Hot Topics

Greatest Commercial Of All Time

There’s actually little debate about this contest. Apple’s 1984 commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh personal computer wins hands down.

Chiat/Day produced the film. Ridley Scott, of “Alien” fame, directed. It echoes themes from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Pictured below, English athlete Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine. It aired January 22, 1984, during the telecast of the Super Bowl on CBS.

The runner embodies the release of the Macintosh as she literally smashes the screen image of the old regime — read Big Brother, Microsoft, IBM, etc. She is meant to unleash a new way of computing and, hence, a new way of thinking and even creating.

$3.5 million worth of Macintoshes sold just after the airing. The commercial was deemed a massive success.

Apple now produces 90 percent of it’s advertising content in house in Cupertino, California.

For all of your high-end video production needs in the San Francisco Bay Area, contact Capitola Media.

Go Gimbal

We love this new handheld camera from DJI. It combines a precision gimbal-based, tilt-and-pan rig and a 4K camera in a small handheld device. The Osmo comes with a 94 degree wide-angle lens and features a Sony 1/2.3″ CMOS sensor for full 4K recording at 4096×2160 and 24 fps. It can also take 12 MP stills.

Further innovations include a Wi-Fi link so you can remotely “tether” to your iPhone running the DJI GO iOS. You achieve up to 80 feet of range through WiFi. And the tether is not just for viewing, it also allows for remotely operating the camera and gimbal, with a pan range of 320 degrees, a tilt down of 35 degrees, and a tilt up of 135 degrees. And it can pan or tilt quickly, at a rate of up to 120 per second.

The iOS app also allows for panorama and time-lapse video production.

The Osmo also records at higher speeds. You can crank up to 120 fps in 1920×1080 resolution with a maximum date bit rate of 60 MB/s!

The one downside we noted is that the aperture is f/2.8, which is not exceptional in low light situations. The ISO range for video is 100 to just 3200. The lens does include a UV and anti-distortion filter.

The Osmo includes 2-channel 48kHz ACC audio inputs. It outputs MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 files to 64 GB microSD cards. There’s even a micro-USB input for firmware updates.

Contact Capitola Media for all of your hand-held, video production needs in the San Francisco, Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Video Cameras

Panasonic guns for the C200 and the FS7 with the new EVA1.

They may be late to the party, actually very late, but Panasonic have finally announced a sub-$10,000 S35 video camera, the AU EVA-1. While they were the first manufacturer post the Canon 5D MK II to bring out a large sensor video camera, the micro four thirds AF100, they never followed up.

The newly-designed EVA1 sensor is Super 35 sized (24.60mm x 12.97mm) with 5.7K resolution. With an active resolution of 5720 x 3016, the EVA1 delivers more than 17.25 million photosites. By starting at a higher native resolution, the 5.7K sensor yields a higher resolving image when down-sampled to 4K, UHD, 2K, or even 720p. Additionally, the increased color information results in a finer, more accurate finished image.

The lack of a camera from Panasonic in this market to compete with the Canon C300, C100, Sony FS7, FS5 etc has always been surprising. Panasonic make excellent cameras. Their 4K Varicams are superb.

After letting some of its marketshare slip to Arri and RED over the last decade, Panasonic has made a huge step back into the cinema market with the Varicam renaissance, starting three years ago with the Varicam 35. Panasonic is now also aiming squarely to reclaim ground lost in the indie cinema marketplace by releasing the new EVA1, announced recently at Cine Gear Expo on the Paramount Lot in LA.

Weighing just under 3 pounds, with a compact form factor and a removable handgrip, EVA1 can be used for efficient handheld shooting applications and can also be mounted on a drone, gimbal rig, or jib arm for complex yet smooth camera moves.

The EVA1’s Dual Native ISOs are 800 and 2,500, which will allow cinematographers to shoot in almost any lighting environment. And the EVA1 delivers 14-stops of Dynamic Range, enabling fine gradation in exposure from bright to dark.

