Author: Coleman Moore In August 2010 we began to plan a daily video blog. 30God.com was designed to provide original videos, not videos collected from sites like youtube.com. As we studied the internet we could find no sites providing what we were creating. Much of what we accomplished was learned by trailblazing.
We faced five major challenges in designing this cutting edge blog. 1) Designing the site; 2) Generating the unique content of the video; 3) Editing the videos; 4) Video formatting and streaming; 5) Video play on mobile and iPad devises.
Our initial vision was to have someone else create the site rather that do that ourselves; to have seven different video contributors rather than the same person each day; to use an online automated editing service rather than edit our own video entirely ourselves; to place our videos out on the cloud rather than streaming them ourselves; and finally to join YouTube to be able to provide for the "i" devises. From our experience, here are the top 10 things to know about the kind of video blogging we do.
1 Web Designer or Not: WordPress or Joomla provide the opportunity to design a fully functioning video blog. We chose not to spend our time educating ourselves on how to do this, but to hire a designer. Before we selected three companies to give us a price to do this work, we did our work.We looked at what we thought were the best looking, most intuitive and most captivating websites. Then, we designed on paper what three different pages looked like: our home page, our video contributor page, and our archive page.
After that we sat down with three different web designers. We chose them based upon their being small and innovative, and their capability to work in WordPress or Joomla. Two gave us bids with Wordpress and one with Joomla. We could have easily gone with any of the three.
2 Meet With Designer Often: Working with the designer was a joy. They involved us at each step of the process and we ended up with a site that was different than we had designed, but one which we liked much better. It is important to recognize your strengths and weakness before you enter into such a venture. Do what your good at and let others do what they are good at. But there were also some downsides to having a designer. Web designers should not only be technicians, they must also be artists. And as an artist, they will not want to sacrifice their "artistic look". And so expect some tension between style and function.
3 One or Multiple Bloggers: Our vision was to provide one minute videos with a 30 second spoken message every day. We could do them ourselves, but as any blogger knows, coming up with a new and relevant message for a blog is very challenging and draining. As a result, blogs either include other spokespeople if they post something new every day, or they only post new blogs periodically. Our vision did not allow for periodical videos, so we believed our only option was to have multiple video bloggers or video contributor.
4 Pick Bloggers Based on Target Audience: Content is king in blogs and websites today. Choosing the right bloggers would be the first part of determining content. They had to be able to convey a thought in seconds that normally took minutes to communicate. And they had to be a little edgy. Our target audience were people between high school and their thirties. They determined the length of our videos and they determined the type of bloggers we wanted. Diversity was important. We began to search for people who were speakers, but we did not want the kind of speaker that sucked the oxygen out of the room when they entered. In the end age didn't matter as much as the mindset of the person. We needed people who were young at heart more than people who were in the age range of our target.
5 Editing Will Eat Your Lunch: Our video contributors send us 4-5 videos each month. We take them and turn them into finished products. If you have seen our videos, you know they are high quality finished products. This would take several hours each to do from scratch. We found that there are several companies that do this as an automated service on line. We had to save time, so we found the one we liked best and begin using it exclusively. Animoto.com is who we chose and we are very happy with them save two reasons. The length of a single video clip is limited to ten seconds. They also do not have the embedding thing completely up to speed (discussed later).
6 But Some Editing Will Be Required: Once you have the video from the contributors it needs to be finished. Nothing is more boring than watching a static talking head. And while animoto.com does a great job, still background sound needs to be selected, still photos, other video, titles, credits, all have to be added. Right now this minimal level of editing averages about an hour and a half for each one minute video. A person who is knowledgeable of editing techniques should be doing the editing. You will find that you will also have to develop techniques in editing still pictures and sound. I use Corel PaintShop Pro X2 (because of the price) and Audacity 1.3 (Beta), a freeware that is excellent for sound editing.
7 Formatting Compression Nightmare: If there ever was a technology that no one could agree on it has to be video. There are so many compression formats in the video industry alone. Camcorders will compress the video into the format of their choice. You have no say in this. Then some players will recognize some formats and not others. And some video editing software will communicate some formats and not others. A software tool that will become essential is a reformatting tool. I use Format Factory, but there are others out there. In the end MP4 is the most reliable standard. I work in a PC environment and choose to do all editing in a WMV format before finally converting to MP4. Remember the larger the file (MB or GB) per minute of video, the more difficult it is watch it streaming on a computer without interruptions, but the higher the quality of the image you want to produce, the larger the file size. Newer players on your website will allow offer several quality choices for the end viewer.
8 Swimming Up Streaming: When we started I thought I would need a dedicated server to handle all the videos that we would be streaming. This allows for maximum control of your videos which was important to us in the beginning. But I found that cloud computing was advancing and changing the landscape, particularly in the area of internet video. Blogging lives on archives. You can imagine that a text blog is a few kilobytes in size, but a one minute video will range between 3 and 30 megabytes. Now multiply that by 365 in a year, and then however many years you are online. And then if you are successful and people are streaming them all the time, the bandwidth gets very big. So we discovered that animoto provided the storage of your videos after you were finished editing them. They give you embedded code to place on your website and when someone comes to watch a video on your blog, unbeknownst to them it was animoto that played the video. This was a wonderful solution, because animoto remained entirely hidden in the background, and we never had to worry about bandwidth.
9 Browser Wars: Most people don't know that it makes any difference whether you choose to view the internet through Internet Explorer (IE), Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, but if you are designing a website, it makes a great difference. Our site was designed by some people who love Apple Mac's and Safari. What worked on that browser did not work so well on IE, and then there are all the different versions of IE. It was a real challenge to make sure everything worked on each of these browsers. If you are developing a more complicated WordPress site, expect problems. And if this were not enough, in the middle or launching our site, Google, the owner of Chrome, announced it would not support a new video format that was to solve the formatting problems. Chrome announced their own solution – back to everyone for themselves. Just know that you need all four browser running on your computer in order to make sure that what you want your customer to see is actually what they see.
10 Apple and iDevises Pull Out: The internet had function smoothly for years with videos being shown through the use of Adobe's Flash software operating behind the scene. Then Apple decided that it would no longer allow its mobile and iPad devices to use Flash in the background. All of a sudden every video on the internet could not be seen by a whole new generation of internet users. This happened just as we were planning our new site that was entirely based on video. What were we to do? Animoto only offered embedded code in Flash and none of those videos would work. We decided it was more important to have these customers than to maintain control. YouTube offers an imbedded code that can be seen on iDevises and on traditional Flash friendly computers, but in using YouTube we had to allow customers to see our videos in places other than our site – loss of control. So we took the MP4 file that animoto.com rendered and uploaded it to YouTube, converting it to its unique embedded code which we placed in our YouTube player on our website 30God.com.
Hope this helps for those who might be thinking about entering the world of video blogging. It is not for the faint of heart or for those thinking how easy it will be. But it is one of the futures for the internet.
Coleman Moore
Founder thinkGod,LLC
http://30god.com
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