The Editing Software
This is what you need to look for if you want to do transitions for your video/video clips, fade-ins and fade-outs, cropping, picture and text insertions, audio and picture editing, and music intros. There are many different types of editing software out there which can help you with these. First, we look at transitions.
Transition is the process where you phase or bridge from one scene to another, where you can fade in and fade out, or where a new scene comes in and you can just go straight to the next thing. If you watch television movies or adverts, you watch how they shoot between scenes, wherein first they're doing one scene and then all of a sudden they shoot to another person or another thing, or they might show text on the screen all of a sudden and then back to a person. Now these don't have any transitions, they're clean cut transitions. However, if you transition with some fade in or fade out, or one shoots off the screen and another one fades in beside it, that is called a transition. It helps bridge when you do lots of talking and you have to stop, edit, and you have to start talking again.
Cropping is when you have a large picture and you want to cut it down to a smaller size. The same goes for video. You can crop a large video and make it a lot smaller.
Inserting pictures is the next big thing with your editing software. You might be filming people in the real world, and then you might want to have some sort of advert popping up in the background or beside you, or you want an arrow to point over something, or a star, or an asterisk, or something to do with another picture right beside your video portrait on the screen. You can add them afterwards, and you can also add text afterwards as well. For instance, if I'm talking to you about some sort of product or some sort of introduction to my business video, then i can have text added across the top of my screen. You just type it in and then afterwards your editing software will make it very, very easy to add to your video. However, it will still depend on which editing software you use.
Another important aspect is that you want to be able to edit your audio. Sometimes you talk, and you make a mistake here and there, and you need to take out some of the audio where you make your mistake, where you're not quite happy with what you said. So, what you do is, you go into your editing software and you can cut and you can crop out and remove that section of the audio. You can even remove sections of the audio from this point, cut it, move right up to the beginning of it, and change the order of your voice. It is very important that your editing software does this and does it easily. If not, then have a look at some other software because this is one of the fundamentals of editing videos. Your editing software should be able to do some editing of music as well. You should be able to import a music file, a music intro, and a music outtake as well. Some of the editing software that's valuable is the windows moviemaker for PCs and screen capture editing software like Camtasia, Camstudio, or GIMP. Now you want to be careful of which one you get because you cannot do everything with all of them. Some have certain features and others don't. Now obviously, the paid versions and paid software is going to have a lot more features. You can film in the real world, import it to Camtasia, and do all the editing in there as well. You can do the same thing with Screenfly or Moviemaker, but I'm not sure how well it uses screen capture on it and you just have to be very careful with that. The other thing that you may use is iMovie. If you use a Mac, then iMovie can do a lot of these features as well. You can do fade-ins, you can do introductions, you can do news clips, and those sorts of things. It's very interesting once you get going because you've got a lot of templates to work with and that's the beauty of some of these programs. Some of the editing software programs have a lot of templates which you can just use straight into your videos and that will save a lot of time.
Let's now have a look at the Setting and the Film Crew. You might think that the film crew got to do with anything but it is very important that if you are the film crew, then you need to make sure that you can do certain things with your camera. When you're the only person filming yourself, you can't move around just like if someone else was filming you. If someone else is filming you, you can move around a little bit more, they can keep you in focus, and pan the camera across. However, if you just have a video camera on a tripod and you're filming yourself, you almost have to stand still in the right position, in focus, otherwise you'll move out of the center of the camera and they will lose you. It's important to know whose going to be filming you, whether it's yourself, or whether you've got a real video crew.
However, the best way to portray your message is to actually get out and start moving, to use your hands to look at the camera. It all depends on where you are. If you want to have a decent setting behind you, you would want to make sure that you're not in front of your front door. You would want to make sure you're in the best location possible for your business, and it might be outside of your garden, or it might be outside of your advertising sign. It might be inside the office. You just have to be careful because you might be beside a busy freeway, you might be near noisy dogs, and you might have light in your eyes. If that's the case, then you need to change the angle of your camera or move about so your setting is different.
Now you can film in a bad location and make it good, or you can film in a good location and make it bad. What I mean by this is you can have the best setting, but have your camera set up so it's picking up distractions in the background. Or you're not in the center of the camera's focus and you could have power tools in the background or rubbish spread on the floor of your background. You want to make sure that you get a nice clean suite in the background. Remember that your setting is all about what people see in the camera. They're not only watching you all the time, they're also watching what's in your background.
