Online Video | EZWebPlayer

Don’t Sweat New Social Media Marketing; Just Tell it Like it is on Web Video

By: stu | Posted: Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

Makes no difference what product or service you offer; sports fishing, video production, cheese making, firearms, auto service, furniture selling, real estate. You are dealing with new advertising media. After your small business has gone through all of the How-To’s you can find to engage in the new social media marketing craze, just to keep up with the competition, when all is said and done, your most powerful tool is still simply telling what you know directly to your market.

Marketers, scriptwriters, social media gurus and ad agents might know how to engage people, but they don’t know your product and service like you do.

Go Directly to Your Market

Cut through all of the media hype by talking directly to your market on your web video player. You, on video, for 90 seconds can do more to bring business through your front doors than hundreds of hits on a Face Book page or a thousand short tweets on Twitter. And, a compelling and personal video from you to your market has the added frosting on the cake of actually creating Face Book and Twitter hits. Done right, it can happen naturally and automatically.

“Get ‘em through your door…”

Get ‘em through your door by shooting a compelling web video. Place it on your custom web site, email links out, even utilize YouTube as a secondary outlet and of course track all of the responses with built in analytics.

If you are finding it difficult to locate a media management application that does all of the above, contact the Customer Support Pros at EZWebPlayer.com. They’ll take your video and help you turn it into a social media magnet. They’ll even work with your ad agency to do whatever it takes to get your video up and running on The Web.

Have a video that you want to share now on your website video player? Click on the “Sign Up Now“, or “Try it Free” buttons.

Stuart Marks
Executive Creative Director
Business Video Applications

For tips on Video On Your Web Site, under real business conditions, check these links;

Automatic Thumbnail Images; Another Reason to Host Videos on EZWebPlayer

By: stu | Posted: Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

When you are managing a video on EZWebplayer’s Video Player, you have two choices for hosting; you can host your video elsewhere and simply enter its address into the URL field, or you can upload the video to the EZWebPlayer servers.

There are many advantages to hosting your video on EZWebPlayer’s Amazon Cloud Front servers, but one of them is the simplicity with which you can manage the thumbnail image.

After uploading a video, you will see this setup window;

This is where you have an opportunity to manage the thumb image. Doing nothing will allow the default settings to engage, thereby selecting a frame from the video which shows up everywhere the video is paused and ready to play from the beginning. If you do not like the default image, there are other choices.

The Player chooses four more images that you can choose from, or you can choose to upload your own custom image, which is a powerful and unique tool for sales and promotion.

Have a video that you want to share now? Click on the “Sign Up Now“, or “Try it Free” buttons.

Stuart Marks
Executive Creative Director
Business Video Applications

For tips on Video On Your Web Site, under real business conditions, check these links;

Video Analytics for Real Results

By: clintpollock | Posted: Thursday, June 9th, 2011

Advertising is not a clear cut science. At best, it is a balance between gambling and knowing recent history of the target market. If one wants any given advertising campaign to be successful, one needs to make the campaign lean as far away from gambling, and as far towards history based design as possible.

This is why a track record of how viewers are responding to your current videos, or Analytics, is so important.

Analytics is a permanent record of what the real world thinks of your efforts to share information with them. It tells you what worked, what didn’t, and what needs tweaking to make it work better in the future.

Listen to one producer/advertiser’s remarks captured remotely, on analytics.

The ease of getting the information is another element of concern. Too many times analyzable information is only delivered in mass dumps where the data is lost in the delivery; like not seeing the trees for the forest. Analytical data is too important to need a specialist for interpretation. We’re not talking medical x-rays, here. We’re just talking Video.

So, the data needs to be in two levels; 1) The At-A-Glance chart, and 2) The In-Depth level.

Here is a good example of the At-A-Glance from the dashboard of my EZWebPlayer Account.

Here’s a close up of a roll-over function that delivers absolute, non-charted values in addition to the graphic pie chart.

The deeper, In-Depth data can be seen below. Here, I can see the specific types of views my videos received from real people. Some watched all of the video and some only watched part of it. The system records the viewer activity in ten-second increments so I can tell when the viewing stopped. This allows me to determine which part of the video people are finding too boring, or otherwise uninteresting to them specifically. I can then change the video at that point.

These Reports were all harvested by merely clicking on the Reports tab, and then on the title of a video. Two clicks and I have valuable, analytical data at my finger tips.

Creating advertising campaigns that deliver real results comes from better planning. And better planning needs analytical information.

Have a video that you want to share now? Click on the “Sign Up Now“, or “Try it Free” buttons.

Stuart Marks
Executive Creative Director
Business Video Applications

For some Business Video How To’s, check these links;

Video on Your Web Site: Notice the Difference

By: stu | Posted: Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

In marketing, the most important tools are not humor, a web site, TV commercials, or nationalizing your brand; though, all of these are effective and certainly there is a reason that 3M, Coca-Cola and Nike all use these. The absolutely most important tool is tracking.

