Ask most social media experts and a common prediction for the future of the web bubbles to the top. The next big thing is commonly thought to be video podcasting, v-logging or Web-TV. Call it whatever you want, but web video is on the rise, and for a variety of reasons. First, the medium of video offers a level of engagement far more compelling that just audio or text. Aside from stimulating more of our senses, the barrier to entry for web video is at an all-time low.

Thanks to easy-to-use video sharing sites like YouTube, Daily Motion and Blip.tv, cheaper video cameras and the general public’s acceptance of lower quality video in web formats, nearly anyone can shoot, edit, upload and engage using video.

In mid-2007, I started experimenting with web video on an old personal blog. Shooting 60-120 second clips on my trusty Canon Powershot A530, I put on my director’s hat and learned (sometimes the hard way) how to produce seemingly professional videos. In January of this year, I started Social Media Explorer TV (see the YouTube channel player over there … on the right) to bring an element of web video to this site.

While I wouldn’t hesitate to consult a professional production company for a large-scale project or reach out to some perfectly qualified Web-TV specialists, at least one of whom I know well and work with on some of his video projects, I wouldn’t be doing you just service if I didn’t explain some easy steps and pointers to adding web video to your repertoire.

Step 1: Don’t Be Intimidated By The Technology

Video can be shot with just about any digital camera, or even smart phone, these days. But even high-end consumer cameras (I use a Canon Vixia HV20 at work) are as easy as power on, point, shoot, zoom and done. USB cables normally get the video from the camera to your computer and software is provided to enable editing. While I’ve documented some frustrations with some cameras forcing you to use their provided software or jumping through several file conversion hoops to edit in your package of choice, there’s usually little difference in the basic editing functions the camera’s software package provides.

And don’t break the bank getting set up. The camera you own probably does video. Most computers these days come with basic editing software. That’s all you’ll need. For instance, until very recently, I edited most SME-TV items in Microsoft Movie Maker, which comes free on most PCs. You’ll need to look for it (it’s usually under Start>All Programs>Accessories) but it’s there and it’s really easy to figure out. Macs normally come with iMovie as part of their iLife software bundle. It is also very easy to navigate.

Step 2: Understand The Limitations Of The Web And The Audience

You can shoot in high definition all you want, but it will not show up any better than about 720 X 480 resolution online. Your video upload sites compress the heck out of the files so clarity and crispness, or majestic fades and transitions for you wannabe Scorseses out there, aren’t going to show up as well as you’d like. Keep it simple and small and you’ll be fine. Besides, we’re all used to seeing pixelation and crappy motion in online videos and we don’t mind it. The technology, bandwidth and such will continue to improve, but don’t worry so much about amateur-ish presentation online.

Step 3: Editing Is Just Story Telling

LaDonna Coy (@coyenator on Twitter) served as the inspiration for this post by asking me to enumerate how I was going to boil several hours worth of video shot at Friday’s Maker’s Mark Mile and Saturday’s Ambassador Day at the Distillery down to a pair of five minute videos for the Maker’s Mark Ambassador’s blog. (Sorry, you have to be an Ambassador to get there but signing up is free and there’s an RSS feed once you’re in there.) While it sounds like an intimidating task, there are some tricks I’ve learned that make it rather simple.

First, think of the story you want to tell before you shoot the first frame. Then only shoot elements of what happens that will add to your story. You’ll collect way too much video, but each piece of it will somehow make sense to the overall message. When you sit down to start editing, you’ll probably already have a few memorable scenes in mind for the start, end and some high spots in between.

Second, watch all the footage again before you start editing. You never know if there was sun glaring in the lens, awful background noise or the interaction didn’t quite come off the way you remember it. Review what you’re starting with before you start and you’ll have a more clear understanding of the elements you can work with.

Third, don’t get too fancy. Again, the quality of online video is not such that every little special effect you use will matter. Fancy wipes and page peels are nice bells and whistles, but simple fades from scene to scene make your video look professional. Straight cuts to scenes are fine, too, depending upon the pace of what you’re shooting. Adding music is a nice touch and greatly enhances the professional quality of your video, particularly if you fade it in and out during transitions and opportune moments, but be sure you have permission to use it and respect the Creative Commons license. You can find free music, even to be used for commercial purposes, at sites like owlmm.com and the Creative Commons wiki.