The next point to tackle is the Message. It is one of the most important aspects of your video. Why are we doing the video in the first place? We are trying to tell a message. What is it that you are trying to say to your viewers? Firstly, you need to introduce yourself; you need to introduce your business; what you do; but only briefly because it's not about you doing your business, it's really about your customer. So in your message, you should have an introduction, and then what you want the customer to do. You should have a call to action and there should only be one call to action. If it's a lead capture video, you would just introduce yourself and then you would simply ask them to collect their free gift after leaving their name and email address. It's a call to action. You are speaking directly to the person; you're not speaking to the audience. Just remember that your message should be targeted to your customer. Whether it's just a prospect who hasn't ordered anything from you yet or whether it's a customer, you have to realize that they are very important. You're not talking to anyone else but that one person, so just be sure not to talk about too many things at once. Focus on one thing and focus on the one person: Your customer.
Now let's go to the Video Type. You want to be able to showcase an introductory video, or a lead capture video, or a sales page video, or even a training video, and they're all different. An introduction video simply introduces yourself and your business and you ask them to come and explore your site. That's basically all there is. It should only go from 30 seconds to a minute. A lead capture video, on the other hand, may go from 30 seconds up to a minute and a half, maybe 2 minutes, not more than 3 minutes. What you're trying to do is tell the customer what they can get for free or what you can do for them if they simply leave their name and email address. So it's all about what the customer can get by leaving their details and that's very important. The video should be short, sharp, and to the point. You shouldn't fluff around the edges and try to make it this or that. You're not trying to sell anything; you're trying to give them stuff in exchange for their details. A sales page video, on the other hand, can go between 2 minutes right up to 10 minutes. What you're trying to do is explain the benefits, the features of the product that would suit the customer's needs. Find the issue that the customer has, you aggravate the issue, and then you offer a solution. You do not necessarily sell, sell, sell. It is very important that you explain what the customer can get as a benefit by getting your product, and that's what a sales page is all about. A training video is to the point and it may go between 2-5 minutes, right up to 2 hours. I don't recommend that you do 2 hours at a time. I recommend you break it up into at least half hour blocks because people's attention spans are very short and they get very tired of watching a video and trying to figure things out. So by putting it into half-hour segments, it allows them to have a break in the video, at least rub their eyes, grab a drink of water, and then start again on the next video. A training video should point exactly to where you want people to go. It should be step by step and it should explain things in a very easy to understand manner.
The next major important aspect for business video marketing is the Customer Benefits. It's important that your customer can get a benefit from whatever you're trying to give them, sell them, or show to them. They need to get some sort of benefit and even if it's a free product, they need to get some sort of benefit going out of their way to grab your free product. If it's a paid product, then they have to get a benefit for buying your product. Just remember that it's all about the customer and their benefit. You have to look at that saying which is, "what's in it for me?" This is the WINFM factor. The WINFM factor is when a customer will be asking, "What benefit will I get out of your product or your information or your advice?" "What benefit will it do for me?" It might be that some of the features in the product will benefit the customer, but you don't want to go on all about the features. Just remember that the features are about the product and the benefits are about the customer.
The next major issue we've got is the Length of the Video and The Producer. How long does your video go for? And here's the answer: It should only go as long as necessary to portray your message and get off a customer benefit, that's all. So if it's an introductory video, it should only go for 30 seconds to a minute because you'll be introducing yourself. You've said your message and you've asked them to do a call to action, you welcomed them, and that's it. The length of the video depends on what type of video you will have and on how quickly or efficiently or well you can say your message and your call to action.
The producer should know how long the video goes for. He should see the beginning from the end, should know exactly what he wants in terms of putting the whole video together, and should have a vision right from the beginning.
The video needs to flow smoothly and you need to have time and Preparation to set up your camera properly. You need to set up the lighting correctly, you need to check out the audio to make sure you're not getting background noise which is annoying to other people listening, and you need to look into the background for distractions. You need to make sure you've got your entire screen capture video web lights ready t o go if you're doing a recorded video on your computer screen. You need to have things ready to go and at hand for when you need them and you're not mucking around in there. Good preparation in the beginning would save a ton of time in the end.
The last aspect of video production and your business video production is the Medium. What platform are you going to be doing it all in, is it a CD, a DVD, a USB stick? What video format are you going to use? Is it an mp4, a mov, a wvm, or a flash file? Just remember that not all video types play on all players. It's very important that you get an application which plays many video types. They can combine them properly.
If you get all of these elements right, then everything will flow like clockwork. It's important that you get it all correct; otherwise it's all going to be all over the place. So the elements that we've gone through are the editing software, the settings, the film crew, the message, the type of video, customer benefits, the length of the video, the preparation, the producer, and the platform. Now if you have all of these working together, then everything will work smoothly for you.