For lensing, the camera utilizes a native EF-mount, giving shooters access to the broad EF lens ecosystem, including dozens of cinema-style prime and zoom lenses from numerous manufacturers. There will be full Iris Control, One-Push Auto Focus, and Lens Data.

The new EVA1 is a great all-round camera. It’s an ideal choice for independent cinema and drama, and it’s small and light enough to be chosen for that documentary look and feel.

For all of your Super 35 video production needs, contact Capitola Media.

Camera Geeks

Blackmagic Design appears to be living up to the hype with the ongoing evolution of the URSA. While the company is notorious for dramatic product launches at N.A.B. in Las Vegas (now just weeks away; we have our fingers crossed for a sensor upgrade), the company has introduced substantial firmware updates in the interim.

The first update (mentioned in our previous post), enabled 80 fps recording along with a new 3:1 compressed RAW recording option, which is similar in size to ProRes(HQ) files. This advance makes post processing with RAW files directly within your non linear edit (NLE) a reality. The latest update, “Blackmagic Camera 2.0,” now adds ProRes 4:4:4:4 recording at 60 fps in UltraHD and 80 fps in HD!

In our previous post we juxtaposed the URSA against the AJA CION cameras, which at that time had the 4:4:4:4 option advantage over the URSA. CFAST 2.0 cards for the URSA have already gone down in price and up in size (now up to 256 GB), with competition between card makers Lexar, SanDisk and Wise sure to further drive down pricing.

With the purchase of any Blackmagic camera, you get the full version of DaVinci Resolve 11, normally about $1,000 for the software. Resolve 11 is deserving of a post unto itself, as Blackmagic has expanded the functionality of Hollywood’s “go-to” color grading and finishing tool to include extensive editing capabilities.

High-end post-houses will probably still need the $30,000 control surface, a $26,000 SONY mastering monitor, a $10,000 fully-loaded 12 core MacPro, and RAID storage. So deep pocketed facilities will still have a competitive advantage.

A free version of Resolve, “Resolve Lite,” is available for download from the Blackmagic site. This version is highly functional, however it is limited to UHD resolutions and does not support noise reduction, 3D grading or other tools and effects.

Over the last several years Blackmagic Design has transformed itself as a company. Not long ago they were considered the “poor man’s” option to AJA in deck capture cards. They have since acquired companies such as DaVinci, ATEM (realtime production switchers and standards conversion), Cintel (high-end film scanning), and most recently Fusion 7 (an ultra high-end compositing and motion graphics package, which sells at retail for for $1000). Again a free “lite and limited” version is available on their Website. (Fusion is currently Windows only.) So, with each of these acquisitions Blackmagic has become more and more of an essential player in the realm of high-end post production, and they’ve been able to drop the price of their products at the same time to cut out the competition.

They surprised the video production world a few N.A.B.’s ago by entering the camera market, and it now seems a bit ironic to see AJA playing catchup.

They got some great PR a few weeks ago during the Super Bowl. The company highlights that fact that the winning commercial in the 2014 Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, called “Time Machine,” was shot by director Ryan Thomas Andersen on a Blackmagic Cinema Camera and colored on DaVinci Resolve. The competition runs online offering consumers the chance to create their own Doritos ads. Entries are then voted on by viewers, and each year at least one fan made commercial is guaranteed to air during the Super Bowl.

Oh, and it has 2.5 million views.

Be sure to contact Capitola Media in Los Angeles or San Francisco for all of
your high-end, Super-Bowl related video production needs!

TV Shot on iPhone

Video producers continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible creatively using “simple” technologies to produce complex results.

The producers of “Modern Family” reported to CNET that they shot an upcoming episode of the hit series with Apple consumer products. The Season 6, Episode 16, February 25th episode of the ABC series was shot entirely with signature Macintosh products. Gone were the heavyweight Sony F35 and the Arri Alexa cameras typically found on a TV series production set.

