Scorsese Called – He Wants In!

June 26th, 2008 Chris Posted in Web, Web Site | No Comments »

Video is hot. Every where I turn, we see people using video to make a personal connection on the web. Video of you, video of your customers, video of you products, etc… It really helps squeeze page conversion rates.

So, off I went to film some video of Colleen for our web site. Given I’ve never so much as held a video camera I did the logical thing and got a reference to a local videographer who could shoot 3 to 5 minutes for our web site. And then I got the quote.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m extremely cheap. As most micro businesses, a penny saved is literally a penny earned.

The quote: $2K for 3 minutes of video. Was Martin Scorsese directing or something? Screw that!

And then I realized, it’s not about the best quality video, shot with the best lighting by a video master. It’s putting a real face behind the name of you and your customers. If it’s good enough for YouTube – it’s good enough for you.

So I dug up a video camera Colleen bought six years ago, took it to the office and shot Colleen doing her thing. It looked great! Or at least, good enough!

There is no reason to pay for top quality video production for a micro business. Your prospects won’t wait hours for HD video to download and that’s missing the point anyways. It’s about building a connection between you and your prospects – they just need to put a face to a name.

Like the guy from ING says – save your money.

Here are some cool video tools that I’ve used or have had recommended to me:

• Video Camera. A friend of mine pointed me to the Flip video camera. It’s a super cool, very portable camera that produces great quality video for the web. It connects right into your computer for easy upload. It’s tiny so it’s not a pain to take with you on road. Best idea ever from this same friend: bring it with you if you are visiting customers and get a video testimonial while you are there! For other great ideas like this, visit his blog – wait, he doesn’t have one (sorry – I had to bug him about that).
• Movie Editing. A would love to use Adobe Premiere but I don’t have time to learn it or the appetite to buy it. I actually use Microsoft Movie Maker to cut up raw footage. If you just want to splice and trim clips, it works really well and it’s included with Windows. OK – all you Mac users, I don’t want to hear about all your super editing tools on your cool computer, blah, blah, blah. Just send me money so I can afford to buy one.
• Format Conversion. We use Adobe Dreamweaver for our web content and it has some great built in scripts for Flash Video. The only problem is usually the video from your camera will be in avi or wmv. There is a great little tool called SUPER that is great at converting to and from different file formats – and it’s free.
• Advanced Editing & File Conversion. I have played a fair bit Adobe After Effects. I does even more file conversion stuff but it’s got a much steeper learning curve. However, if you want to do green screen video – it’s a must. They have a great little guide to doing it – I tried it and it works great. By the way, you can buy a roll of green paper at your local photographic equipment store for around $50 – works great for body and head video. If you want to do full body (ie. with the feet) you’ll probably have to invest in a green curtain (mucho more).

There you go. There is no excuse not to have video on your site!

C.

P. S. The one exception I can see about compromising on video quality is when you are actually showing your product. I suspect you’d want that to be very crisp and clean. Don’t say “but I’m my product” – I’m talking about cars, electronics, whatever physical widget you’re selling…

P. S. S. If you want to see how we have been using video, you can check out: www.engageselling.com/workshop.