Step 4: Don’t Get Greedy

For a five-minute video, you aren’t going to need more than 4-5 major scenes. Of course, if you’re doing an interview like the ones I produce for SME-TV, you can just do a continuous shoot with no edits, but keep your questions to 3-5. Most people are longer-winded than you think and filling five minutes won’t be hard. For a highlight video, or one involving a lot of different scenes you want to incorporate, choose 3-5 segments of decent length (30-45 seconds) and use the transitions to pepper in shorter clips.

The most important attitude to have when editing is that it’s okay to leave some things lying on the cutting room floor, as it were. You can’t use everything. Pick the best five minutes and discard the rest. If you have enough, make two videos and expand your offering – exactly what we’re doing with the Maker’s Mark efforts since two days worth of Ambassador activity couldn’t possibly be highlighted in one video.

And five minutes is a bit long for most web viewing audiences. Todd Earwood says the sweet spot is between two and four minutes in length. Any longer and most people don’t watch. The view numbers from my SME-TV interviews certainly reflect that philosophy, but I firmly believe that if the content is good, the length is irrelevant. If it’s compelling, people will watch. Don’t let your watch dictate your content. As I’ve told Todd hundreds of times in relation to “Fridays with Falls,” “I can’t be compelling or funny in under two minutes. Live with it.”

Step 5: Give Yourself Time

The most frustrating part of doing web videos is the massive amounts of time you’ll think are wasted in rendering video, uploading video, transferring files from one type to another (if your camera and editing software don’t gel well) and, God forbid, when you have to re-render or re-upload because once you see it online, you realize there’s a scene that looks bad, a stray goober in the background picking his nose or some other such problem. Even the fastest personal computer is going to churn on video rendering and uploads for a few minutes. The longer the video, the longer the lag time. I’ll often set my videos to render and then go to dinner, sleep or something else that takes a while. Otherwise, I’ll sit and watch the computer and that whole watched pot never boils thing is true.

You should also give yourself time to edit, particularly on the front end. I work fast and am used to my editing software. A five minute video still takes me at least an hour, sometimes two, to put together, watch, tweak, polish and etc. When you’re first starting out, it’s going to take longer. Give yourself a 3-4 hour block of time to piddle and play. The more you learn early on, the better you’ll be down the road. Like anything, practice makes perfect.

And then there’s the time to get good. Your first 3-5 videos are probably going to suck. Videos 5-10 will be incrementally better and with each edit, you’ll experiment a little more, learn a new trick or just get tighter and more polished on your overall production quality. The key is to not give up after the first few tries because it’s hard. Nothing worth doing is easy. Keep at it and you’ll soon find you’re spitting out some pretty entertaining stuff, even if it is just home videos of your kids that are slightly slicker than the ones your dad showed your high school prom date.

Conclusion

Keep in mind, I’m a web video amateur. While I write and help direct the occasional Daily Idea and had a couple of video editing classes in college, I’m essentially self-taught. If you’re interested in producing web videos, you probably have a little cinematic flare. All it takes now is diving in and testing the waters.

For more professional advice and expertise, I’d recommend checking out thoughts and blog posts from Todd Earwood, here. ShirtlessApprentice is a good video tips site and Jim Kukral, a digital colleague on Twitter (@jimkukral) is a good example of a blogger turned v-logger who has good insights into the approach.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. 5 Video Editing Tips And Tricks
2. Tips For Shooting Better Online Video
3. Video Killed The Internet Star
4. TV Networks To Dive Deeper Into Web TV For Future Seasons
5. Easiest Ways To Watch Web TV

IMAGE: “The Editing Process” by Spider Dijon on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: web video, web TV, vlogging, v-logging, video blogging, podcasting, how to

If you’re really into a certain tool and use it to connect with someone, you should make sure they don’t work for a competing tool. That’s the lesson I learned Saturday night when I Skyped Scott Monty to see what he was up to. Scott, you see, works with ooVoo, a video chat and conferencing platform that probably has Skype scrambling to come up with something better.

So Scott sent me an invite and I logged on to ooVoo to check it out. I meant to join and watch some of the My ooVoo Day activity last month, but was tied up for various reasons. Knowing I’d get around to reviewing the platform for all of you, it fell on the list of things to do. Scott’s prompting shuffled it to the top.

And for the record, the first letter in “ooVoo” isn’t capitalized. The name is supposed to look like two pairs of eyes joined together by “V”ideo. Clever, eh?

