April 19th, 2011
There is no doubt that the social media revolution is here and saturating the planet. So what does it really mean to you? If you are doing nothing within the various social media outlets, then it means you are falling behind in the marketplace through inaction.
If you are like me, then you want to know some solid facts about why this media outlet is so important to you. Nielson Online, that vast market survey company that we all knew initially for TV ratings has many data points on this. The most telling is this:
First off is exposure. According to Nielsen Online, 142 million US citizens use social media. Current US population is 307 million, so nearly half of us are very busy online using social media.
From an article in Creative Cow magazine – the foremost magazine in the US about video, film and related media production, there is a long list of facts and figures courtesy of author Richard Harrington in his story, “Social Media, is it worth it?”.
You need to pay attention if your main audience is from Generation Y – since 96% of them use social networks. If Facebook were a country, then it would be the fourth largest on earth, and it would be run by Generation Y.
The US Census Bureau lists 24 million businesses of all sizes in the US (2002). Currently about 330,000 businesses have a Facebook page. It may not be a stretch to consider that these are likely from the larger size businesses in the US, but there is plenty of room for you to join in. You can make your presence known and target it to your specific audience.
Dell has sold over $3 million worth of computers via Twitter. When you consider that there is a 140 character limit per ‘Tweet’, this is an outstanding figure! (It’s a lesson in choosing your words well, also.)
Ford Motor Company spends 25% of its advertising budget via social media. They were the only US car manufacturer who did not get or need a bailout – hmmmm
Finally, according to Raj Sarkar, Product Marketing @ Google Apps, ” Social Media Marketing (US only) was a $716M market in 2009. It will grow to a $3.1B market by 2014 according to Forrester at a CAGR of 34%. If you do the math for 2009 – Facebook is hands down the leader with the maximum market share.”
So, what does this mean to you? First it is a big marketplace that continues to grow at a rapid pace. Second – you have control over who you invite into your social media circle. Be selective. Be aggressive and keep a constantly refreshed presence It’s all up to you.
As with everything media-related, get help when you need it. There are a lot of resources out there.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: Creative Cow, Facebook, marketing, Neilsen Online, REM Video & Event Company, remvideoevent, social marketing, social media
Posted in Marketing, Multimedia/New media, Philosophical Musings, Web Media | No Comments »
September 1st, 2010
It’s not too often that a video production company runs a sale. We currently are and plan to come up with other packaging scenarios based on our 20+ years of experience in custom work. “The times, they are a changing” as a famous, former Minnesotan, Bob Dylan once said.
Commercial and industrial video producers always have had to respond to the uniqueness of their client’s needs in developing proposals. That very nature means that packaging is a tough option. How do you package the unknown? My short answer is that you don’t, because you can’t. What you can do is package known experiences and hang some relevant caveats or variables on the side. We’re doing just that with our sale called “One Grand Day”.
The impetus of this sale is to bring in new customers with a need that fits the sale. Okay, that’s Marketing 101, but there is nothing wrong with that in an industry segment that largely ignores sales.
I was sitting with a compatriot over coffee yesterday discussing the future of the video production industry. We focus on business to business communications and my friend’s company focuses on event videos such as weddings, school happenings, etc. His world is filled with package deals because there is a lot of continuity in how Americans go about weddings or school events. The benefit is the ease in which a budget is arrived and the buyer know exactly what is in the ‘package’. In a subjective industry, this is pretty cool. We had already gone live with “One Grand Day” before the coffee meeting and I got an enthusiastic thumbs up from him.
In our seldom-packaged corporate video world, it is challenging to arrive at a package that ‘fits’ a lot of scenarios. With “One Grand Day” we saw that there were a lot of simple ‘talking head’ and product demo situations that could fit and so we developed the package. We have more up our sleeve – stay in touch.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: advertising, Assets, branding, business, costs, Freshness, marketing, packaged, pricing, professional video, REM Video & Event Company, remvideoevent, Roger Miller, sales, talking head, video, video assets, video producer, video production
Posted in Marketing, Philosophical Musings | No Comments »
August 24th, 2010
As you all know, video-based media is going through some very large changes right now. Consumer TV and DVD have pretty much completed the switch to HD and Bluray and now we are seeing a surge into 3D. So what on earth are we all going to do with our years of accumulated video footage from the ‘old days’ – that’s right, the early 21st century?
