Media of Birmingham

Thanks to everyone who came out Tuesday morning for our video workshop!

A few special thank yous:

• Matt Cuthbert and Dennis Pillion (shown above) of AL.com for a great presentation on putting video on your site.
• Shift Workspace for hosting us.
• Volunteer Jeff Book for event photos (to be posted soon) and Shaun Chavis for hospitality.
• And Andrea Walker of W Social Marketing for putting the whole thing together.

If you couldn’t make it, a few takeaway tips:

• Matt and Dennis often use a Flip camera, one of the more popular and less expensive options out there.
• You can use a digital still camera to shoot video, but keep in mind that the quality won’t be as high, since it’s primarily designed for photos.
• Before going out on a shoot, check two things: battery life and available memory. You can’t shoot if your battery is dead or your memory is clogged with older videos. (The Flip has no accessible memory card — you must dump footage to your computer to free up space, delete it or no shoot.)
• They use basic video editing software that usually comes standard with computers: Windows Movie Maker and iMovie for the Mac.
• With the Flip, proximity is important for good audio. The model Matt showed off had a mono microphone (Flips have no audio input jack).
• Besides YouTube and Vimeo and other video sharing sites, you can also post your videos to AL.com to reach the hometown audience.
• Breaking a long video into a series of shorter ones (around 2 minutes or less) can yield higher numbers of views.
• To have a home for each video, embed it on one of your Web pages or within a blog post. Then, you can write a headline and some explanatory text for maximum search engine optimization (how users find it through Google).

Also, MOBster Lisa Isbell shares her insights from the presentation.

What should we present at a future seminar or workshop? What do you as a media professional want to learn?