Tools For Your Video Career
The basics
Obviously you’ll need a camera to get started in video; if you’re a Mac user you might have a cam built in, but if not web cam’s are fairly cheap. Alternatively people like Chris Pirillo stream from a professional video camera, but even a second hand older model can also work, for both live and recorded shows to computer. For camera effects, CamTwist for the Mac is free and fully featured with effects such as text, clocks, image overlays, Picture in Picture, and much more. Fix8 (our coverage here) offers cartoon style overlays if animation or funny faces are more your thing.
Recording
You’ll have two ways of recording a video: local or to the web. Local could directly on to a camcorder through to Quicktime or something in-between. Quicktime Pro (between $30-$45) does the recording and it’s a quick and easy solution. To the web means recording your video directly to a website; the advantages are that you don’t have to upload it and it’s available immediately, however depending on your internet connection the recording quality can be significantly poorer than recording a video locally and uploading it. YouTube offers the direct recording option and is an obvious candidate, but the Live streaming services also allow you to record to their services and even distribute your video out to sites like YouTube later. I’ve also found that the quality of the live stream services can often be higher in recording than YouTube.
Streaming Live
Live in the newest sector in online video with venture capital being spread around a range of services. Live offers some advantages over doing recorded video alone (although they are not mutually exclusive); streaming live means you can interact with and network with your audience while creating archive footage than can be distributed later. Companies in this space include Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, Mogulus, BlogTV, Stickam and others. All of the services have strengths and weaknesses and you should explore each one, but if you haven’t got time for that I’d recommend Justin.tv or Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is attracting the professional, higher quality streaming shows so if you want to be in that space, you’ll be well positioned. Their tool set including full video conversion makes for a solid product. Justin.tv has a slant towards a younger, Gen Y audience, and if you’re pitching more to that audience it’s the better place to be. I also found when testing both that Justin.tv was more reliable for streaming quality from outside of the United States, and at times Ustream.tv was unusable for me, even on a 14mb down, 1mb up ADSL2 connection; you wouldn’t experience this in the US however. Of the others, Mogulus has a stronger emphasis on professional video and doesn’t have the strong community yet, BlogTV has a lot of potential, and Stickam seems to be dominated by soft porn, at least when I visited it.
Distribution
I asked Chris Pirillo for some tips for this post and one of his key points was simply: “you must understand that (a) It’s all about YouTube, and (b) It’s all about YouTube.” Like it or not YouTube dominates online video today more than Google dominates search in the
The other consideration in distribution is getting your video onto other devices, like iPods. The key is to provide the correct file type and feed for services such as iTunes. You can do it manually with a WordPress plugin and by making sure the file is available on your server in the correct format, or you can use Blip.tv.
There was an argument between Ze Frank and Rocketboom a year or two back where Ze Frank disputed Rocketboom’s viewer numbers as they were reporting 10x the traffic of Ze’s The Show. The key to Rocketboom’s success has always been distribution, and for a long time you couldn’t open a media player without seeing Rocketboom pre-loaded. Distribution is key, and combining services like TubeMogul and Blip.tv make it a lot easier.
Content
Chris Pirillo told me that the key is to make sure every video has something different, and that you should use supportive text with each video posted as Google loves text. Ultimately what you decide to create is up to you: it may be something simple like a web cam chat, or you may want to get more creative. We cant tell you what will work for you, but the easiest way to start is to get on YouTube and just see what different people are doing, you’re sure to find something to inspire you.