“Connection Lost” traces the Dunphy family’s attempt to locate their missing daughter, Haley. As the extended family frantically searches for their daughter, they stay connected through video chats, mobile phone calls, text messages and emails, all using Apple’s latest products: iPhone, iPad Airs and a MacBook Pro. Staying true to the “connection” theme, the show’s creators decided they would also use iPhones and iPads to record the episode.

Steve Levitan, Co-Creator and Executive Producer, said, “everything was shot on the iPhone or new iPads, with one or two small scenes shot using MacBook Pros.”

Shooting the episode on these devices proved to be more challenging than anticipated, according to the show’s writers and editors. In an effort to make it believable that the actors were actually communicating via Apple’s FaceTime, they had to shoot scenes simultaneously on as many as three different sets. And the talent, it turned out, were also not very good at shooting themselves while at the same time focusing on their lines and other visual cues from the crew. So, the production relied on crew members to physically hold the recording devices, while the actors held the crew members’ arms, to make appear like they were controlling the devices.

Why Produce A Video?

Why Expend Time and Money Producing Video Content ->

Susan Weinschenk, a UI/UX behavioral psychologist, writes that we rely on a specific area of our brain to tell us to read faces and then to decide whether or not someone (and their message) can be trusted.

So, we have an innate preference for interactions, even monologues, with human beings. We trust communications with people over other forms of information presentation, be they the written word, animations, infographics, etc.. And when we believe the presenter, we picture ourselves in their shoes, literally, sometimes, and become converted through the story they are telling.

Videos are effective messaging tools, because we empathize with the storyteller. And customers would rather hear about how a product or services has benefitted the lives of people like them. They don’t want to hear the VP of Sales yammer about their own product.

Stacksandstacks.com, an online retailer, found that visitors to their Website who watched a product video were 144% more likely to purchase that product than visitors who did not watch the video.

Viewers tend to spend as little time as possible reading when given the option to watch a video. Visitors report watching a video to be easier, faster and more effective. That’s great for marketers, because potential customers absorb and retain information in videos more effectively than they do by reading simple text or looking at static images. By educating Web visitors about the specifications and key differentiators of your product or service in a compelling story format, potential customers will be more likely to purchase that product.

Internet Retailer reports that when a video includes a high degree of varied content, viewers will actually watch that video multiple times to absorb more of the information presented, and this translates into potential new customers spending more time on your Website considering your products and services!

And if you didn’t already sense a trend, your competition is producing a video right now! According to Cisco, 87% of Internet traffic is video content. 70% of business-to-business content marketers already use video in their marketing strategy. And almost 60% of those marketers rate video as the best way to market their content.

Videos also boost that all-important marketing metric: SEO. If a Website includes video, Google equates that information to mean, “this site has content!” And Google’s ever-changing algorithm continues to increase the ranking factor of pages that include video.

Video also decreases bounce-rates. Visitors spend twice as long on a page with video than without. And they remember more content from a message in a video format, than when it comes in a text.

And higher quality content, like video, generates more backlinks, which further promotes SEO.

With responsive design integrated into most Web templates, video viewers, social media sites and video sites, video will play on virtually any device.

Last but not least, marketers can distribute their video content across all of their social media and other points of Web contact: Website, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Amazon, blog posts, email campaigns, and the like.

So, what are you waiting for?!

Video Production Cameras

Video cameras are evolving as quickly as any other technology out there. We explore the pros and cons of two of the latest hot cameras.

The first we are recommending is the Blackmagic URSA.

