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Reader SurveyEdit Expertise: Working the Web
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Franklin McMahon
Getting your video to go global—and viral
iTunes is a great place to start submitting your video for maximum exposure. The more popular your video gets, the more people see it on the Top 100 charts and elsewhere.
I remember the first time I saw streaming web video. It was small, jerky as it kept rebuffering, with bad resolution — but it was working. And it was inspirational. Today, web video is kind of like electricity: You don't think about it, it's just there. But you really should think about it, because content producers have a wide range of tools and services at their disposal that make getting video out to the Web easier than ever.
Before we go over some of the methods to get your video online, let's look at formats. Things have not changed too much as far as brands go. Leading the way are Windows Media, Real Networks, and QuickTime. What has changed is the positions, with Real lagging, QuickTime gaining, and Windows Media running steady. Real Networks recently joined up with Microsoft, so the partnership will eventually negate the rivalry, leaving QuickTime and Windows Media to duke it out.
However, it's important to mention Flash video, as well. Although it is less a format and more a delivery method (because it's more tied to a web browser than Windows Media and QuickTime files), Flash has gained popularity in the online streaming world because of its embedded nature. Just about anyone can view Flash in today's current browsers. In addition, Flash video begins to start up fairly instantaneously, typically with less buffering than other formats.
As far as Windows Media and QuickTime formats are concerned, the main difference in both of these formats in the past year has been the ability to deliver HD resolution over broadband. The catch is the computer or device being served needs to have slightly beefy specs to keep up with the large files and large playback requirements. For example, Microsoft's Windows Media High Definition Video (WMV HD) can do 720p/1080p, but for playback, it's recommended to have a 3.0GHz processor and 500MB of RAM for top resolution with 5.1 surround sound. Chances are if you are reading this magazine, you have at least these specs, but what does your audience have? To look at some examples, check out Google's “WMV HD Showcase” for some stunning videos from Microsoft. (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx)
Mac users will need at least a G5 or Windows equivalent to keep up with QuickTime's HD format H.264. But the stunning quality is no less evident. In addition, the H.264 format can do fantastic compression, to get amazing videos delivered via smaller file sizes. Visit the Apple site under QuickTime for some great HD examples (www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd).
You can also find encoding tools at both the Microsoft and Apple websites; however, most likely all you need to for encoding is already installed on your machine, ready to export out of Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, or almost any desktop editor or compositing program. As more of your potential clients get larger widescreen LCD monitors and faster broadband pipes, and once you start to view more HD web content, you'll quickly see that the days of small streaming clips are over, making way for 1080p/5.1-surround experiences.
Although the MySpace design is less than desirable, the power of the site lies in the interconnectivity with other MySpace pages.
Social networking
So you can produce HD video for the Web. Great, but how do you get it out there? The problem with HD video is every download burns through a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. (See S.D. Katz's article “iNetwork” in the May issue of Digital Content Producer or at digitalcontentproducer.com/videoencodvd/revfeat/inetwork.) It most likely will cost you if you suddenly get linked on a highly trafficked website. So look at options to avoid hosting your video on your server. Instead, include it on a large site, for free, where lots of people can see it. The days of building a website and simply placing a nice QT demo reel on it are over. Sure, you can still do that (and you should), but if you want to get maximum exposure, get your productions on lots of websites.
My advice is to go viral. Go everywhere. The current king is YouTube (www.youtube.com), which has taken off like a bullet, but there are other options such as MySpace and Google Video. There's also video podcasting via iTunes, but we'll get to that in a bit.
So maybe you thought these video websites were for kids trading clips? Think again. In order to understand the power of these platforms, it's important to examine how the Web has changed in the past five years. Web 2.0 has ushered in a whole new way of looking at web technologies, but the core new reality of the Web is nothing new technologically — it's social networking, which has blossomed into many prominent sites in recent years. Facebook and MySpace are fine examples.
The design of the MySpace interface is cobbled (I am trying to be nice), and the actual pages look like early bad HTML attempts. So why have 80 million people jumped onboard to create MySpace pages? It's social and it's hyper-hyperlinking. The power is in the connections — adding friends and interconnecting with other MySpace pages. People see you as a friend on other MySpace pages, and they click over to yours. MySpace has recently included the option to include video clips in your profile, so now you can network and have a collection of movies for all to see.
You'll notice MySpace is now part of the promotional marketing plan for most movies and television shows. Visit their page and become their friend, and you are linked. You appear on their page and they on yours. Take a page out of the pros' playbook and do the same thing yourself for your movie. Take a look at myspace.com/blowout and see what Bravo has done for its Blow Out reality series.