If you don’t know where you’ve been, you cannot plan ahead with any accuracy. Agencies that handle million dollar accounts are strongly encouraged to “Get it right” more often than not by the results of return business from those million dollar clients. And, the biggest and most powerful tool that the big agencies like Leo Burnet and Aegis use is testing and tracking.

So, if you want to play The Game for your own products and services, and market successfully like the big boys, you must know what makes big differences in your efforts: what delivers and what doesn’t. And, video delivers.

To prove it to yourself, make one change and watch the results.

Here’s how:

1)      Establish a base line. Use site hits, or a well established dollar value somewhere before your bottom line.

2)      Add video to your web site, or include a link to your powerful web video in your regular newsletter.

3)      Run this for a predetermined period; 30 days minimum.

4)      Check your stats the day after your predetermined period ends.

Knowing this type of information helps you make decisions with a certain amount of credibility and reliability as to the outcome. Why is this important? So that you choose the right tools at the right time in your marketing cycles. If you only have $1,500 left in your 90-day advertising cycle, and your radio rep comes a’ knockin’, you want to have an answer to those at the head of the big table as to why you are dropping radio for a few months while you run a video that is going to cost you $1,000 to get up and running (your marketing lead is begging for a new HD web cam to record your next group of customer testimonials and they can cost up to $1k for a really good one with good audio pickup).

After you get that powerful testimonial video up and running, you can always return to radio. Now you have radio, AND a powerful web video bringing in new business. All due to your savvy testing and tracking. The next time you are charged with doing something to increase sales, more folks sitting in the big padded chairs will be listening.

Have a video that you want to share now? Click on the “Sign Up Now“, or “Try it Free” buttons.

Stuart Marks
Executive Creative Director
Business Video Applications

For tips on Video On Your Web Site, under real business conditions, check these links;

Four Quick HD Render Settings to Help Get Your Videos Streaming on Your Website.

By: rbouchez | Posted: Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Whether your website is marketing the latest gadget to hit the industry or just expressing opinions in a video blog series, adding video to your website is the best way to get your viewers to stay longer on your site. When adding video to your website you’ll want to ensure the video file is encoded properly. A couple things to keep in mind when exporting your HD video to a web video player are to keep the video ratio consistent and achieve an acceptable balance between bitrate for both video and audio data streams and the overall size of the video file. If the frame width and height values are not keep consistent the video might result in a distorted picture, black bars on the top or bottom and could even affect the frames per second of the video causing issues during playback. The video hosting site will have to stream the compressed video file and then decompress the file during playback, so a large file might be difficult for some users who have slower connections and systems. I will be using Adobe’s CS5 to demonstrate some example render setting to use when exporting your HD video to a streaming file for the web.

Video Frame Size

Video Bitrate

Audio Bitrate

1minute File Size

1280×720

VBR 2 pass -

Target 3.5M, Max 5MB

160kbps

26.1MB

1280×720

VBR 2 pass -Target Target 2.5M, Max 4MB

112kbps

18.6MB

1024×576

CBR -

1MB

96kbps

11.3MB

768×432

VBR 1 pass

Target 3.5M, Max 5MB

80kbps

7.69MB

HD Render Settings Example 1

HD Render Settings Example 2

HD Render Settings Example 3

HD Render Settings Example 4

By Mike Pudlo: Chicago Area Video producer and Creative Writer

Pre Rendering Extensive Visual Effects for Web Video: Stop All That Crashing!

By: rbouchez | Posted: Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

When adding some nice bells and whistles to your web videos by way of fun but purposeful motion EFX, the time line can get bogged down and you might find your computer crashing a lot.

Following some professional secrets will reduce your crashing and maximize your processor’s ability to render the video in a shorter time.

A) Close all unnecessary software programs. These are programs not being used to edit the project at hand.
B) Pre render high activity timeline elements on their own time line, then bring them into the main timeline as a single element.
C) During rendering of the main timeline, you can choose to only render a smaller segment at a time while you go to the kitchen or break room for filling up your coffee cup, instead of relying only on the whole timeline being rendered while you go watch a movie or clean out the garage.

My process for the final rendering session goes like this:
-I empty my machine’s trash
-Reboot, keeping my MS Office closed so that Outlook doesn’t hog resources during rendering.
-I then open my editing program and execute final renders.

If you do all of this and still have problems, start by deleting all of your PREVIEWS, then reboot, etc. Obviously, you’ll have to re render your pre rendered segments again unless you chose to save those specific renders. But, your machine will be running leaner when you do.

Incidentally, most professional editing suites are devoid of all other software other than those environments necessary for post production tasks and editing . There are even many editing suites that have a separate machine for high level tasks like operating After Effects. The only other program they might have on all of their machines is a file sharing program to move files around amongst their various tasking machines.

