subject: Key Steps On Making An Effective Video [print this page] To make an effective video, make sure you have an intro screen, or you can lead straight into it. You want that hook very early on. Then you want to make sure that you mix up the shots throughout because your eyes can get tired or someone can get bored if it's the same shot.
That's another reason why we mix up camera angles and zoom in and out. That's why, if you watch TV they usually, I don't know how often do they change on TV, every minute or two they'll swap, zooming in and out, just to keep that interest. Otherwise the shot can get very stale. Then towards the end, then you want to make sure that you have the call to action which is in the final screen. We like to have lower thirds at the start of every clip and then you also have the URL which runs throughout in the bottom left hand corner because you want to make sure that they come back to the website.
If you do that to your say online video ads, do all the recording, nine out of every ten industries that you go into, your competition won't be doing this and you'll look professional. At the moment you can get away with having very average looking video because there isn't any competition. I don't think that's any excuse, once you've learnt how to put out that high quality work. The competition is now coming, People are starting to wake up. Video is still very early days but once people start to wake up, who are they going to choose? The one that looks more professional. So you might as well start getting as good quality as you can.
I try and find that balance because I also don't want to be a hindrance to not getting content out there.
The last thing so that's our finished product, it's ready to go, it's been given the tick of approval, it's uploaded. So now is about getting it back out of the effective videoediting software. This is where the minefield can begin; it's really easy with iMovie though to get footage out and then get it up there. So what we do, we go to share, you have a bunch of tools. You've got export movie. You can go to YouTube, you can go straight to YouTube and it will ask you what size you want to do and things like that. You can also export it using Quicktime, so into a Quicktime movie file.
Generally what we do is just do 'export movie' and it comes out as an M4V which will play in iTunes. Then we go and convert in other software. Ultimately I think if you're just using this, I would go and export it using Quicktime. The reason I wouldn't go straight to YouTube is you never know how many applications you want for this effective video you are aiming for. YouTube is one thing.