Back in the day, professional video was shot on Betacam SP, Digibeta, and DVCam among others and a lot of the footage was the older 4:3 (squarish) as opposed to today’s 16:9 widescreen standard. We all did a lot of good work back then and clients paid good money for their message to be recorded, edited and spread around the world. So what becomes of this footage – these assets? Well, for a lot of them, they simply are over and done with and we’ve moved on. For other videos and clips, however, they may still have purpose and it would be really nice to extend the life of those assets. Perhaps the subject is no longer alive, or there is some historical aspect of the footage that makes it desirable to use it within a show currently under production in HD. What do you do then?
Bearing in mind that these older assets are much lower resolution (around 6 times less video information per frame), so it would take some serious video magic to make them usable. We just so happen to have some serious video magic and on top of being able to scale up the old video, we can do it in real time. Now that’s what makes it inexpensive! To be fair, the footage does not look like brand new, freshly shot HD. We’re not pretending it does. However, it does allow you to stretch some earlier assets, or make use of those older unrepeatable points in time that are of value to you.
We are looking into another quality step-up in this realm and will seriously consider it if the market demands. For now, our MXO2 based Mac Final Cut Pro can turn your tape footage into usable HD. Since we can’t redo the past, we can at least salvage what we need from it. Here is a link to our webpage contact. Just scroll down and click on Roger Miller – Creative Director to send me an e-mail and I’ll be happy to talk rates, upsides and downsides. You may be quite surprised.
Video production has always been ‘green’. Now you can be a little ‘greener’ by extending those older assets.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: Betacam, Bluray, editing, FCP, Final Cut Pro, HD, Mac, marketing, MXO2, professional video, recycling video, REM Video & Event Company, remvideoevent, rescaling, Roger Miller, uprez, video, video assets
Posted in Editing, Marketing, Philosophical Musings | No Comments »
August 11th, 2010
Back on June 22nd I wrote about branding being similar to naming a baby. Just this week we had another “bouncing baby brand”, through a workshop that I lead with Kela Caldwell, the Development and Marketing Manager at HandsOn Twin Cities. The workshop is entitled, “Your Brand Is Your Story”. HandsOn Twin Cities regularly schedules many workshops that can help your business or nonprofit organization. To look at upcoming courses and register, please go to this link: HandsOn Twin Cities Training.
Since we are already talking about offering the branding session again this fall, I’ll fill you in on some of the highlights. The session focuses on tools for creative communications and how to extend your budget for greater impact when building your brand. We also offer 2 case histories of brand building and the entire workshop is quite fun and interactive.
In brand building, we closely examine 6 key brand success elements: Awareness, Assets, Message, Equity, Freshness, and Marketing. Within each of these 6 elements we cite successful implementation and tips to help you build your brand. There is a lot of energy put into using social media as a brand building tool as well.
Check back here and at the HandsOn link above for future dates.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: Assets, Awareness, branding, creative communications, Equity, extend budget, Freshness, HandsOn Twin Cities, marketing, Message, nonprofit, REM Video & Event Company, remvideoevent, Roger Miller, training, video
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
August 11th, 2010
Okay, the bean counters will call it an expense because it is an outflow. However, they count your paycheck the same way, so let’s look at the investment aspect. Your video production is either a training, PR, advertising or a marketing item. It is intended to improve your people’s knowledge and skill, promote your wares and reach your audience with positive effect. It’s about putting your message in front of the right people at the right time with the right results.
Providing detailed information to your video producer on the content will ultimately help determine how the message is delivered and the story is crafted. We need to find out what the big picture is long before the small moving picture is created. By reviewing your needs and all of the relevant details with your prospective producer will help you to determine who is best suited for you to work with. It is not very likely that you will ever receive true apples-to-apples comparative bids. There is just too much subjective influence within each video production. It’s just never going to be as simple as comparing a pound of nails at one hardware store with another.