What I discovered is that ooVoo takes Skype to a new level, then adds on a handful of features to sweeten the deal. Here are the highlights:

• You can video chat with anyone on ooVoo for free.
• You can have group chats/video conferences with up to six people at once, also free.
• You can call any phone number in the U.S. and Canada for free up to 500 minutes during an introductory period. It appears that period ends this week, though, so sign up now and call your mother from your webcam. She’ll get a kick out of it.
• You can record any call, video or otherwise, in its entirety, for free.
• You can send video messages up to 60 seconds long to anyone with an email account.
• Like Skype, you can supplement your video or audio sessions with chat for link sharing, etc.
• You can also share files up to 25MB in size with your contacts.

Now think for a minute of the possibilities. As project lead you get your legal, marketing, business development, sales and finance gang on a video conference to go over the week’s assignments. You pop them copies of your 25-page PowerPoint deck via file share while the conference is going on, send hyperlinks to a few articles you found they should read via the chat session, pipe in your print vendor via phone to speak to the gang for a few minutes, then go over action items and take aways both verbally and with a written file shared at the end of the call. And you record the whole thing. All of this is done from your laptop at home for the grand total price of $0.00. That recording will come in handy next week when Sheila from marketing claims to have not heard the instruction to call the caterer for the dinner. Rewind … Play … Your fault.

And that’s just one use.

I’ve been researching several items for a side project lately that is better documented by call recording. With ooVoo, I can record my phone calls or even video chats without having to pay extra for a service to do so. On Skype, you have to find a third-party software for this and most of them charge a subscription fee. With ooVoo, I can then pull the recordings for supplemental multimedia for blog posts or even podcasts at a later date, creating the Jetson’s version of footnoting.

ooVoo has also recently partnered with Quanta to develop a plug and play version of video chat in high definition. So, you and your kids can all gather round the 55-inch Sony in the living room, sing Grandma “Happy Birthday” and see every crevice of her coffee-stained teeth as she smiles with glee in the process. Of course, she’ll be able to see your son picking his nose in amazing clarity on the other end as well, so go over the HDTV web cam rules with the kiddos a couple times before.

Surprisingly enough, all of the above isn’t the VC pitch, it’s real, live and available, though the HDTV part is still in the works. Just go to oovoo.com to download and get started.

But it can’t all be gits and shiggles, right? Right. Technology is grand when perfect. Which is to say it’s mostly okay.

Scott and I connected instantly but spent the better part of five minutes watching pixelated, grainy video, hearing the occasional sound from one another and chatting via ooVoo’s IM function before we could fully connect. That was accomplished only after we both turned off our video streams and went audio only and I stopped a batch upload of images to Flickr. Ultimately, we figured out since I was on a wireless connection and using up bandwidth during my uploads, the video and audio streams were maxed out. Once I shut down the uploads we were able to have an audio chat just fine. Will Murphy even joined us a few minutes in and, while there was an occasional delay or hiccup, the three-way phone call went well and we had a nice time catching up.

Monty verified that software running concurrently that uses a lot of memory or bandwidth, and trying to do too much over wireless connections can negatively effect ooVoo’s performance. Sure, that’s logical and expected, but we never really got the video working together with the audio. Still, I’ve had video chats on Skype before that had similar issues.

And the video messaging works well except for the annoying audio-video synchronization issue you get with a lot of webcam recordings. Bandwidth, processor speeds, audio and video hardware and other factors all play a part, but the one video message I sent Saturday night went through with a mismatch in the presentation. It was extremely cool, however, to record a one-minute video (instructions, reminders, birthday greeting, look at my new tattoo) and send it to anyone with an email address. The recipient clicks on a link that goes to a video player on ooVoo’s website and they don’t have to be a member of ooVoo to see it.

Other issues surfaced in my research as well. Turns out the while the developers originally approached the platform, which was launched in June of 2007, with no plans for  but a Mac version and one wasn’t available until recently. (Note: Strike thrus corrected 4/1/08 after facts corrected by ooVoo officials. My apologies for the oversight.) Will, who was using his Mac Book Pro with the built-in camera and mic and was on a wireless connection, reported no issues. As I understand it, however, the Mac version isn’t quite as robust at the PC download.

At the end of the day, ooVoo can be a powerful connection tool for individuals or businesses. And to further illustrate how much potential I think this software has, my first item of business Monday is presenting it to IT to see how quickly I can start conferencing clients.

Disclosure: Scott Monty and I are friends. He did not ask me to blog about ooVoo and only pitched the platform to me when I dialed him up on Skype. The conversation started with him just giving me crap for not using the competing ooVoo platform he works with. I’m glad he showed it to me.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. What Is An ooVoo?
2. Can ooVoo Succeed? No!
3. ooVoo Has Big Potential
4. Do We Need Video As A Communications Tool?
5. Stay Connected From Your Small Town

IMAGE: My silly snap shot of Monty and me talking.

