A three minutes videocast may tell more than a thousand lines of text. It engages more than even the best text can, and it allows for more direct addressing of your audience, especially when you combine it with the ability to comment and share. What makes a good video story? The content is the most important element, but how you tell the story may be just as important because it can either increase attention span or decrease it. Here are the elements of a good videocast and what you need to create and publish one.
There are several angles for judging a videocast’s professionalism:
- The way it looks and how well the story comes across
- The equipment used to create it
- The software used to create it with
- The relevance and effectivity of ‘special effects’ used.
The way a videocast looks can be subdivided in several components:
- The use of an intro and outro
- The use of still images
- The transitions between scenes
- The variation between scenes (like panning the environment, zooming in onto a talking head, angles of an interviewee, screencasts).
Intros and outros are rarely seen on YouTube and Vimeo, but they serve a distinct purpose: they help identify the creator. Benefits to the publisher: free advertising and increased brand awareness. Intros and outros should be kept short, preferably under 10 seconds. An outro can contain a list of assets used to produce the video story.
Still images can make an otherwise dull subject look more dynamic, certainly when used with carefully chosen transitions. Transitions are to video what fonts are to layout design: use only a couple and use them carefully. The most often used transition is the cut; an abrupt and direct transition from one scene to another.
If you are telling a story using video as your main channel, there should be variation between story lines. You can achieve this by alternating between panoramic shots and interviews, between a talking head and pans, between a combination of those and screen recordings — if you’re telling the story of a software application, for example. When using talking heads, you can cut them out and ‘place’ them in a different surroundings using rotoscoping or masking software. Mocha (review) is unbeatable in this respect.
Special effects are OK if they are relevant to the story. A nervous camera can get across a dangerous situation, but always keep in mind that such ‘shakes’ are making your audience jumpy too; they might become so pumped up they’ll click away and go view something else. Special effects are to be used like transitions: the fewer, the better. Unless you’re making a Hollywood blockbuster and you know what you’re doing.
The way your videocast will tell the story you want to tell depends in a large part on your ability to tell a story — period. But technology can help. Start your videocast by setting up a storyboard. Storyboards can be drawn on paper, but an excellent application is Toon Boom‘s Storyboard Pro (review). Go for the Pro version as that has animatics. Animatics are necessary to get a preview of motion and dynamics.
Screencasts can be created with Camtasia (review) or ScreenFlow (review) on the Mac. I’m still not sure whether ScreenFlow is better than Camtasia or the other way around. For now, ScreenFlow has my vote because of its more Mac-like interface and good feature set.
Editing your footage on a PC requires you to choose from a plethora of professional Non-Linear Editing (NLE) software. On the Mac, there’s really only one option if you want professional results: Final Cut Pro (part of Final Cut Studio (review), giving you all you need to create video with the highest level of professionalism).
If your camera equipment isn’t of the multi-thousand-Euros broadcast type — you can achieve professional results with a consumer level camera — the odds are that sound will be the most obvious component suffering from an amateurish quality level. To get good sound, buy a dictation device that can record PCM audio (WAV or AIFF) at 48K and 16 bits for spoken voice, or a stereo sound recorder for music. Get a good microphone for the device, and use Singular Software’s PluralEyes to synchronise with the footage in Final Cut Pro. I’m always amazed at how well PluralEyes (review) synchronises sound with video, even in cases when I forgot to turn off my recording device, resulting in a sound file that contained all kinds of data that could potentially confuse PluralEyes.
If you can’t avoid background noise, consider buying a license for iZotope RX or RX Advanced (review). This professional audio repair software is much better than SoundSoap. To place a talking head inside a different environment or to boost a musical background, consider iZotope’s Alloy (review) or Ozone (review) for Apple’s Logic Studio (review) (or other sound editing applications).
When you’re done shooting your video and ‘cutting’ it, there’s only one thing left to decide: shall you host it yourself or via a service like YouTube or Vimeo? And technically: which codec will you transcode into?
The latter is quickly answered: use Squeeze 7 (review) or Episode 6 (review) to transcode to a format that is good enough for the output channel. In human language: for YouTube use Flash or H.264. If you’re going to burn a Blu-Ray disc with your video story, consider Dolby Pro for sound and higher quality levels of H.264 to transcode into, or leave it to Squeeze or Episode to decide what’s best.
If you’re in doubt whether Episode or Squeeze is better: my personal experience tells me Squeeze 7 gives sharper and more detailed results at the exact same settings when exporting to small sizes like the ones you need for YouTube and Vimeo.
The answer to whether to self-host or publish via YouTube is more complex. If you want to have extra awareness and exposure, go for YouTube and Vimeo, and other services even. If you want the maximum control over what your video looks like and any advertising you would care to run as part of a story, you’ll better self-host. However, be prepared to have a lot of disc space as even small videocasts can run in the Gigabytes.