Once you have made your decision on who you will partner with, there are other considerations to plan for. In part 1 I spoke of being a good steward of your production budget. Stretching those dollars should always be in the plan. Generally, it can be pretty easy to accomplish if your producer has multiple media expertise and you can see broader purposes for your finished show or selected clips. Perhaps your audience is broader than your website. It may make sense to put it up on social marketing forums like YouTube and FaceBook among others. It may be useful as a DVD or a high definition Blu-ray disc for tradeshows, or meetings and possibly reformatted for your sales staff’s PowerPoint presentations. All of these elements can be drawn from the same footage with a little up-front planning and become vastly added value within your communication objectives.
When you invest in your message you are also investing in us – our expertise, experience, and technical acumen. We are also investing in you when we go down this road together. As we learn and understand what is important to you and your audience(s), we become an extension of your marketing and communication efforts. Our goal is to establish a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship that will help you be successful.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: advertising, Bluray, DVD, Facebook, high definition, marketing, Message, PR, remvideoevent, Roger Miller, tradeshow, training, video producer, video production, YouTube
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July 22nd, 2010
A video is a video is a video. If that was true all baseball players would be Babe Ruth, every nun would be Mother Theresa and every clinic would be the Mayo.
No producer can possibly answer the budget question for a video on the first phone call, yet we are often pressed to try. Okay, so what does differentiate one video production from another? Primarily it is the message. This is the game-changer because every video is completely different from another. Your content affects how the video is produced – what needs to happen with equipment, locations, crew, graphics – the whole shooting match. One video’s production cost can not be the same as another – as they say in auto commercials, “Your mileage may vary.” Circumstance dictates the need and affects the outcome and cost.
Let’s look at your circumstance. A simple ‘talking head’ video that runs 3 minutes has very low production costs while the same 3 minutes with a spokesperson, wardrobe, multiple locations, an approved script requiring rehearsals and prompters and a fast-paced soundtrack requiring a lot of cutting will simply be more expensive. Both are 3 minutes, but there is a world of difference in what happens in that timeframe. So we start with a lot of questions to help set the parameters of the production which helps to set the production timeline, project specification, and budget. We want to be good stewards of the budget.
A finished video is a product of the expertise and ability of the people crafting it, the tools they use and their ability to comprehend and communicate your message. Real research goes into a quality video. The producer must understand your audience and how to speak to them. It’s not about cameras and computers – it’s really about the capability and experience that the producer brings to your project. In the end, it’s always about your story – the benefits of working with you, your services and using your products. Getting to the budget requires a thorough understanding of the message and the circumstances that the production needs to work with. So if we ask a lot of questions, be patient, it’s worth it for the right results.
[The next segment of “A video is a video, right?” looks at the investment / expense question. Stay tuned.]
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: advertising, Bluray, DVD, Facebook, high definition, marketing, Message, PR, REM Video & Event Company, remvideoevent, Roger Miller, talking head, timeline, training, video producer, video production, YouTube
Posted in Marketing, Philosophical Musings | No Comments »
June 22nd, 2010
When it comes to branding, you’re giving your special service, or product, a personality and reinforcing it by how you are naming, raising and promoting it. This is your baby and you have to work hard to make it turn out right. The identity that you’re building must reflect the product or service, fit the market and the times we live in, and connect with your audience. Anything less and ‘your baby’ will wander aimlessly with no one taking notice.
The communication elements available to you are vast and they must reinforce your brand image and provide consistency. Video is one of the most important aspects of branding because it makes your product, or service, come alive through the visual and auditory senses. People can connect on several levels while watching your video. They are absorbing the ‘personality of the brand’ as they watch and listen to it. Know your audience to build your brand – it’s a mantra.
Audiences today are far more video centric vs. print centric. They know the latest movies and viral videos on YouTube. They talk about the latest movie effects like the refined 3D in Avatar. They may not know the latest billboard, or end cap display. Come to think of it – even billboards and end caps have giant LED displays or video monitors these days – it is a sign of the times.
