Posts Tagged ‘HD video’
Make HD Videos w/Apple’s Keynote
Being an effective communicator in today’s more virtual world means you must master the tools to do so whether it’s effectively using your webcam or having noise-free conversations via Skype.
Today we are, as Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and Dries Buytaert of Drupal have pointed out, media producers as well as consumers. They have publicly stated that anyone who hopes to be effective online today (both as individuals and as organizations) must recognize that we’re all in the media business and must use the tools available to us (and video is the most obvious way) to deliver higher value communications than we’ve ever done before.
To that end, I love seeking new tools and exploring new uses for the ones I own. I’ve put together some examples in the overview called “How to Use Apple’s Keynote to Make HD Videos” about using Apple’s Keynote (available in their iWork ’09 suite) and it will hopefully help you see how you too can create and deliver HD quality videos that better tell your product story, message or any video communication you need to post online.
Creating HD videos is an especially interesting use of Keynote since most video sites now enable you to upload and deliver HD quality videos (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, VideoPress for WordPress) and HD quality is a great way to deliver product promos, your presentations or even creating intro slides for an HD video you’re creating in some other program.
Before you continue to the page that outlines how to deliver these HD videos using Keynote, take a peek below at one example of a video I did for our business and know that these types of video ads are MUCH MORE EFFECTIVE in selling products than a static product photo or a gallery below a static photo AND RESULTS IN HIGHER SALES (by 15-25% for us). It gives potential purchasers of our products a solid inside look at the $400 report and enables them to do so in 1.5 minutes which is a much better use of our website visitor’s time than expecting them to read dozens of paragraphs.
Here’s one video to start with but again, look at this page to see more videos as well as the “How to Use Apple’s Keynote” section:
Your Perfect Social Media Input Device?
If you haven’t been paying attention to the continued improvements in handheld cameras, let’s just say that what’s being released in the handheld space is pretty amazing and you should pay attention if you’re involved in the ‘internets’ as a participant in any way and especially if you’re a social media user.
Back in April of 2007, I shot this SD video of the incredible ‘maker’, author, showman, and good guy, Bill Gurstelle, as he wow’ed the geeks at Minnebar with his potato bazooka. It was recorded with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX50 handheld camera which I’d purchased in the Fall of 2006 and, as you can see, it’s pretty good quality video, the sound is decent, and it does take great photos:
But now Nikon has announced their Coolpix S8000, a 14.2 megapixel, 10x optical zoom, 720p HD video, very low light (down to 3200 ISO), 4-way image stabilization, all for the great price of $299.95! That’s $100 less than I paid for that Panasonic over three years ago (which, I’m well aware, is ancient history in technology).
Though I’d always prefer to have my single device that can do everything (in my case, a 3GS iPhone) there are too many compromises with mobile devices and the low video and image quality disturbs me. The lack of “glass” on a mobile device lets in a lot less light and having the iPhone default to compressing both videos and photos before uploading means that most of the stuff sent to blogs, websites and social media spots look like crap.
So I’ve been thinking… Read More