The good news: this camera is cool for a bunch of reasons of reasons — one in that it has every kind of monitor you’d want built right in. It has a giant flip out iPad-sized viewfinder/touch screen, as well as two other LCDs. This camera also has a whole panel devoted to audio, with dedicated XLR inputs and meters. It also records to ProRes and RAW internally. One of the coolest things about the URSA is that is has the a user upgradable sensor and mount, which essentially future proofs this camera. So, while now the camera has a 4K (cropped 35) sensor capable of recording 80fps, we expect an upgrade to be announced at NAB in April. Perhaps 5 or 6K at up to 120fps! The current sensor has just 12 stops of dynamic range. Again, with a larger sensor we expect the dynamic range increase as well. Another thing this camera has is a “global shutter”. This eliminates all morié or rolling shutter artifacts. ProRes 422(HQ) is the highest quality version of ProRes the URSA can record.

The camera is available with an industry-standard (Canon) EF lens mount and the body retails for $5,995.

The bad news: this camera is heavy, weighing in at almost 13 lbs., without a lens. It also records to new “c-fast” cards, which are currently expensive. However, the cards are non-proprietary, so the cards should go down in price. Also, if you want to go hand held with the camera (in addition to adding weight), you will need to buy a shoulder mount (@ $99) and probably a third-party viewfinder.

Here’s the link: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicursa

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The competition to the URSA is the AJA CION.

The good news: this camera is lighter, at between 6.4 – 7.4 lbs without a lens. And, like the URSA, it also has a 4K, (cropped 35) sensor with a global shutter and 12 stops of dynamic range. Looking at this camera, it has a much more parred down, almost minimalist design. It features one small LCD on the left side of the camera.

The CION can record RAW, but only to a external recorder. It can also do 120 fps, but only to an external recorder. It does however beat the URSA for recording resolution, in that it can record ProRes 4:4:4:4 (the extra 4 is an alpha channel). 4:4:4 refers to RGB, indicating that the CION is recording to the full bit depth of each channel. And in this case we think that is up to 12 bits per channel! The only other camera we are aware of that can match this feat is the ARRI ALEXA.

The bad news: a failing of this camera is that does not have a “LOG” recording option for superior color control when grading, whereas the URSA does have this feature. The CION is also limited to recording to AJA’s proprietary “Pak Media”. Plus, currently, this camera is only available with a PL lens mount, though third-party EF mount adaptors are available. The AJA CION retails for $8,995.

Link: https://www.aja.com/en/products/cion

Bottom line – while both cameras rock!, in our opinion while the CION wins for its light weight and ergonomic design. DPs will get more for their money with the Blackmagic URSA.

For all of your video production needs, please contact Capitola Media in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Why bother with YouTube?

Why bother with YouTube?

In a word — search. YouTube is the number-two search engine and the largest video hosting platform on the Web. What’s number one? Google, of course. But who owns YouTube? Google does. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that YouTube is the number two most popular site on the Internet. Guess what number one still is.

How big is big? According to Merchdope.com content producers upload three hundred hours of video every minute! And content consumers watch almost five billion videos every day. This alone should convince you that you cannot ignore YouTube as a marketing channel.

YouTube can also help with your SEO (search engine optimization). This is the holy grail of search. If you content is optimized for search, you will be discovered when your products or services are searched for.

YouTube not only allows you to post cat videos. YouTube allows you to create a mini, branded site through their Channels platform. Upload your videos, group them in playlists, add links to your website and your social media sites. And, in the About section of your Channel, you can fill out an online profile detailing your company’s mission, location, and products and services. In addition, you can generate subscribers to your Channel. These subscribers will be notified when you push new content live.

Is YouTube a social platform?

Yes, YouTube videos support likes, comments and shares.

YouTube also allows you to optimized for SEO. They allow for embedded tags that tell search algorithms about your content. YouTube also provides a tool for content producers to upload a written transcript of your content. Transcripts become searchable guides for Google to index. You can also add sub-titles, which become searchable as well.

What are the details?

YouTube allows you to input: a title, a description, adjust privacy settings, collect content into playlists, select an optimal thumbnail that summarizes your content in a single frame, include searchable tags, add intra video hot spots that can launch the user outside the YouTube platform, and add a CTA (call to action) at the end of your video.

