Rules for Video on the Internet
July 7, 2007
Rule Number 1
YOU ARE NOT in control, your viewers are.
Rule Number 2
Your viewers time and attention are precious, this is not FRONTLINE. Your pieces should not be longer than 4 minutes, otherwise, chapterize, the viewer can come back and see the rest IF THEY WANT.
Rule Number 3
Make your videos 'sharable.' The internet is about sharing the love and goodness, make is easy for viewers to link to or embed your video content.
Rule Number 4
Know your audience. Run some stats on your site, like Google analytics, to find out what browsers and therefore possible plug-ins your viewers might need, make it easy for them to download the plug-in if needed.
Rule Number 5
Compose the shots in your video for your presentation size. If your paper's website runs video, 320×240, then you should be shooting tight! And even if your site runs it's video presentations, say 640×480, still shoot tight because before you know it, and mark my words, it will happen, not matter how big you are able too run the video on your site, our future audience is going to be viewing our content on small portable 'thingys,' can you say iphone.
Finally, and most IMPORTANT,
Rule Number 6
Make something 'good' happen in the first 15, no, 10, wait, 5 seconds -you get my drift- or you are doomed. Don't bury your lede. Put the good audio quote or image up front.
Ok, the caffeine from the Diet Coke just wore off, i had a good dozen more rules, but i have no fuel to keep me going, good night and enjoy.
-r
Good stuff. Thank god for caffeine!
On another note. I have been trying to find out who you are and how to contact you. I would like to ask you if you would be interested in speaking at a workshop for multimedia.
My email is attached to this post. If you wouldn’t mind dropping me a line with you name and email I will give you more details about the workshop.
Thanks again for the good stuff,
Ehrin
rhernandez@mercurynews.com
Your site is very useful. Thank you for all the hard work that you do.
Please consider adding more technical tips. For example, in this post you recommend allowing video to be linked from other sites. How exactly would this be done if the video is inside a Flash page, especially if the video is loaded from an flv in an external swf file and not directly from a flv in the main movie?
Another example is SoundSlides. I gather that the SoundSlides files may be lighter than the same content delivered in a plain Flash movie. Is this true? (I looked on the SoundSlides site, but didn’t see an answer to this question.)
These are just a couple of examples of technical topics that might be useful to discuss….
Thanks!
rodger,
i’ll take your advice about more tech stuff. but to answer your questions right off, the soundslides one, yes, for the most part a soundslides package is much lighter in ’size’ because it loads the images dynamically or only when the soundslides–the user–asks to see the image so to speak. most slides shows built in flash usually embed the images in the flash package and that’s when you’ll see a loading bar that usually takes longer than a soundslides to load. BUT smart people build slides shows in flash and call the images in dynamically just like soundslides. you can even call images in using XML. hope that helps.
when i talk about letting users embed video video, i’m talking about using the same functions as youtube or brightcove, where the embed code is part of the player and a user could grab it and post the video to their blog.and if you have a video playing ‘inside’ a flash stage, it’s still being called from an outside file, so you could write a script that allows the showing of the embed code as well. flash done right, as with the soundslides example and the video embed example is a powerful tool with the right knowledge, good luck.
-r
Thanks for posting the rules of shooting video for the internet.
I’d propose move rule #5 higher on your list. I’ve been accused of shooting too tight, and I think that was a great complement.
I know the video is going to end up on a postage stamp sized flash player, so I shoot faces tight.
I also know that we connect with people through their faces and facial gestures and eyes and smile (you get my point), so I shoot faces tight.
A reporter in my newsroom told me just last week, “I bet your stuff looks weird on a television screen because you shoot so tight.”
Thank you. I know my end player is not TV-sized.
My end player is a compressed version at 320×240 — so my “stuff” needs to be tight in order for anyone viewing it to make out what’s going on.
Shoot tight with no pans, zooms and with as little unnecessary camera movement as possible to avoid the compressed version falling apart.
Keep up the good work with the blog. Would love to see more posts on equipment and/or a day-in-the-life that you go through.
re: soundslides
Photos and audio will pretty much be the same size no matter what dynamic method you use to play them, i.e., hard-coding a Flash movie, loading into Flash via XML or using Soundslides. Pixel for pixel, you’re pretty much delivering the same volume of data to the user.
However, any of these methods are probably going to be “lighter” or provide higher-res images than using video to play the same photos and audio at the same size, since video pretty much has to encode 15 or 24 frames per second — with quality probably degraded by panning, zooming and fades — as opposed to dynamically loading maybe 15 or 24 jpgs with Flash-controlled transitions.
And aside from services such as Brightcove and vMix, there are packages you can buy or modules you can add to your content-management system to allow your video to be embedded. Just search Google for “YouTube-style” for something like this applet from Tufat.com: http://tufat.com/s_youtube_video.htm