The ability to be shown via several portals is an enormous plus, with well planned video you can do this and stretch your budget dollars. Smart video production exposes your brand to a far wider audience and is definitely the key tool to use in the 21st century to uphold the brand of your ‘baby’.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: advertising, Awareness, Bluray, branding, extend budget, Facebook, high definition, Mac, Message, REM Video & Event Company, remvideoevent, Roger Miller, video, video production, YouTube
Posted in Marketing, Philosophical Musings | No Comments »
June 16th, 2010
For business, YouTube is a powerful marketing tool. First, it is known the world over – there is no identity crisis here. Second, it is free. (Quick, someone show me how this business model works! – I’m kidding) Finally it is another cross-reference link to find you. Being found is what it is all about
YouTube is well known for quirky, viral videos that catch fire and people everywhere talk about them. There is a lot of outright junk on YouTube and a lot of very worthwhile material as well. One of the ‘costs’ of free is that there is little, if any quality control. That’s where you and your producer come in.
Your video on YouTube is a business and a social statement. Your style and message are reflected in the videos you place there and people who like that style will be attracted to you, a sure business builder. In that same vein, if you put up bad, shakeycam video with indistinct audio – that is the impression you will leave with your audience. This is a no-brainer; you want to put up your best material as it is either a first impression or it reinforces an impression you have already made – so it better be good. We’re not talking Hollywood here with famous actors and 3D visual effects. We’re talking about a well-crafted message, visually clean and interesting, with a concise story that is all wrapped up in a professional package.
Now you can make the best use of the free publicity and exposure. Pay special attention to the keywords so that you will be found! You can also direct people to your own YouTube channel, or embed individual videos into your website. This is a major win for you – if you take care of the quality of the videos you put up. So you might want to consider having your producer put the video up for you. Let the producer make sure that the quality level is optimized while you sell more goods and services. After all, that’s why you’re doing this right?
Using this, and other forms of social media creates a broad, professional presence and shows how you differ from other companies. YouTube is a great marketing tool, especially if you use it right. Here is a link to our YouTube channel: Remvideoevent – enjoy!
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: advertising, branding, business, costs, marketing, Message, professional video, REM Video & Event Company, Roger Miller, social, social media
Posted in Marketing, Multimedia/New media | No Comments »
May 4th, 2010
Let me begin with, “I hate moire’s!” They are the bane of multi-format video production. Now that we are all shooting in HD, we see, with fantastic clarity, footage as it should be and so we may think – hey this looks great and our troubles are over.
I am reminded to ‘think again’. Just because it looks great on the camera monitor and that HD monitor that goes to the shoot, it may not properly behave when it’s crunched down to smaller than standard definition for the web. Enter the moire’ pattern – that shifting shimmering distraction that shows up on clothing, screens, brick walls and other places where it usually doesn’t occur in nature. If you don’t know what a moire’ is, I can give you an example that does occur in nature – the chain link fence. When you look through one from a small distance and see another identical fence further away a pattern forms in the combined fences. This pattern shifts as you change your perspective while moving. It’s kind of interesting and quickly dismissed as you walk on.
However, when you have just done the perfect interview and the interviewee’s coat has a contrasty herringbone pattern in it you may end up with a major distraction instead of the perfect scene. You don’t see it during the interview, you don’t see it back in the suite in HD and then you make the web version and Pow! there it is. The dancing coat sleeve. It shows up in your smaller preview canvas in your edit program. So how did this happen?
Remember the chain link fence analogy? If the herringbone is one fence pattern – where is the other? The other is the camera sensor which is a symmetrical pattern of pixels. So why isn’t his apparent on the HD shoot? The short answer is resolution. On the HD monitor you have plenty of resolution to show the herringbone without the moire. However when this high resolution is crunched down to a smaller size AND played back on yet another LCD screen (with its own dot pattern) the moire surfaces in all of its evil glory.
An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure
So what are the solutions? The first is prevention. Give out a clothing recommendation and avoidance list before the shoot so that no one comes in with troublesome attire. Okay, so let’s say one slips by, then what? You might not even see a low contrast pattern in a suit jacket and yet it becomes troublesome in final encoding. One thing you can do is carry along a small standard definition LCD monitor and have that connected to your composite out. (Great, more stuff to carry or rent or explain the charge for.) It’s only job is to act as a moire checker. It is a ‘defacto-encoded’ view of your HD material in real time. If you see a pattern on this little monitor, then you need to have a wardrobe change. If you can’t change wardrobe, then a moment must be taken to do a light defocus using the composite monitor as the guide to see when the defocus is enough to kill patterns, but not the shot. Checking back against the HD monitor to see that your material is still usable.
