One aspect of video marketing that often trips people up is the technology. What kind of camera do you need to shoot good video? How do you make sure the audio doesn’t come out grainy? What about editing?
Let’s talk about all the important technical aspects of video marketing.
==> Video Equipment
The video equipment you choose depends entirely on your budget and how high grade you want to go. Rest assured; you don’t need a $10,000 camera to produce great videos.
In fact, even a low end HD camera can do a great job. You can easily spend under $500 today and still get a camera that can create high quality web videos.
Another route you can go is to buy a tripod for your iPhone. The iPhone’s camera quality is quite high, so as long as you can hold it steady and pan it, it can be a decent starter camera.
==> Audio Equipment
For marketers on camera, you generally want a wireless mic set-up. This will allow you to stand in front of whiteboards, demonstrate products or even be out and about in the world without worrying about tripping on wires.
You’ll want to get either a lavalier mic or an over the ear mic. The mic should be able to plug into a wireless transmitter, which in turn plugs into your camera.
==> Lighting Equipment
If you’re going to be filming in one location regularly, invest in getting some lighting equipment. Having great lighting is more important than having a great camera.
Lighting is a lot more complicated than most people think it is. You have the front light, the back light, the diffused light and often several more lights before you can get a distributed yet bright kind of effect.
Fortunately, once you get it right the first time, it’s quite easy to set it up again in the future.
==> Video Editors
When editing on a Mac, the most popular video editing program is Final Cut Pro. On the PC, Adobe Premier is a popular choice. For budget editors, Sony Vegas more than does the job. For special effects, Adobe After Effects can do almost anything you can imagine.
If you’re on a budget, you can simply outsource most of your effects or animation work and only do editing in house, which is relatively easy.
==> Video Players and Servers
Finally, you need a great video player to make sure your videos actually play smoothly.
You can host your videos on Vimeo or YouTube if you don’t want to self-host them. They generally have very good up-time, though occasionally videos will load slowly. YouTube allows you to use “skin” players, where the player simply uses a video feed loaded into YouTube.
Hosting your own videos allows you to get more creative. You can do special things, like pause a video midway to ask for an email address. If you host your own videos, you absolutely must be on a VPS or a dedicated host. Playing sales videos on shared hosting means risking a lot of money on file delivery speeds that you can’t depend on.