject by a window with the key light on the other side. The window light will act as the fill light. The light must be bright but not so much so that it creates a harsh, white light, which potentially blanks out the features on that side of the face. The light’s strength can be reduced or increased by changing its distance from the subject.

Fill light

This light is less bright than the key light. It is placed on the opposite side of the key light, at an angle of around 25 – 30 degrees at the same height as the camera. This light fills in the shadows on the other side of the face. You can lower the intensity of the fill light by using a diffusion material (this is a supple plastic, slightly opaque, sheet that pegs in front of the light) or by moving the light back.

Back light

This is placed behind the subject (but obviously not direct behind him or her so it is in the shot). This light just defines the back of the person creating contrast between the background and the subject.

Background lights

These are two lights that evenly light your chroma key background. The subject must be far enough away from this lit-up wall so as to avoid the colour of the wall “leaking” on to the subject.

Audio

Your mic needs to be close enough to the subject so that it only picks up the voice and not the ambient sounds of the room. You need to test and watch the level of the sound on your camera. The sound level needs to be balanced. If it is set too high it will spike and “clip” causing distortion. If too soft the signal to noise ratio will not be optimal. The signal has to be as high as possible without clipping. A good level is around 70%. This gives you enough room for louder words but is not too low so as to pick up too much other noise.

Setup and Shooting

Video blogging needs to be done often to be properly effective, so it can’t be a huge hassle to set up. If you can spare a corner to leave your lights up permanently then that would be best. If not, mark the position of the lights with masking tape so you don’t waste time adjusting them every time you want to do a blog. The same goes for your sound. Spend time finding the perfect level for your environment and note it down, then, barring any changes in noise levels, you can always just adjust it to that level.

When shooting your blog you will invariably make a mistake with the script. You’ll then need to scroll back a little on your auto-cue and redo that line. But you will also need to change the shoot composition. This is so that you have something to cut to when you cut out the blooper line. If you don’t change from say a medium shot to a close-up then you’ll have a jump cut. This is when a person’s head jumps from one position to the next in the same shot. It looks shabby and can be easily solved by changing angles or the shot composition.

In the third and final part of this blog series we will look at how to use the editing and postproduction process to best package your video.

Have you set up lighting and audio before? Can you add to these suggestions?

About the authors: Francois Karstel is the owner of Sound Idea Digital, a full service digital agency. You can connect with him on Twitter @soundideadma, Robyn Bloch is a digital journalist at Sound Idea Digital. You can connect with her on Twitter @soundidea or visit: Sound Idea Digital

Image by Travis Gray

[From Jeffbullas's Blog]

[Jeffbullas's Blog]

McDonald’s, for the first time ever, achieved the first place, as the best place to work, in Denmark. I had the pleasure of producing the video on employee job satisfaction. Hope you like it

 A Great Place to Work is the organisation who organises the event.

Travel + Leisure is using an image that Identityzoom has produced. The location is in front of the Meyers Bakery in a street called Jægersborggade in downtown Copenhagen. The image can be found in the 40 year anniversary magazine edition (October) and the image has also been used in a post on the Travel + Leisure website.

Jeg har lavet en PDF med alle de sider, hvor mine billeder indgår. Klik her. Hele magasinet kan ses online her. Magasinet vil kunne afhentes i Meyers Deli fra i morgen.

Jeg kan med stolthed nævne, at tre af mine stillbilleder er kommet i Børsen (14. Maj 2011). Det er reportage billeder produceret for Meyer. Hele artiklen kan ses som pdf her

Written by Jeff Bulla.

I have realized the importance of online video now for about 18 months after joining YouTube on September 28, 2009 and this year I have committed (and actually started) to interview on video and publish online, 50 business leaders in the online and internet sectors so that other people can learn from their experience and insights.

The power to educate and influence through video has been realized by big business and TV moguls for over 50 years but with advent of social media and YouTube the democratization of media is just beginning.

Any business large and small can easily, quickly and efficiently produce and promote their online videos to achieve business goals with various degrees of  skill and success but it is now available for all to use.

An Ad-ology forecast for small business reveals some statistics that confirm the growing importance of online video in the mindset of business owners stating that nearly half (45%) plan to do more with online video in 2011 (significantly up from last year when only 28% of companies planned to do something with online video).

Getting started with online video is maybe the hardest part through not knowing what to do and also just plain procrastination and lack of inertia are the culprits.

I just viewed the latest online video by Stephanie Wonderlin from Austin, Texas who I met on Twitter about a year ago and I have watched her very professional and enchanting YouTube online videos educating people about social media with quiet admiration.  Her latest online video exploits display interactive video which is very cool. So if you want to see an awesome online video production check it out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I hope it inspires you to start thinking about how you could use online video for your business.

If you want to connect with Stephanie (I am sure she won’t mind  as she is a social media fanatic) you can follow her on Twitter and check out and subscribe to her blog at Stephanie Wonderlin.com.

(Via Jeffbullas’s Blog.)

Scott Gerber is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, public speaker and author of Never Get a ‘Real’ Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke. The content for this post was sourced from the Young Entrepreneur Council, a group of successful Gen Y business owners. You can submit your questions to this group on NeverGetaRealJob.com.

In today’s YouTube crazed society, video is more accessible and easier to create than ever. One 30-second video has the potential to create a customer for life, or — conversely — a hater that will plague you with negative comments and bad word-of-mouth. This is why small businesses must learn to properly utilize videos to market their services on the web. These same videos can also be used in offline and online branding, sales, marketing and PR strategies. A great video will pay off ten-fold.