This is what you need to look for if you want to do transitions for your video/video clips, fade-ins and fade-outs, cropping, picture and text insertions, audio and picture editing, and music intros. There are many different types of editing software out there which can help you with these. First, we look at transitions.
Transition is the process where you phase or bridge from one scene to another, where you can fade in and fade out, or where a new scene comes in and you can just go straight to the next thing. If you watch television movies or adverts, you watch how they shoot between scenes, wherein first they're doing one scene and then all of a sudden they shoot to another person or another thing, or they might show text on the screen all of a sudden and then back to a person. Now these don't have any transitions, they're clean cut transitions. However, if you transition with some fade in or fade out, or one shoots off the screen and another one fades in beside it, that is called a transition. It helps bridge when you do lots of talking and you have to stop, edit, and you have to start talking again.
Cropping is when you have a large picture and you want to cut it down to a smaller size. The same goes for video. You can crop a large video and make it a lot smaller.
Inserting pictures is the next big thing with your editing software. You might be filming people in the real world, and then you might want to have some sort of advert popping up in the background or beside you, or you want an arrow to point over something, or a star, or an asterisk, or something to do with another picture right beside your video portrait on the screen. You can add them afterwards, and you can also add text afterwards as well. For instance, if I'm talking to you about some sort of product or some sort of introduction to my business video, then i can have text added across the top of my screen. You just type it in and then afterwards your editing software will make it very, very easy to add to your video. However, it will still depend on which editing software you use.
Another important aspect is that you want to be able to edit your audio. Sometimes you talk, and you make a mistake here and there, and you need to take out some of the audio where you make your mistake, where you're not quite happy with what you said. So, what you do is, you go into your editing software and you can cut and you can crop out and remove that section of the audio. You can even remove sections of the audio from this point, cut it, move right up to the beginning of it, and change the order of your voice. It is very important that your editing software does this and does it easily. If not, then have a look at some other software because this is one of the fundamentals of editing videos. Your editing software should be able to do some editing of music as well. You should be able to import a music file, a music intro, and a music outtake as well. Some of the editing software that's valuable is the windows moviemaker for PCs and screen capture editing software like Camtasia, Camstudio, or GIMP. Now you want to be careful of which one you get because you cannot do everything with all of them. Some have certain features and others don't. Now obviously, the paid versions and paid software is going to have a lot more features. You can film in the real world, import it to Camtasia, and do all the editing in there as well. You can do the same thing with Screenfly or Moviemaker, but I'm not sure how well it uses screen capture on it and you just have to be very careful with that. The other thing that you may use is iMovie. If you use a Mac, then iMovie can do a lot of these features as well. You can do fade-ins, you can do introductions, you can do news clips, and those sorts of things. It's very interesting once you get going because you've got a lot of templates to work with and that's the beauty of some of these programs. Some of the editing software programs have a lot of templates which you can just use straight into your videos and that will save a lot of time.
Let's now have a look at the Setting and the Film Crew. You might think that the film crew got to do with anything but it is very important that if you are the film crew, then you need to make sure that you can do certain things with your camera. When you're the only person filming yourself, you can't move around just like if someone else was filming you. If someone else is filming you, you can move around a little bit more, they can keep you in focus, and pan the camera across. However, if you just have a video camera on a tripod and you're filming yourself, you almost have to stand still in the right position, in focus, otherwise you'll move out of the center of the camera and they will lose you. It's important to know whose going to be filming you, whether it's yourself, or whether you've got a real video crew.
However, the best way to portray your message is to actually get out and start moving, to use your hands to look at the camera. It all depends on where you are. If you want to have a decent setting behind you, you would want to make sure that you're not in front of your front door. You would want to make sure you're in the best location possible for your business, and it might be outside of your garden, or it might be outside of your advertising sign. It might be inside the office. You just have to be careful because you might be beside a busy freeway, you might be near noisy dogs, and you might have light in your eyes. If that's the case, then you need to change the angle of your camera or move about so your setting is different.
Now you can film in a bad location and make it good, or you can film in a good location and make it bad. What I mean by this is you can have the best setting, but have your camera set up so it's picking up distractions in the background. Or you're not in the center of the camera's focus and you could have power tools in the background or rubbish spread on the floor of your background. You want to make sure that you get a nice clean suite in the background. Remember that your setting is all about what people see in the camera. They're not only watching you all the time, they're also watching what's in your background.