YouTube's template is much the same, but video is the star. Upload your video, and then you can be ranked by your peers and drive up the charts. If you have an animation or movie that is unique and captivating enough to have others recommend it, you can go viral in a few days with millions of views. This type of momentum is uber-traction fueled by the masses, while your pleasant little demo reel sits patiently on your website, hoping for a click or two. You work the network on YouTube, too, voting on movies, clicking to make friends, developing playlists, starting groups — basically helping sculpt what people will be clicking to watch.
Getting onto YouTube requires a simple signup; you create a title and description. The most important element to create before you upload is tags — a series of keywords to help your video get discovered when people search YouTube. You'll also notice a prompt conveying not to upload copyrighted material or video for which you don't own the rights. Ironic, since even a quick search for The Daily Show will bring up scores of pages of clips from the Comedy Central program (unless the network is actually uploading it).
Once you get to the upload page, you'll see the catches: Each video has to be 10 minutes or less and can't exceed 100MB in size. You do have the option to make this video public (searchable for the world to see) or private, where you create an email list and then send the video to your peeps. Before you upload, YouTube again warns that your work should not violate any copyrights and says that the clip must not be obscene. Uploading takes a few minutes depending on size, and after that you are ready to share your work with the world.
Also worth noting is that YouTube is Flash-based. If you have basic developer's chops, you can integrate your clip streamed from YouTube by embedding or using simple application programming interfaces (APIs) on your own website. This is far simpler than having to build a player from scratch. (YouTube actually displays HTML code for embedding on the page for each video.)
Google Video is another option for hosting your videos. It used to be clunky in that you had to upload and then wait for the video to be approved, which could take days. And then once it was available it produced a long, unfriendly URL. This past month, Google, feeling the heat of YouTube, changed everything. You no longer have to be approved, and you now have a link to promote right away. Uploading is easy and all happens on one page, where you type in your description, title, and genre. And the URL you get is short and easy to share. Again, nothing obscene or copyrighted. Google Video does allow video clips larger than 100MB, and does not restrict on how long it is, giving the site a definite advantage over YouTube.
Another great option Google has is a standalone desktop uploader (for Mac, Windows, or Linux) that you can install, completely bypassing the web browser interface. In fact, the standalone uploader even lets you cue up multiple files for uploading. Google is certainly more feature-rich and lenient when it comes to uploading, but, again, it wants to grab a share of YouTube's market, so it's trying a bit harder.
All of these services are free, you are using their bandwidth, and it does not cost a cent. A great deal, plus lots of exposure.
Also intriguing is most of these services serve up the video as Flash. That means protection of your content and scalable playback options, as well as nearly immediate playback start, as opposed to lengthy downloads. Both Windows Media and QuickTime have come a long way in making video play as soon as possible, but Flash is so well integrated and starts up so fast that it's often the format of choice for any new or existing video-serving website.
MySpace, YouTube, and Google Video are not just video-hosting websites, such as we've seen before via sites such as iFilm. The key is these are all living, breathing social networks, with video content ping-ponging among users. You could spend years dragging your short to film festivals and never reach the number of people you could capture in a good afternoon via these websites. Want some extra bang? Add a link on Digg.com about your content. If it catches on and enough people vote on Digg, it will rise to the front page and your views will hit the roof.
Video podcasting
And then there is video podcasting. I produce five podcasts — the most recent one being RumorGirls.com, a reality series starring two sisters. It's kind of funny to compress HD down so small, because I shoot it in HDV 1080i, doing HD graphics in Adobe After Effects and Apple Motion, and then shrink it down to 320×180 size to make it go portable. And portable it goes.
In only a few months, we've captured multiple thousands of weekly viewers using iTunes. In fact, the total of all the podcasts I have done in the past year recently crossed the 2 million downloads mark. That's a lot of brand going to a lot of different countries all over the world.
Podcasting seems complex, so how easy is it to get your video content out to the world? Not hard. There is a little bit of nerd stuff with creating the RSS feed (Real Simple Syndication), a great way to essentially self-syndicate. Just get a program to do it for you, such as FeedForAll on the PC or Feeder from Reinvented Software on the Mac. Encoding is easy, because most editing programs will export to podcast formats such as MPEG-4.
Submitting your video podcast to iTunes is a great start, because there are 50 million users who are dying for content. Once your show gets popular it moves up into the Top 100 iTunes charts, where more people see it and then subscribe. Apple may feature it on its front podcast page in iTunes for additional exposure.
The key with podcasting is to make a compelling program that extends your brand, with lots of links back to your website promoting your talents. Getting your video content out into the Web these days does require a new mindset that you should get your head around. The old days was putting a demo reel on your website, handing out your card, and getting some hits. These days it's all about motion. Your clips and movies are uploaded to services and then pushed to the masses via clicking, voting, and massive networking. With enough momentum and virtual seismic tremors, your content can capture thousands — or even millions — of viewers around the world. Just produce killer stuff, and let the users move it to the top of the viewing mountain. The Web has always been a network, but now it's a social network, where masses of people are ready for content and wanting to share it. So get into the mix today.
