Recently, Videomaker completed its first-ever Basic Production Techniques webinar and we couldn’t be more pleased with the turn-out. There were so many good questions, but, unfortunately, not enough time to answer them all. Here, at Videomaker, we value every question presented and aim to answer each one of them. One question we were unable to answer within the allotted time was regarding basic tips for composing, lighting, and shooting a talking-head corporate video.

Great composition is vital to any video production. Generally, you always want to observe the rule of thirds. If you divide your frame into three equal parts, both vertically and horizontally, you’ll end up with a basic guideline for good composition. The goal here is to place your subject, or points of interest, on one of the intersections within your imaginary grid. In the case of shooting a “talking-head,” you will want to place the subjects eyes on an intersection located in the upper-third of the grid. If you can’t fit your entire subject into the frame, be sure to crop the top of the head and not the chin.

Since corporate videos are pretty straightforward, you don’t need to create an extravagant lighting scheme. A basic 3-point lighting setup – a key light, fill light, and hair light – should do the trick.

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On the surface, it certainly seems like you could put anything onto your favorite video sharing site. It seems like we’ve seen just about everything that could possibly be seen on video sharing sites over the past few years. The primary demarcation point, when it comes down to it, is whether a video being posted is a one-off production of a remarkable event, or something episodic.

We got a very nice mention from ReadWriteWeb a while back from regarding our just-completed Basic Production Techniques webinar. They reminded us of a few of the flagship episodic videos out there, including the venerable Ask a Ninja and iJustine, though there are a few that we’d add a few to that list too. Video sharing sites, at that point, do their best work in that they serve as a springboard to encourage viewers to subscribe to feeds in a somewhat more convenient way (though you can certainly subscribe via the sharing site itself, and that is certainly easy.) But it also lets you find new, related videos as well. And as we see it, the biggest coup one could hope to accomplish is to have an episode of an episodic series go viral, exposing viewers to a goldmine of previous episodes which might result in the clicking of the big golden “Subscribe” button. And that could mean ad revenue sharing…

It’s true, though, that YouTube comments are some of the most brutal things on the internet, right up there with having a comment disemvoweled on Boing Boing or any number of things that might appear on any political web site…

Avid teams with ABC to give journalism students the opportunity to practice production, editing and distribution aspects of broadcast journalism in their ABC News to Campus program. Read on for more details.

Student teams from leading journalism schools across United States get hands-on experience; create and report news in real-world newsroom environment

Avid® has joined forces with ABC News to participate in ABC News On Campus – an innovative program designed to give tomorrow’s most promising news professionals an opportunity to practice real-world news gathering, production and broadcasting.  ABC News On Campus students capture, produce, edit and distribute news stories in their local area, which are often featured across ABC News programs. This year, students from six universities, including Arizona State University, Syracuse University, University of Florida, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of North Carolina (at Chapel Hill), and University of Texas (at Austin) will learn the inner workings of a newsroom, while using industry-leading solutions like Media Composer® video editing software to create news stories.  The program is in its second year.
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We just got out of our Videomaker Lounge and conference room feeling the glow of our first webinar with our partnership with YouTube. We’ve watched webinars, but have never conducted one ourselves, so this was a new learning experience for us here at Videomaker. We feel everything went well, the only hitch was not enough time for the live Q&A session at the end of our seminar. But isn’t that always the case?!? Read the rest of this entry »

I was searching the “net” today and I ran across several blogs commenting on why television is either bad, or a waste of time and how watching television only serves the purpose of warping ones mind…. Well, it got me thinking about it and the truth is, I really like television and if you edit video, you should to.

Number one, if you complain about commercials and you edit video I am sorry but you are an idiot. A commercial is the number one video type that video editors should study to understand how the process works. Commercials tell stories in a very short amount of time and almost always  conveys some sort of message. This is a task that is difficult for major motion pictures to accomplish, yet with 30 seconds commercial producers can and they do it consistently. If you want to understand how to edit, how to shoot, and how to tell a story watch commercials. Don’t complain!

Number two, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are not the end all be all of real TV and everyone should know this by now…. However, instead people still find the time to rip all of them because of their lack of integrity and journalistic objectivity. By spending hours of the day and your own free time complaining online on a blog that you claim is the “legit” news about how the “other” news source only represents biased and opinionated political views… you yourself are only doing the same.

Number three, to everyone who says that TV warps the mind and results in one becoming a “couch potato.” I have this to say, television inspires me to create better, faster developing, stories that grasp any audience and make them want to pay attention. When I see a show the grabs me, and actually gives me a reason to focus through my almost uncontrollable A.D.D. I get inspired to work and work til I know I have done a better job than I what I saw on TV.

If you edit video you should NEVER limit yourself. Watch commercials, don’t gripe about the news and pay attention. In your mind you will learn how to critic, learn and move forward with your video production knowledge and skill level. Don’t believe me? Well try it and see for yourself.

Today is the day you can get Microsoft Windows 7 in stores and via download. We’ve been playing with the release candidate around here for a few months, and we really dig it. It’s still bloated compared to, say, the very svelte (but now woefully outdated) Windows 2000, but is significantly faster than Windows Vista. It plays nicely with all of the video editing applications we’ve thrown at it, but we’re not too surprised by that.

I’ve been boning up on the installation notes to see exactly how I want to do this for the laptops at my home. I have come to the conclusion that I want to do custom installations to wipe out the previous Vista installations; but I have been making backups carefully to make sure that I’m not going to lose anything major. I think if I have a good disk image for each computer, I should be golden. Hopefully.

Things I’m looking forward to:

• Support for even more GPU features.
• Smoother, prettier fonts.
• Quicker than Windows Vista for pretty much everything.
• Less-painful networking.
• 64-bit computing on my computer (which shipped with 32-bit Vista; hence, why I’ve been reading about the custom install…)
• New taskbar that is vaguely reminiscent of Mac OS X dock–significantly reduces clutter