A couple weeks ago we released a blog post about the benefits of online video for manufacturers. Video is a simple way to demonstrate products, generate brand awareness and boost inbound marketing efforts.
According to Pixability.com having video on your homepage makes your site 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results. We covered all of that last time and if you haven’t read it you can get it here.
This week we want to talk about a few of the production tools we use here to produce and deliver video content to our audience. I realize in our blog readership we may be talking to some who have a video production budget big enough to produce an Indie Film and others may have no budget at all. Today we are going to highlight the tools we use and hope you will share your favorite tools and workflow in the comments.
The iMac is a capable machine for all things media production related. It has a fast Intel processor, a substnatial hard drive and a high resolution monitor built into a slim space saving design. The iMac excels at everything from basic office tasks to HD video editing and design.
The first time someone told me that their digital photo camera took amazing high definition video I couldn’t believe it. Today I am a believer. The latest HDSLR cameras are great for businesses of all sizes because they combine a fantastic still camera with a video camera that is able to produce outstanding video footage. They generally are very portable and durable and vary in price to fit different budgets.
In testing and R&D style videos often times we need to get shots that aren’t able to accommodate a camera and cameraman. In that situation we turn to GoPro or Contour cameras since they are designed to capture high quality video while mounted in unlikely places.
The video editing software we use here at UniTherm is iMovie and Final Cut Pro. iMovie costs $14.99 on the Mac App Store and can be used for great looking videos with the ability to edit, add titles and effects and output to formats ranging from DVD to YouTube. For more advanced projects or users I recommend Final Cut X. It costs $299.99 on the Mac App Store and is an intuitive and powerful software package that provides an start-to-completion workflow for video editing, encoding and delivery.
Handbrake is a free, open source software that imports video from DVDs. It allows you to compress the imported video into a variety of formats so that you can edit the footage on your computer and include it in your production.
We use YouTube exclusively as our online video delivery system. You can upload HD video up to 15 minutes in length and tag the video with specific keywords that allow your video to be searchable in search engines. YouTube lets you share and embed you videos on websites, blogs and emails. Best of all YouTube is free!
Most of the time we like to include music in our videos. We like to use Premium Beat to buy royalty free tracks that are legal to use online and and high enough quality for video.
This has been a brief rundown of the big pieces in our video production workflow. Now we want to hear from you. What tools do you use? What does your video production workflow look like?