Sure, not every web video you shoot on your iPhone will end up being the next Old Spice ad, but a few hundred — or even a few thousand — views can lead to some serious moola for your business. I asked a panel of successful Gen Y entrepreneurs how small businesses can improve their web video marketing efforts and what they can do to make their videos sing. Here are their responses.

1. Be Real and Get Real

- Ashley Bodi, founder of Business Beware

2. TubeMogul Is The Answer!

- Devesh Dwivedi, founder of EntrepreneurInMaking.com

3. Keep it Simple

- Ryan Paugh, co-founder of Brazen Careerist

4. Have Fun With It!

- Kris Ruby, founder of Ruby Media Group

5. Use YouTube

- Elizabeth Saunders, founder of Real Life E

6. Keep It Short and Simple

Anderson Schoenrock, founder of ScanDigital

7. Be You

- Adam Gilbert, founder of MyBodyTutor.com

8. Know Your Audience

- David Hauser, CEO of Grasshopper Group

(Via Mashable!.)

Via Businessinsider.com

Written by Steve Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net.

Video overwhelms the Web. And it should.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Internet, at one time the plumbing that connected pages of text and occasional images, is rapidly transforming itself to be a network of video publishing and viewing.

At first glance, this seems quite terrible.

But in fact the emergence of the Video Web is critically important, intellectually exciting, and entirely inevitable.

There are historic reasons why we fear video. For most of us who grew up on Batman, or Gilligan’s Island, or Charlies Angels, we’ve known that TV was at best junk food… and at worst, a cognitive cancer.

In recent years, television has become far less benign, filling hours with a grim view of our world with programs like Fear Factor, Big Brother, or the Jersey Shore. As television increasingly dominates our leisure and screen time, it has continued to spiral down toward base human fears and car-wreck peeping tom voyeurism.

When it came along in 2005, YouTube could have been viewed as an accelerator of this trend toward trivial amusement and video junk food. Certainly, squirrels on skate boards didn’t qualify as hight art.

But Web video isn’t television. It’s something else entirely.  And in the past 5 years, from 2005 to 2010, as Web video has moved to become the fastest growing and most prevalent form of traffic emerging on the Web, something else happened.

Web video abandoned TV.

There are plenty of examples of this — but the perhaps most dramatic one is the growth of TED Talks. TED Curator, Chris Anderson, calls this emergence  Crowd Accelerated Innovation. His thesis is that Web video accelerates the cycle of humans creating, sharing, and iterating.

Three things have changed in past five years — the combination is like rocket fuel for Web video.

1. Cameras. Web video cameras are now standard fare on cell phones. FlipCams are cheap and record remarkable HD video. The sales of Digital SLRs (DSLR’s) put high quality camera with interchangeable lenses in the hands of mid-budget pro-sumers.  

2. Bandwidth. Back in 2005, broadband was still elusive for many Web surfers. And video just wasn’t a very good experience on dial up. Now, video moves with rare buffering as users find they are able to get a HD experience with relative ease.

3. Distribution. YouTube was important in breaking the monopoly that broadcast and cable had over video distribution, but since 2005 more and more distribution solutions have come on line. Devices like the iPhone and iPad have made Web video viewing far more ubiquitous. But the barrier between the Web and the living room flatscreen is about to burst wide open. With boxes like Roku, Boxee, and AppleTV(2) on the way, viewers are going to be able to choose between broad Web video offerings, and more limited cable/entertainment packages. And ‘over the top’ solutions like Netflix make the Internet to flatscreen option all the more reasonable.

The trifecta of change — Cameras, Bandwidth,and Distribution promises a future where change happens quickly.  Of course, there can’t only be winners.

The broadcasters and cable companies that have for decades been able to be the exclusive distributor of video via closed one-way networks are now starting to feel the sands shift under their feet.

It seems that humans would rather watch interesting, thought provoking, potentially interactive video content.  As Clay Shirky so extraordinarily explains in his book Cognitive Surplus, the extra brainpower we have is no longer being relegated to ‘coach potato’ activities of mindless viewing of lame sitcoms. Rather, people are engaging in the kind of accelerated innovation that Chris Anderson is seeing across disciplines.

He says two things are fueling this acceleration: Revelation and Motivation.

As Anderson explains it:

“Revelation: for the first time, people can see what the very best people across the globe are capable of. A world of possibility opens up.  Motivation: if you can do something innovative and special, you get thousands of people viewing your work and talking about you. It’s intoxicating. And it’s driving hundreds and hundreds of hours of effort from potential innovators across the globe.”

So,  the future of Web video ISN’T more of the same.  In fact,  all signs point to the fact that it is something quite different and quite wonderful.

Skirky says we’ve got extra brain power to put to work. Anderson says as we see each others innovation —in the global language of images and sound — we ‘step up our game’  in a friendly competition that accelerates innovate, and honors innovators.

Now, for those of us who grew up on TV that was ‘bad for us’ — the idea that Web video could actually make us smarter seems a bit hard to accept.  Yet, the massive video viewing of TED talks alone suggests that someone other than geeks and PhD’s are using their free time to engage in, explore, and share ideas.

The Web accelerated the connection of data. But the Video Web accelerates the transmission, innovation, and iteration of IDEAS. And that can only lead to good things.