The next point to tackle is the Message. It is one of the most important aspects of your video. Why are we doing the video in the first place? We are trying to tell a message. What is it that you are trying to say to your viewers? Firstly, you need to introduce yourself; you need to introduce your business; what you do; but only briefly because it's not about you doing your business, it's really about your customer. So in your message, you should have an introduction, and then what you want the customer to do. You should have a call to action and there should only be one call to action. If it's a lead capture video, you would just introduce yourself and then you would simply ask them to collect their free gift after leaving their name and email address. It's a call to action. You are speaking directly to the person; you're not speaking to the audience. Just remember that your message should be targeted to your customer. Whether it's just a prospect who hasn't ordered anything from you yet or whether it's a customer, you have to realize that they are very important. You're not talking to anyone else but that one person, so just be sure not to talk about too many things at once. Focus on one thing and focus on the one person: Your customer.
Now let's go to the Video Type. You want to be able to showcase an introductory video, or a lead capture video, or a sales page video, or even a training video, and they're all different. An introduction video simply introduces yourself and your business and you ask them to come and explore your site. That's basically all there is. It should only go from 30 seconds to a minute. A lead capture video, on the other hand, may go from 30 seconds up to a minute and a half, maybe 2 minutes, not more than 3 minutes. What you're trying to do is tell the customer what they can get for free or what you can do for them if they simply leave their name and email address. So it's all about what the customer can get by leaving their details and that's very important. The video should be short, sharp, and to the point. You shouldn't fluff around the edges and try to make it this or that. You're not trying to sell anything; you're trying to give them stuff in exchange for their details. A sales page video, on the other hand, can go between 2 minutes right up to 10 minutes. What you're trying to do is explain the benefits, the features of the product that would suit the customer's needs. Find the issue that the customer has, you aggravate the issue, and then you offer a solution. You do not necessarily sell, sell, sell. It is very important that you explain what the customer can get as a benefit by getting your product, and that's what a sales page is all about. A training video is to the point and it may go between 2-5 minutes, right up to 2 hours. I don't recommend that you do 2 hours at a time. I recommend you break it up into at least half hour blocks because people's attention spans are very short and they get very tired of watching a video and trying to figure things out. So by putting it into half-hour segments, it allows them to have a break in the video, at least rub their eyes, grab a drink of water, and then start again on the next video. A training video should point exactly to where you want people to go. It should be step by step and it should explain things in a very easy to understand manner.
The next major important aspect for business video marketing is the Customer Benefits. It's important that your customer can get a benefit from whatever you're trying to give them, sell them, or show to them. They need to get some sort of benefit and even if it's a free product, they need to get some sort of benefit going out of their way to grab your free product. If it's a paid product, then they have to get a benefit for buying your product. Just remember that it's all about the customer and their benefit. You have to look at that saying which is, "what's in it for me?" This is the WINFM factor. The WINFM factor is when a customer will be asking, "What benefit will I get out of your product or your information or your advice?" "What benefit will it do for me?" It might be that some of the features in the product will benefit the customer, but you don't want to go on all about the features. Just remember that the features are about the product and the benefits are about the customer.
The next major issue we've got is the Length of the Video and The Producer. How long does your video go for? And here's the answer: It should only go as long as necessary to portray your message and get off a customer benefit, that's all. So if it's an introductory video, it should only go for 30 seconds to a minute because you'll be introducing yourself. You've said your message and you've asked them to do a call to action, you welcomed them, and that's it. The length of the video depends on what type of video you will have and on how quickly or efficiently or well you can say your message and your call to action.
The producer should know how long the video goes for. He should see the beginning from the end, should know exactly what he wants in terms of putting the whole video together, and should have a vision right from the beginning.
The video needs to flow smoothly and you need to have time and Preparation to set up your camera properly. You need to set up the lighting correctly, you need to check out the audio to make sure you're not getting background noise which is annoying to other people listening, and you need to look into the background for distractions. You need to make sure you've got your entire screen capture video web lights ready t o go if you're doing a recorded video on your computer screen. You need to have things ready to go and at hand for when you need them and you're not mucking around in there. Good preparation in the beginning would save a ton of time in the end.
The last aspect of video production and your business video production is the Medium. What platform are you going to be doing it all in, is it a CD, a DVD, a USB stick? What video format are you going to use? Is it an mp4, a mov, a wvm, or a flash file? Just remember that not all video types play on all players. It's very important that you get an application which plays many video types. They can combine them properly.
If you get all of these elements right, then everything will flow like clockwork. It's important that you get it all correct; otherwise it's all going to be all over the place. So the elements that we've gone through are the editing software, the settings, the film crew, the message, the type of video, customer benefits, the length of the video, the preparation, the producer, and the platform. Now if you have all of these working together, then everything will work smoothly for you.