TechTime in Post
Okay, let’s say that you didn’t catch this in production and now you are in post. Now what? Well that depends on the pattern severity. I’m using Final Cut Pro as well as Premiere, but most edit suites have tools that can fix this. I’ll use examples from Final Cut Pro for the ‘cure’.
Looking at your canvas monitor, you should clearly see the moire patterns. Select the offending scene and then apply a gaussian blur filter. I try to use an amount less than 1 so that I am not blurring as much as defocussing. Let’s say that the amount is set at .75, then I put 100% of that against the horizontal and about 50% against the vertical to retain as much sharpness as possible. Finally I play with the mix control and it tends to land between 60 – 95%.
I also have used a great tool from Mattias Sandstrom called Frame Blend, It is a Final Cut script plugin. This is a bit tricky as you need to apply all of your other settings first and then nest that timeline into a new timeline. This nested timeline is where you apply Frame Blend. Mattias’ plugins can be found on his ‘Too Much Too Soon’ website.
As with everything related to problem solving, you have to test and check everything. There is no single setting to cure moire’s as they all differ and the scenes that contain them differ. Prevention is better, solutions have compromises, your mileage may vary…
Finally, Mom was right, you have to clean up after yourself.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: Adobe, Apple, defocussing, editing, FCP, Final Cut Pro, HD, high definition, Mac, moire', moire' pattern, multi-formay, Premiere, professional video, REM Video & Event Company, Roger Miller, video, video producer, video production
Posted in Editing, Shooting | 1 Comment »
April 21st, 2010
Today while finishing up a 20 minute show, I ran into a few somewhat baffling and certainly irritating little issues that ate up more time than they should. This is a 3 camera shoot with sharp focus foregrounds and slightly out of focus backgrounds. The show has 2 subject matter experts so we had one camera on each plus a 2-shot.
This looked great on the monitors as we shot and at the end of the shoot, the client mentioned that there was a small stem in the background of camera 1 that didn’t have a flower. It escaped everyone else as we set up and though it was quite inconsequential, we said we would fix it. Since the shots were lockdowns, I thought it would be easy to find a bit of background to use as a mask and pop it over. Well that was, in fact, easy. However since there were quite a few takes, the lockdowns did shift here and there between the takes. So we took a number of background samples. Still no problem.
I created the little masking bits to cover the stem, color-matched them and did a small defocus to blend and dropped them into place and merrily edited along. I didn’t have to do many, but since the camera shifted now and then between take, I did have to do some positioning. Come finishing time, I found that the perfectly made little bits did not render cleanly all the way through. It would get a ways through the timeline and then the render would get a hard edge and stand out. So I would redo the defocus and it would look great pre-render and then when I re-rendered I would get the same hard edged mask.
Although I do not know why, the cure turned out to be making additional little masking bits whenever the render became unsightly and visible. This totally cured the problem. Why? I couldn’t tell you – right now. I will get an answer sometime however.
One other curious bit. I did a 15 frame audio edit when one of the presenters didn’t quite enunciate a term. Luckily she said it many times and I did a lift from one place to another. It was a clean cut and sounded great. Oddly enough – right at that spot a title super jumped about 2 raster lines at the cut. While unrelated to sound, I think even the 8 cores of processing with 10 gigs of ram still hiccupped. It was totally repeatable. Take the edit out and it goes away, put it back and it returns. The cure was to put a 2 frame cross fade at the head and tail of this little edit. The graphic jump went away and it sounded clean. Even if this is in the manual – good luck finding it. Editing is an art and a science, plus a little video-voodoo thrown in for good measure.
Keep making media that is relevant and that you’re proud of.
Roger Miller
Tags: 2-shot, audio, cross fade, editing, HD, high definition, lockdown, Mac, masking, professional video, REM Video & Event Company, Roger Miller, video, video producer, video production
Posted in Editing | No Comments »