As you’d imagine from a Google product, YouTube’s analytics are robust, offering per-video information on reach, engagement, audience and even revenue if you turn on YouTube’s revenue-sharing engine. Metrics include: views, watch time, audience retention, impressions, click-through rates, traffic sources, and subscriber demographics.

YouTube’s offers an in-platform video editing tool set, but these are definitely prosumer-level tools.

YouTube is a world in a world. Don’t exclude yourself.

For expert video content production services and help getting your content up on YouTube, please contact Capitola Media.

Premiere Pro

Like many professional, Final-Cut-Pro, post-production facilities, the release of “Final Cut X” and Apple’s immediate “end-of-life-ing” of the program we had come to rely on and love, left us in a lurch. Upon Apple’s release, we found Final Cut X to be missing a slew of professional features and required learning a whole new interface and editing paradigm. This left us looking at two viable alternatives — AVID’s venerable Media Composer or Adobe’s re-worked Premiere Pro.

Many former Final Cut editors have switched to the latter, finding Premier’s interface and workflow a natural evolution away from Final Cut 7 (the official release from Apple before X). There are a ton of features to list in the latest edition of Premiere (Premiere Pro CC 2014), enough for an encyclopedia of Premiere blogs; however, perhaps one of the most important is Premiere’s “native” editing workflow.

A lot of the footage we’ve worked with lately has come from DSLR cameras. DSLR’s typically record to the highly compressed h.264 codec. This recording is usually 8bit, with a RGB color space of 4:2:0. A common Final Cut 7 (now called legacy) workflow with h.264 footage was to “transcode” the source footage out of the DSLR to a flavor of Apple’s “ProRes” codec. ProRes, is 10bit, and usually specified with a 4:2:2 color space. The rational for doing this was that editors would be putting this highly compressed 8bit, 4:2:0 footage into a larger 10bit, 4:2:2 workspace. And, in so doing, this step provided the editor with more room for video post-production operations like color grading and compositing. In reality, taking this up-resing step, editors were making unwieldy files, many times the size of the original, and not actually “creating” any true additional color information.

Adobe had long touted Premiere’s ability to work with footage natively, even mixing different codecs, video frame rates and video frame sizes. So, after researching about native transcoding and editing in Premiere, we took the plunge.

The following is an excerpt from “An Editors Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro” and the nature of the Premiere timeline: “Many editors believe you must transcode your media for color grading, but this is not accurate. The intermediate codecs that many are accustomed to using do not buy you any more dynamic range for color grading. Adobe Premiere Pro automatically up-samples media to 4:4:4 and 32-bit float upon import.”

On our most recent project, we worked with DSLR footage natively. It saved an enormous amount of drive space, hours of pre-transcoding, and when it came to really pushing the footage during color correction, the footage behaved just as well as the transcoded ProRes files we were accustomed to.

Go “native” on your next project! You’ll be glad you did!

Contact Capitola Media for all of your video post production needs in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How much does it cost?

How much does it cost to produce a video?

This is often the first question we are asked. The answer, surprise!, is, it depends. Capitola Media starts by asking the following questions:

1) What is your budget? Firms often have a budget in mind, and this can streamline the process enormously.

2) When do you need final deliverables? This often drives overtime requirements and rush charges, if applicable.

3) Is your deadline firm? Is the video for an event with a predefined show date? Will it go live with the launch of a new product or service?

4) Most videos tell a story. What problem are you trying to solve in the video? How are you solving it? How is your solution unique? What is your target market?

5) Where are you thinking of shooting? At your company’s offices? If so, do you have an appropriate location in which to shoot? High ceilings for lights, open space to work within, natural light and an interesting background are our preferences. Or, do you need to shoot at a client location, for a testimonial? Will there be travel involved? International? Or, do you want to shoot on a sound stage to control the lighting, audio, sets and background? Do you want to shoot green-screen and comp in a different background?

