First up this week let me explain the cat image I used as a thumbnail for this weeks roundup.
Sometimes there are enough articles for me to share with a common theme, sometimes one of the articles lends itself to the easy selection of a suitable and interesting image… this week was not one of those times.
In this case I can either search for an interesting image that bears no relationship to the post contents or, go with the internet’s lowest common denominator when it comes to images attractive to humans… a cat image.
So! No prizes for guessing where my head is at this week!
Video Clichés
One of the problems in developing your own style in video is that without (or even with) formal training it is easy to fall back on watching other videos for inspiration.
Now don’t get me wrong on this point, watching what other people are doing is a great way of identifying techniques and styles that you may not have thought of yourself.
However the trap you can fall into is that instead of being inspired by these other works, you begin to fall into following them… copying them.
This not in itself a totally bad thing as long as you keep your head and remain aware of what you are doing so that your own vision remains intact.
For the inexperienced it is also difficult to be sure that what you are seeing is actually good for engaging your audience.
Sure it may seem cool to you but then again YOU are not your audience!
The final point I want to make here is that very often what you may see as effective may be part of an overall production and is only effective because of being part of a whole.
Taken out of context that effect or technique may easily fall flat.
The result of thousands of people copying thousands of other people in the video productions is an inevitable reduction of technique down to a series of clichés which may or may not have been a good idea at the time!
In the following post over at ReelSEO they go into some great details on clichés that you should try to avoid and best of all have some great video examples of the art of cheesiness through cliché.
- 6 Excruciating Video Production Clichés to Avoid Like the Plague
Corel VideoStudio Pro x7 Color Mask Tutorial
Audio Tips
Before you check out the next article below you should do a little experiment.
Go over to YouTube or Vimeo and randomly check out a bunch of videos on any subject you like.
Watch each one for a while (or for as long as you can stand it) and then go to the next and then the next.
Keep track of all the videos you watch then ask yourself a few questions about the ones you didn’t think were very good.
Basically you need to find out why they weren’t good.
For many the answer will be obvious because they are low quality or the subject wasn’t covered well or a whole host of blatant errors.
But what you will find are a number of videos that look OK, seems to cover their topic reasonably well, seem to present whatever it is they are trying to present reasonably well yet for some reason you didn’t like them.
I am pretty certain that in most of these cases the one thing that turned you off the video was not actually the video!
In most of these cases the offending characteristic was in fact the audio.
There is an old saying that the most important part of video is audio and it is very true.
How many times have you sat there watching a video getting annoyed at it and clicking away but could not really tell why it was annoying.
Most often it is the audio that is driving you away.
There some simple techniques and rules to follow that anyone can implement in order to get an audio quality that may not exactly be Hollywood Surround Sound but will at least not drive the audience to despair!
- Starting with Sound on Vimeo Video School
Playing With Marbles
Compensating for the position of your human subjects in relation to the sun when shooting outdoors can be a bit of a pain at times.
If the sun is too close to the rear of the subject the camera starts to give a washed out image.
Too close to the front and everything looks good except your subject is now squinting and looks like he or she has a bad case of brain freeze.
Check out this article for some tips on getting the position right.
More on That iPhone Bentley Ad
Can’t remember if it was last week or the week before when I originally posted a link to the new Bentley ad that was shot entirely on an iPhone 5 and edited on an iPad.
For anyone who has seen the ad it really is quite an incredible piece of work that presents the Bentley brand beautifully.
Obviously the ad wasn’t shot by a couple of guys walking around with iPhones and the use of a Bentley for the day!
In the article below they go into some detail of just how they managed to get a final product that looked the way it did but extracting everything possible from the equipment they had.
- What it Takes to Create a Video Ad on an iPhone 5S
Create Blockbuster Cinematic Trailers with muvee Reveal
Speaking of muvee Reveal, for many people the act of editing footage into a final project is not exactly a task they enjoy.
Let’s face it, you need to be a bit of a masochist or at least an editing enthusiast to be able to sit alone fiddling around with video, audio and image files for hours on end.
For those of you not so masochistically inclined there is a great solution on offer called muvee.
You can click here for my muvee Reveal review or take a look at the article below to see how muvee can be easily applied to a project and semi-automatically provide you with great results without the boredom!
Copyright Comes to Vimeo
Over on Vimeo this week they announced the introduction of a new system called Copyright Match.
Essentially what they are doing is trying to tackle the problem of copyright infringement by users of their service.
YouTube have had a similar feature to the one proposed by Vimeo for quite some time now and although it may have dealt with a number of issues for them, the way in which they have implemented it has been at times downright rude.
The system specifically deals with audio tracks and uses an identification system to inspect the audio of each video.
If it comes up as a match to known copyrighted material then the video gets flagged.
Personally I think this is all OK provided that Vimeo does what is says regarding the appeals process and applies a light touch.
- Copyright Match on Vimeo
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