Technorati Tags: oovoo, video chat, video conferencing, VOIP, on-line communications tools

So I was sitting in the Bloghaus at South by Southwest (SXSW) one day and Ted Shelton from The Conversation Group comes up and says, “Here! Take this camera and go shoot the SXSW experience and bring it back to me. I’ll post your video on the web. Maybe you’ll even get a free camera.” I look at the unit, a FlipVideo Ultra not much bigger than a decent cell phone. It fits in your pocket and has about four buttons on it. I’m skeptical, but figure what the heck. But I never leave a chance to get a free gadget in limbo.

“I’ll make you a better deal,” I say. “Let me keep the camera over night and I’ll film stuff at tonight’s parties to give you a view of the night life at SXSW. Since you’re not going to get that from anyone else (at least not as cool as me), you download the videos and I keep the camera.”

Ted, whose firm is handling social media outreach for Flip, made no promises, and I haven’t seen my video online yet, but last Wednesday, my new FlipVideo Ultra arrived. I immediately recorded a few minutes at the office just to have an example of the quality for you to see.

What the FlipVideo Ultra does is make web video – recording a video, doing some basic edits and posting it to sites like YouTube – easy for even the technically challenged. The unit has six buttons: On-off, Record, Play, Delete, Volume Up, Volume Down, Skip Forward and Skip Back. If you can work a VCR remote, you can figure out how to operate this thing without need for the tidy little instruction booklet.

The switchblade-like USB plug pops out of one side, plugs in and software kick-starts that allows you to easily navigate through the process of downloading, editing, saving and sharing your videos. The user interface is simple and there’s an indexed help section for when you do get stuck. When you’re ready to share your videos, you can email or upload to AOL Video or YouTube with a couple of clicks and entering your username and password for the respective service, or it will convert your file into an even more upload-friendly version if you use other video sites like DailyMotion.com or even Utterz.

I turned to my wife after using the camera and software and said, “This is so simple, even your mother could shoot, edit and upload a video with this.” (Sorry, Ma.)

While the beauty of the FlipVideo is its simplicity, the tech-savvy users will probably find nit-picky things to complain about. Like John Stammerman in my video suggesting a reversible view screen so you can see yourself when aiming the camera at you, experienced video folks will not like the editing functionality … trim from beginning and end, but anything more complicated and you’ll need to open the video in a separate software. I also found there was no real quick, easy way to rearrange the video clips in a different order than that which they were shot. Plus, when I renamed a file, it slapped it at the end of the playlist, so my finished video would have been all out of order. I fixed this by going back to each clip in the order I wanted and saving it to a new library (folder) in the proper order. In essence, I had to create 2-3 libraries to compensate for a couple of simple mistakes just to get the clips arranged correctly.

And if you don’t have administrative privileges on your computer, you’ll be frustrated. The software requires a codec download (provided on the camera) to see the videos and without admin permissions, you’re stuck until someone can install it for you.

That said and provided you have admin access to your computer, if you just want to record a quick, one-minute or so video, impromptu and quickly zap it to the web or to someone via email, this gadget is pretty darn handy.

In addition to the above, the automatic upload feature to YouTube failed. It gave me an error message saying it had trouble connecting and I should try back later. My browser got to YouTube just fine, so I’m not sure what happened there. I was also a little confused as to where the Movie Mixes (edited, up-loadable versions of the videos) were saved since I couldn’t find a cache or program folder on my hard drive. I would imagine it would have to then reside on the camera meaning the thing is going to fill up at some point. I did discover, however, a YouTube uploader end-around – an “Upload Videos To Your Favorite Website” function that compresses the finished video a bit more and dumps it to a desktop folder for easy find.

For web video made simple and, thus, more accessible, FlipVideo has a stellar product with this camera. I wouldn’t recommend it for experienced video users unless you just want a utility camera for quick, easy captures, but with a retail price of $149.99, it’s not a hefty investment for that, either. If you have a not-too-tech-savvy person who digs video and wants to start posting clips to YouTube or other services, then the FlipVideo Ultra is absolutely a good buy.

And for the record, I was not asked to blog about the camera, nor am I being paid anything by Flip Video or The Conversation Group, other than the unit I’m reviewing. I am friends with Chris Heuer, one of the principals at The Conversation Group, but he did not ask me to blog about the camera, nor did we have a conversation about it until after I’d written this. Regardless of that relationship or whether or not I got a camera to keep, I would have blogged about it and recommend it.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. DAVOS08: Tiny Cameras
2. Pure Digital Announces Million Camcorder Giveaway For Non-Profits
3. What The Flip?
4. Unsurprisingly, Flip Has 13% Of Camcorder Market
5. SXSW After Hours (Not nearly as entertaining as my version.)

