Video Length Matters, however…
It’s no secret that keeping videos short is a good thing. Once you add in your opening branding and a solid call-to-action, the actual content gets even shorter. Now here’s the kicker, we feel a video need to be as long as it needs to be. For instance, if there’s a one hour video that shows you how to fix your car and avoid a $2,000 car repair, there’s a good chance you will be watching the entire video. When you have a long format video to share, it’s sometimes good to break it up into sections. Each video could have a slightly different marketing message and...
read moreIs your YouTube Captioning Saying you Curse?
We just watched a corporate video on YouTube with captioning turned on. Not only was the company name spelled incorrectly but an expletive was incorrectly generated in one of the sentences! Why is it critical to fix your captioning? Because Google reads it. If your company is spelled wrong, chances are it might be omitted from important search results. Don’t risk it. You might be wondering who does the captioning in the first place. Well, technically it’s YouTube but as you probably know, Google owns YouTube. There are some amazingly powerful speech to text algorithms behind the...
read moreVideo Special Effects on a Budget
Want to add special effects to your videos but don’t want to spend a fortune? You may be surprised to learn that it can be affordable if you’re up for trying some unconventional approaches. Below, we’ve detailed a project where we created an invisible whiteboard. We’re fortunate to work with some really wonderful people. One of our favorites is Dr. Woodie Flowers, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. If his name sounds familiar, he was the original host of the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers. We’ve created many videos with the professor and each one has had a unique...
read moreVideo Special Effects using PowerPoint
We frequently encourage clients to use programs like PowerPoint and Keynote to help get their ideas across. One of our longtime friends and clients, Sargent Production Services was tasked to go one step further. He was asked to produce a video but use Keynote slides and animations as a substitute for traditional video animation. The presenter, Dr. Woodie Flowers is an advanced user of Keynote (Apple’s version of PowerPoint) and is the mastermind behind the project. Not many people would attempt something this challenging but in theory, everything was going to work. We recorded Woodie...
read moreQR codes for Video
We always suggest adding QR codes to the end of videos but did you know how flexible they are?
read moreHow long should a video be?
You can read all over the internet that videos should NEVER be longer than two or three minutes. When we get asked the same question, our response is “a video needs to be as long as it needs to be,” length should be the last thing on your mind. There’s no doubt that most videos are about three minutes long since that tends to be the limit of many people’s attention. Consider for a moment your own video viewing experiences. You’ll think nothing about sitting through a two hour movie but a two hour presentation streaming on the web is definitely another story. On the other hand, if you...
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