Have you ever wanted to create a motivational video for your business, product, or presentation but didn’t know where to start? This week I’ll take you through the process of creating a motivational video using readily available consumer technology. We’ll look at the different tools that are available along with the process of planning, writing, and producing the actual video itself.
With the advent of low cost, high definition cameras, almost anyone can create a reasonable quality video in 2011. Gone are the days of video tape, VCR’s, and hours and hours of editing time. With the advent of digital video, quality remains high post edit, and editing can be frame accurate… things that did not exist in the analog tape era.
For our video experiments this week, we’ll stick with some basic tools that make the video process fast and easy.
Camera: While camcorders have become smaller, regular digital cameras have added the ability to record hi-def video in a very small hand held package. For our experiments, we’ll use a regular digital camera outputting H264 MPEG video onto a flash memory card. If you have purchased a digital camera in the past two years, you probably have a camera that will output high def video. (Many cell phones now have this option as well)
Editing: We’ll take our video clips and import via memory card into iMovie on a Mac. iMovie makes the editing process easy and with a few advanced tricks, we can do some pretty cool edits. iMovie has a lot of built in transitions and titling options to make our job easier. We’ll also experiment with iMovies’ built in trailer feature.
Presentation: To add text and graphics to our presentation, we’ll use Keynote on the Mac. This will give us the ability to add an educational flair to our video and also use the computer as a basic teleprompter. We’ll look at ways to present this information in our video, from shooting the presentation on a monitor, to overlaying the presentation directly into our video.
Output: To finish our project up, we’ll need to output our finished video where others can see it. We’ll look at different options from Youtube, Vimeo and others. The process of uploading and embedding will also be covered.
Presentation style: While the technology is important, how we look, sound, and present to an audience is just as critical. We’ll take a look at different presentation styles to see what works best.
Overall: This week is a big experiment for me. I have wanted to produce good quality video presentations, but have been frustrated by the process. This week we’ll try some new techniques and see how things come out. It will be interesting to see what is possible with the current consumer technology. As always, your comments, ideas, and feedback are welcomed.
Question: Have you created a motivational business video?