Technorati Tags: FlipVideo, Flip Video, Pure Digital, SXSW, video camera, camcorder, camera, digital camera, camera review, Flip Video Ultra

Downloading ringtones and wallpapers for your cell phone can be frustrating and costly sometimes. I’ve only downloaded one of each just to see how it all worked. I paid $1.99 or something like that for both, neither of which I really liked because they weren’t mine. (Granted, this was over a year ago, so save the “you’re stupid” comments, please.)

Myxer.com, however, puts creating ring tones and wallpaper for mobile devices in your hands. Upload images, video or audio files and have custom content sent to your cell phone. This is a valuable service for our the ever-growing customization of our lives. But it can work for brands, too. They even have a special starting point for bands to upload their music to add to their catalog of user-generated ringtones. Pretty cool. And it’s ad supported, so there’s no subscription fee for the end user. Nice.

At a social media breakfast at South by Southwest last week, I had a chance to sit down with Jeff Sass and J.C. Hutchings from Myxer. Hutchings is also the web-celeb author/podcaster (”7^th Son”) who was hired recently to help recruit content providers to Myxer.

For more, visit Myxer.com. To see exactly how it works, they’ve got a nicely done tutorial here.

Technorati Tags: Myxer, podcasting, mobile, mobile content, cell phones, J.C. Hutchings, Jeff Sass, Jason Falls

The problem with conferences like South by Southwest (SXSW) is that you need 36 hours in a day. When Shawn Morton, Richard McInnis and I got on the elevator last night with Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica, Smorty very eloquently pointed out we needed to account for daylight savings time and spring forward. You could see the last threads of enthusiasm sputtering out of Scoble’s body. The guy was exhausted and that additional hour of sleep would have done us all good.

And, for the record, I dig Scoble but am here to declare that while cool and all, he’s not the star of the show. Rocky is where it’s at. The dude’s just cool. I’d bet Robert would agree.

Sunday was slow going, mostly because of the Frog Design party the night before. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com was there and I could have sworn Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters was standing in front of me at one point. Twittering that wasn’t the best idea because many folks demanded I introduce them to him, as if I knew him personally. Of course, they all came to the party, partly for that reason, so it was a kickin’ time. (For the record, it probably wasn’t Dave Grohl, but if it wasn’t, it was damn close.) Who needs Dave Grohl. Pete Cashmore was hanging with us. That’s pretty cool.

Off to the presentations we trod. Charlene Li’s Social Media Revolutionaries session was great. The SlideShare is below. The reason Forrester presenters are so good, aside from the fact they’re always pretty freakin’ brilliant, is that they give case studies, which I’m finding are the most oft-requested stories from people interested in social media. Look through the slides and see the information about Blendtec, Ernst & Young, Dell and more. Plus you’ll get the top-level Forrester approach to social media which I’ve written about before.

Click here to see the slide show from SlideShare.net in a new window. I don’t have the plugin and my FTP wasn’t working well.

And the magic of Twitter is continuing to rear its blessed head. Shortly after Charlene’s presentation, in which she talked about Lionel Menchaca from Dell, he started following me there. I’ve insinuated that he’s an impostor and that the real Lionel wouldn’t follow me in a playful attempt to get him to do something cool like email me … or give me a free laptop. I’ll keep you updated.

I spent the majority of the day trying to collect more social media tools and case study examples to share with you via SME-TV in the coming days. And then there was the networking, of course. There are simply too many people to link to, talk about, brag that I met and so forth. Even writing this is tough because Jeremiah Owyang just walked in and is rocking the Bloghaus room. As of this writing, Kami Huyse is nowhere to be found and I haven’t synched with Connie Reece yet, but if you run down the list of cool bloggers I wanted to meet, or for that matter my Twitter followers, I can check off a ton of them.

Tonight’s parties will produce more fun and frolic. My hope is to somehow catalog all the people I met at some point. Linky links are what it’s all about in building and growing your blog. But the signal-to-noise ratio is mind-boggling and while I’ve found a couple cool tools that you’ll learn more about in the coming week or so that will semantically analyze your posts and apply links to relevant terms, they aren’t smart enough yet to link, say, Kami’s name to her blog.

More to come …

Technorati Tags: SXSW, Forrester Research, Charlene Li, social media, networking