Adding Video – Wingrove-Services

Sometimes a site can be made more interesting or effective by adding video to the site. It may be a promotional video about a service, or a fundraising video to raise awareness of the services that are provided from an organisation and where your money goes.

While some of my client base do use professionally developed videos from small specialists, it is also possible to create your own if you take a little care. Most people have video cameras, and many cameras these days have the ability to record video. If you have a DSLR then some of these can produce very high quality video in HD and above.

Do give this a try, it is not difficult to do and it is possible to create professional looking videos without spending £1000’s on equipment to do it.

Creating the video

Things to think about if you are creating your own are:

What is the message you wish to convey?
Setting for the recording?
Environment for the recording?
Sound quality
Visual quality
Script or rough plan
Length of the clip

It is certainly possible to create a video clip without paying any attention to these, however if you pay some thought to these first then your end result will have a greater impact.

The Message

This needs to be crisp and direct, with no umm’s and arr’s in it. Talk directly to the camera and keep looking at the camera.

The Setting

Where are you going to take the video, and do you have full control of that environment? It is best to take the video on a tripod and get in close on the subject. Are there any audio or visual distractions? If there are then you need to minimise them.

Sound Quality

On camera microphones are generally quite poor. If your recording device has an external microphone input consider using a lapel microphone. (This is a small microphone that is attached to the presenter.) This will give a better recording of the sound because it is close to the subject. You do not need to pay a fortune for a half decent microphone. It is best to start with whatever you have (e.g. just the camera and inboard microphone) and see how it sounds. You can improve it from there.

Video quality

These days I would recommend taking video for the web in the lower of the two current HD video standards. This is 720P. You can take it higher than this 1080P but you will end up with a bigger file. But when you create the final version you can downscale it to 720P. In terms of the image when shooting make sure there are no visual distractions such as lamp posts coming out of people’s heads.

When viewed the image needs to have the presenter or what the presenter is talking about clearly visible on the screen.

The Plan or Script

Why bother planning when you are making progress? Well, you can make progress more quickly: think about what you want to achieve, and how you can achieve it. Paying thought to this before the shoot will save time.

Length of the clip.

As short as possible. Think about the ads on the TV. These have to convey a message in around 1 minute or less. For bandwidth reasons, you should probably try to keep below 5 minutes unless there is an exceptional reason. It depends what you are trying to convey.

Post Production

When you have your video “in the can” you need to get it onto your computer. If you are working in HD, you need a moderately fast computer because it will take a long time to process the encoding of the final video and the intermediate editing steps.

Getting an Editing Program

If you do not have access to an editing program then you need to acquire one. These can be downloaded, they are not generally free, but they are quite easy to use these days. I have used Corel Video Studio Pro currently at version X7 (version 17). You can download it from Corel it is currently listed at £47.99 and you can also download a trial version for free. There are better programs out there, and you can pay a lot more, however if you are doing this on a tight budget then this should fit the bill.

Your editing program will generally have a workflow built into it so you don’t need to think very much. There are several stages to this.

Importing the video into the program
Editing the sequence in the editor
Adding a title
Adding an ending title (and perhaps call to action)
Adding in SFX*
Check the sound quality and levels and fade in and out
Add music
Check the final result
Process the assembled video to create an output file.

This may all sound daunting, but it really is very easy to do. I placed an asterisk by “Adding in SFX” because there are literally dozens of “clever” Special Effects, however most of them and I mean 99% will make your video look tacky. So observe what you see on TV and follow their SFX which are generally limited to fading in and out, and cross fading between scenes.

I have my video what next?

From a web systems perspective you do not want your video on your website. It will eat a lot of bandwidth on your website and impact the performance of the server if you place it there.

However you can make the video appear to be on your website. It is actually hosted by YouTube. So when it is playing it is playing from YouTube in a window on your website.

To do this you need to take out a YouTube account (free). Once you have that you can upload your video to YouTube. This process seems to re-encode it possibly to make a smaller file. The benefit is that this is all done for you.

Sharing your video

You need to share your video and then select the code for “embed video” from YouTube and insert it into your webpage using the page editor’s TEXT view rather than the VISUAL view of your page.

I have an example below of a family of Macaque Monkeys in Sri Lanka taken in December 2014. This was taken on a handheld DSLR. The final version is encoded at 720P so it will display on an iPad. Please note that in this case I have not edited anything, it is shown here as an example of how to embed a video into your webpage.

The code comes from the Share link at YouTube. You can specify a target size, then copy the code and add it to your site. The code looks like this:

This basically sets up an iframe (a window) and shows the YouTube website within in the window. It means the video is not running on your website, so not loading the server.