6) Who will be the talent in this video? Your employees, a client’s employees, or professional talent? What ethnicity? What gender? Will we need extras? An audience?

7) Will you need voice-over talent? Male or female?

8) Is the “script” already written? Will you need our creative help drafting the story, transitions and the dialogue?

9) What is the purpose of the video? Why do you need it? What will it be used for? Who will the audience be? What is your point of view?

10) Where will the video be broadcast? On network television? Live streamed over the Internet? Limited to just your company’s Intranet? At a conference? On your Website? On YouTube? All of the above?

11) Do you need visual effects, motion design and graphics incorporated into your story? How sophisticated a look do you want for your video? If we are shooting a product demo, are all of the elements ready to be taped, or will we need our help creating them during post production?

12) What sort of music, if any, do you envision? Needle drop or an original score?

13) Do you have any video samples you’ve seen that you love? Content created by your firm? Content created by others? Competitors?

14) How should the video end? What is your call to action (CTA)?

Contact Capitola Media for video budgeting and production services in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How BIG Is Big?

Everyone intuitively knows that video on the Internet is big! But how BIG is BIG?

Cisco reports that an individual would spend over 5 million years watching the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month last year. Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will pass through the network four years from now. Further, IP video traffic is projected to represent a massive 79% of all consumer Internet traffic, up from 66 percent last year. The sum total of all forms of video (TV, video on demand (VoD), Internet, and P2P) will range from 80 to 90% of global consumer traffic by 2018.

eMarketer estimates that digital video ad spending in the US will grow from $4.1 billion in 2013 to $9.1 billion, versus email ad spending which will climb from just $229.3 million to $256 million.

HP studies have shown that people remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, AND 80 percent of what they see and do.

What does this all mean for business owners, marketers and advertisers? You must create, broadcast and optimize video for all of your key products and services.

If you need video production services in the San Francisco Bay Area, give us a call at Capitola Media!

Bad Audio vs Good Video

When it comes to a video project, it can be easy to forget that audio comes before visual. You may find yourself asking “why,” but A/V (audio/visual) is crucial when it comes to producing a great video.

You can have the best video in the world, but it does nothing if the audio is anything less than perfect. Visual effects are great, but they become non-existent when you can’t hear what’s going on – that’s the difference between amateur and professional producers.

Here are a few things that can ruin a good video:

Placing the microphone in the wrong position
Choosing the wrong microphone
Using a cameras microphone

At the end of the day, your video is only as good as your sound. Professional video production companies such as Capitola Media know the right way to shoot a video. If you currently reside in the Bay Area and need assistance with producing a video, contact a professional San Francisco Video Production company today at (415) 381-0595!

Owned, Earned, Paid

Forrester Research recently wrote about the terms “owned, earned and paid (or bought) media.” These buzzwords have become very popular in the interactive marketing space today. In fact, taken together they can be applied as a simple way for interactive marketers to categorize and ultimately prioritize all of the media options they have today.

Yet as popular as these themes have become, they’re often loosely applied across the industry and essentially no one speaks the same language. Here is a summary of how each type of online media and their roles can be defined.

Start by creating an ecosystem of your owned media — all of the channels you create and control. There are fully-owned media (like your Website) and there are partially-owned media (like your YouTube channel, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter accounts). Owned media should create a broad brand footprint. Once your core communications are in place, marketers can extend your brand’s presence beyond your Website so that that same messaging exists in many places across the web — specifically through social media sites and niche communities.

Earned media is a result of brand behavior. Earned media is an old marketing term that essentially meant getting your brand into free media rather than having to pay for it through advertising. However the term has evolved into the transparent and viral word-of-mouth created through social media interactions. Brands need to learn how to listen and respond to both the good (positive, organic) and bad (spurned), as well as consider when to try and stimulate this type of media through word-of-mouth marketing, seeding and outreach.

