DON'T BE SHY. BECOME A WEB STAR OVERNIGHT (OR MAYBE IT'LL TAKE A WEEK. YOU NEVER KNOW.)
Add Video to Your Website:
“Roll ‘Em”
You probably have a friend or two who still has a dial-up connection to the world wide web. They’re still out there. But broadband delivery of online services has penetrated the market to the point where e-commerce marketing and promotion can employ design elements that would be impossible for dial-ups. Too much download time. You could take a nap, come back and that little blue line would still be slowly, slowly moving to the right.
Today, you can add motion and useful, informative content through the use of a video presentation. Videos are great for demonstrating products in use, pointing out product features, testimonials from happy buyers and even you, the company owner, promising satisfaction. Guaranteed!
But even though the “big pipe” lets data flow freely from the W3 to the user’s browser, there are still things you can do to make your online vid-clips look their best. Here’s how.
1. Start with the best source material available. A third-generation dupe won’t cut it. By the time the image is further degraded in formatting and delivery to the user’s browser it’s going to look like it was shot under water – if visitors can see it at all. So, don’t use your “vacation-quality” vid-cam. You can rent the best by the day so create pristine, high-res source material to vastly improve the final product.
2. During production, keep it simple. Really Simple!
Even though there’s a George Lucas inside you waiting to get out to produce an epic film, keep it simple.
Limit camera movement. Lock down your camera on a solid tripod and avoid zooming in and out quickly. A slow zoom will work, but this is still streaming media and you can’t expect every visitor to have a souped-up video card to keep motion smooth on screen, so zoom slowly to allow for the slower refresh rate of the W3’s compressed, lower resolution videos.
Shoot against seamless. Available at any photography store, seamless is paper with a non-reflecting finish that comes in plenty of colors. And, it doesn’t have any seams.
Light it from three sides. Even if you have to rent the lights, it’s essential that the product or model be lit from right, left and front on. If you only use the front on lighting, the object or model will look “hot” while the background goes black.
Keep your subject still. A shot of a business exec, dressed in a suit and leaning against a cabinet in a nice office setting is fine. Also, the model should dress in neutral colors and avoid any flashy jewelry (Unless you’re selling jewelry. Then flash away!).
3. Have a point and get to it. Don’t put up a video just because it looks cool. There’s still some download time even with digital cable so that video better be worth the wait. Keep it short.
4. In post-production, don’t overdo it. If you’re producing a demonstration video and you need to show how tab A fits into slot B, cut away and reset the camera rather than panning and zooming in on tab A. It looks smoother and you can create an X-fade in post.
If you’re using cross fades, make each X-fade is slow to avoid a jumpy finished product.
Scrolling text may be difficult to read on some browsers. Use still text in a simple font for easiest readability.
Adding a music bed adds to load time and bandwidth usage. It can also distract from what the speaker is saying. Go with a single track, mono audio for best effect.
And speaking of FX (effects), keep them simple. Complex transitions from scene to scene only serve to confuse and, frankly, it gets annoying. Same with split screens – standard fare in most onscreen videos. Remember, some of these images are very small and when you display a four-way split in a 400 x 300 pixel rectangle, each individual image is just going to break up – even on slightly older systems.
5. Provide user controls that enable the viewer to start, stop or skip the video altogether. The worst is to have to sit through the same video every time you return to the home page. That’ll send visitors bouncing to a less annoying site before you can say “Roll ‘em.”
6. Use time-based compression rather than compressing each frame. There’s less load time. In fact, the video can start almost immediately and compress over the run time it takes to deliver the entire clip to the viewer’s browser.
7. Cut your frame rate. Drop it to 10 fps. It’ll load faster and no one will notice the lower resolution. It’s the norm on the Net.
8. Keep picture size in the 400 x 300 range. That’s large enough to see without squinting but not so large that it requires a 30 second download.
9. Compression decisions must be made before upload. Which streaming media format will be used – Windows Media, QuickTime or RealMedia, the big three in streaming media playback.
Do you need the video to run cross platform? You may have to compress the master twice – once for PCs and once for Macs – to get 100% cross platform usability.
What about image quality? The higher the quality of image, the longer the load time and the higher bandwidth usage. So, the trade off is image quality and size versus download time and bandwidth use.
What kind of streaming will you be using? HTML or true real-time? That’s going to impact compression ratios to minimize loss of picture quality and shorten load times, i.e. better image in less time.
All of these decisions are trade-offs: image quality vs. image size, stereo vs. mono, QuickTime vs. RealMedia and other decisions that, when considered as a whole, produce the best image to do the job, whatever that job is, in the shortest time. That’s download time and viewing time. Only the hard core are going to sit through a 10 minute video on why your mousetrap is better than the next guy’s.
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