So, you can enjoy near the same CPU leanness by simply shutting down unnecessary programs.

If you’re still having problems, buy a new computer with lots of processing power. The more, the better. And, keep it off of the Internet; another pro trick. Free of charge. Your welcome.

By Stu Marks: Chicago Area Media Designer & video consultant.

Flickr Photos credits:

ATC Don’t Panic by Sarabbit

Web Video Quick Tips #9: Custom Bins for Special Effects

By: rbouchez | Posted: Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Web Video Post Production Editing; Are you ripping through your editing software trying to meet a deadline and wished you didn’t have to keep going back to the special effects preset folder to grab the same transitions over and over? Click, open, scroll, click, drag, customize. Save. Click, open, scroll, click, drag, customize. Save. Click, open, scroll, click, drag, customize. Oh this is silly.

Just create a custom bin. Then, after you drag the special transitions and effects into the custom bin, it’s just, drag, customize, save.

No more searching. All of the effects and transitions for this production are all in one folder.

By Stu Marks: Chicago Area Media Designer & video consultant.

Special Effects Links worth checking out:

1. Add ons, Downloads, and Updates – Windows Movie Maker 2

2. Web Video Special Effects for Beginners: What is Keying?

3. Web Video Quick Tips #1: Using Effects

Flickr Photos credits:

Wrap-up – 313/365 By tranchis

IMG_5741 By Dave Malkoff

Web Video Quick Tips #8: Hiring a Writer

By: rbouchez | Posted: Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Need a writer? Choose one who is already swimming in the pond of your content need. Google the video script topics and start reading and watching what is already out there. Find out who wrote it and hire them. One of our best writers isn’t even on staff. We hired him just the way I’m suggesting. Steve Edwards (the east coast one, not the other one) is famous for the DR Outdoor Power Commercials among many projects, but he does a lot for us that ends up being tweaked by me and others for our final video projects. I collaborate with him and he helps keep me on track with keywords and thoughts that he knows will deliver the goods. Use well honed experience in key positions of your project and your project will deliver the goods.

By Stu Marks: Chicago Area Media Designer & video consultant.

Writing Links worth checking out:

How To Write A How-To – Knowledge Hound

Writing Tips – General

Web Video Quick Tips #6: Amazing Scripts in 3 steps

Web Video Quick Tips #5: Writing 101 for Video

Flickr Photos credits:

pen in macro by athena.

Cat attack pen by Gage Skidmore

Rendering Dialogue for Video on Your Website: How to Sound Good Everywhere

By: rbouchez | Posted: Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

With the global market place at our finger tips, the types of amplifiers and speakers through which our audiences are listening to our web video sound tracks are varied and broad in capabilities. From cheap or expensive headphones and ear buds to auditorium house systems, It can be a crap shoot on how consistent each video will sound, so here are two important steps in our effort to stand out with crisp clear dialogue:

1) Render a flat audio wave. Use your rendering software to make all loudness the same, bringing the peaks down and the valleys up. Premiere Sound Booth does a great job at this with a preset that needs no tweaking. LOUDNESS>ALL THE SAME

2) After flattening, push the audio level up over the “0 V.U.” level (zero V.U.) by 2- 6 units or more. You need to test this task until you get a crisp sound quality without crackly static. All systems are different, so testing is important. In Premiere, right click on the dialogue element in your time line and choose AUDIO GAIN. Choose the NORMALIZE MAX PEAK TO option and tweak it up past +4 or +6 V.U.s.

These two steps MUST be done in the order given.

By Stu Marks: Chicago Area Media Designer & video consultant.

Flickr Photos credits:

Speakers by Johnny Vulkan

Web Video Quick Tips #6: Amazing Scripts in 3 steps

By: rbouchez | Posted: Thursday, September 30th, 2010

*Please note: If you follow these steps in order your embeded web videos will improve dramatically!

Step 1: Facts

Simple enough right? Just get together all the absolutely necessary information and jot it down. If you’re writing for someone else, get their buy-in on this list before you go into production. Finding video you never shot in the first place is never an easy task!

Step 2: Tone (or personality)

Once you have the facts laid out, you can begin tying them all together and adding your call to action (for example). This is where the finding the tone of your script is key… I like to brainstorm one-liners and then, later when I have enough material, I go back and begin crafting the actual script.

Step 3: DELETE

The goal of any video editor ALL THE TIME is to get an audio track that’s considerably shorter than the total video length. A rushed announcer is a useless one! You can always fill in audio gaps (relatively speaking) with sound effects or whatever.

Unofficial Step 4: 2nd Opinion!

The important question for a 2^nd opinion-ator is “Do you get it?” The reason this step is unofficial is because only you have the full video vision! Unless you’ve really laid this out for someone, they’re not going to be much help.

Thanks for stopping by!

@richardbouchez, Social Media Specialist for EZWebplayer.com