Video Podcasting Workflow
After producing several audio podcasts, such as Media Artist Secrets (www.mediaartist.com), I decided to dive into the world of video podcasting and produce The Mary and Karla Show, a reality show that's a combination of in-studio and on-location footage. We shot the show on MiniDV at first, mainly because the end product is reduced to 320×240, so we would have more than enough resolution. The video was captured with Adobe Premiere Pro and then exported and compressed with Apple QuickTime Pro. For a $30 program, QuickTime Pro does a fantastic job of converting 4:3 video to H.264 (.m4v), the standard of choice for podcast video (We'll get to widescreen in a minute). MPEG-4 (.mp4) is a fine option, and although compression times are almost always faster, the codec is generally a lot less efficient than H.264, producing larger files. So I always recommend H.264.
Towards the end of the series, we got even more streamlined, shooting the show on a digital camera, the Casio Exilim EX-S600. This slim still photo camera also shoots full-motion VGA 640×480 30fps video to an SD memory card (a 2GB card holds more than 1 hour of video). Again we scaled down to 320×240. Because it's a still camera, I could adjust the saturation, tint, sharpness, and other settings, and have them apply to the video. The Mary and Karla Show was a big hit around the world, featured on iTunes as well as traditional media, including BBC News, as one of the first video podcasts. For my next video podcast, RumorGirls.com, I decided to scale back up and shoot master quality and change the workflow — mainly because we intend to expand to DVD collectors sets and other products down the line with this brand.
We do a “RumorGirls” audio podcast called “Rumor Girls Uncut” (on which I appear with the stars, Karla and Karen), which is recorded with an iRiver audio unit and edited/encoded with Apple Soundtrack Pro on the Mac and Adobe Audition on the PC.
For the video version of the program, however, we shoot in HDV with stereo audio with a Sony HDR-HC1 (an HD camera with enough manual controls but small enough to go undetected in public locations) and I edit using Apple Final Cut Pro as well as iMovie.
I create all the graphics and animated bumpers in Adobe After Effects and Apple Motion. Changing to this workflow also meant changing our aspect ratio, so all graphics were created in 16:9 and set up in a FCP project so all that is needed weekly is to capture the footage, wrap the front and back graphics, then encode via export to QuickTime. Final Cut Pro ironically is not all that great at exporting to H.264 and maintaining the aspect ratio. If you export to iPod format using the QuickTime preset, you'll get a widescreen video stretched to the 4:3 ratio at 320×240. Not good.
What is good? iMovie! I started using iMovie for final export because if you encode out a 1080i widescreen video to the iPod QT preset, iMovie smartly encodes the video podcast to 320×180, perfectly recreating the correct aspect ratio. I'm sticking with iMovie for now — sometimes with software, less is more.
iTunes Secrets
I've had all my podcasts featured on Apple's podcast page, and I always get asked, “What is the secret?” Well there is no magic formula, but I can offer some advice that may help you get considered, because a prominent spot on iTunes can mean multiple thousands of new viewers and listeners. First, how do you submit a podcast to iTunes? You need to create an RSS feed. This is an XML file that people subscribe to; it's basically a list of your shows and where the files are located (on your server, for example).
You can create it in a simple text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad, by hand; however, I recommend getting a program to do it for you. I like FeedForAll on the PC and Reinvented Software's Feeder on the Mac. Because your show may get popular, you may want to pay for a dedicated server to host it so you don't get high bandwidth charges. Libsyn.com is a great place to host for a flat monthly fee, or you can use Google Video, MySpace, or YouTube. Once you are set with your feed, install iTunes and go to the podcast page, where there is a large button to “Submit a Podcast.” You should get approved in a few days, then your new show will be searchable in the directory.
To be considered, Apple likes programs that are produced consistently and have decent production quality and a well-done feed. What is a well-done feed? An RSS feed that has relevant keywords and incorporates iTunes tags (Apple created its own to go with RSS tags). The show should be properly labeled, explicit or not (if it's explicit, label it as such), and most importantly, make sure your episode descriptions are fully fleshed out. Don't just call it “Show #1‥check it out!”
Spend time writing up a paragraph about who was on the show and what you discussed. Not only will this make it easy for people to know the context of your show and each episode, it'll beef up your feed with relevant keywords, causing more hits to your show in iTunes searches. Lastly, make sure you validate your feed for errors (you can do this by loading your RSS feed into any current browser). A bulletproof, descriptive, and accurate RSS feed — not to mention a good show — can make it very appealing to Apple to pick you as one of the chosen ones to be featured in iTunes.
Franklin McMahon runs the creative company fmstudio.com, which offers podcast production services, development, and training.