The good news is that paid media is not dead, but has evolved into a catalyst for campaigns to have longer lives. Advertisers are forever predicting the end of paid media. However, that prediction is always premature, as no other type of media can guarantee the immediacy and scale that paid media can. Superbowl spots will receive record-breaking prices for 30-second slots this year again, guaranteed. However, paid media is shifting away from the foundation of brand marketing strategies, and is evolving into an accelerant needed at key periods in a campaign to drive engagement and to support owned and earned ecosystems.

Ultimately these types of media work best in concert, but making the hard choices of what to devote resources to and what not to is crucial, especially when budgets are tight. However, if you simply start by categorizing your media and identifying the right roles based on your objectives, then you’re halfway there.

Video SEO 911

Aside from delivering the message in person, no vehicle is as direct or compelling as a well-conceived, well-made video. And viewers are much more likely to watch and engage with a video than they are to read … anything.

But it’s all well and good to create great video content for the Web, but if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear/see it, does it make a noise? On the Internet, the answer to this question is a resounding, “No!”

So what’s a content producer to do? This post contains a few pointers on how to drive an audience to your hard-fought efforts.

Video SEO is a new and developing art and science. So, where to begin?

As filmmakers, we recommend starting with compelling content. Hire a script writer, and tell a great story!

Next we recommend producing high-quality content, created with and by professionals. Real camera people, real audio engineers, real editors. Professionals who do this every day for a living.

Then, upload your video to YouTube. YouTube is a beast, but because the #1 search engine, Google, owns the #2 search engine, YouTube, video producers who seek a Web audience are obligated to add their content to YouTube.

If you don’t already have a YouTube “channel,” create one. They make it easy to get going. Fleshing out your YouTube channel will require some additional efforts.

Google cannot “see” the content of your video. So, using Google metrics, determine which keywords will work best to promote you video. Embed those targeted keywords on your YouTube channel.

Write a script and upload that into the transcript section of YouTube. This will help Google at least “hear” your content.

We also recommend using Google AdSense to create contextual call-to-action banners to play over your video content. Drive audiences to your videos and then drive them to action.

Next, add your video to Vimeo. In addition to YouTube, Google also crawls other video sites, such as Vimeo, for video content.

Embed your YouTube and Vimeo videos on your Website, and surround that video content with contextual rich media including those same keywords used above.

If you have the resources, generate a video sitemap for your Website. Google provides step-by-step instructions in the Webmaster section of their site to create this code.

Spread the word! Promote and embed links to your videos on all the relevant social media outlets you have access to and time for. This will help increase the search ranking of your video.

And if your ultimate goal is to live stream your awesome content using a cloud-based service like DaCast, these SEO strategies can also work well bundled together. Producers can promote live streaming and pay-per-stream broadcast events, leveraging all of the techniques above. DaCast differentiates its streaming services by offering a white-label presentation platform for its subscribers, and allows producers to monetize their content through an embedded merchant account.

Successful efforts to produce, drive traffic and then monetize all of your video communications will pay dividends.

A special shout-out thanks to Andrew Shotland who runs a great local SEO company in Pleasanton, CA.

Contact an experienced video production company who serves the San Francisco Bay Area!

YouTube Users

YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing network, has confirmed that it has passed two billion regular users, putting it on par with its social media rivals. One out of every two people on the internet visits YouTube.

YouTube reported that the top 100 Ad Age brands all use the site to run campaigns. This shows the power of the platform for advertisers, amid lingering concerns over the effectiveness of Facebook advertising.

The site has seen huge growth in demand for its service on smartphones, helping to boost the user numbers.

HP Networking

Shooting for HP Networking at their Executive Briefing Center in Palo Alto on Sand Hill Road. We shot with two Mark IIIs for interviews and b-roll. And, in the middle of our shoot who should walk through our set but none other than Meg Whitman.

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