Camcorderinfo Blog: Your Source for Producing and Marketing Online Video

I started by compiling a list of the video search tools I had seen other bloggers recommending.  Next I created a list of specific videos I wanted each tool to look for.  I asked each tool to look for each video using search terms that worked well on the service that hosted that video.

 Following is a listing of the five videos I was looking for, the search terms I used, and an explanation of what I was looking for:

• Doraemon Happy Meal McDonald's - A Japanese McDonald's commercial I found on YouTube.

• IBM and the Future of Movies - An episode of one of the best- known corporate video podcasts. Hosted on IBM’s servers.

• Joe Devlin, Rick Prelinger explains - An interview I posted a few days ago on Google Video for this blog.

• San Francisco Urban Iditarod - A fake sled dog video I posted as a test almost two years ago on several on-line sites. Six months ago it showed up on the front page of the official SF Urban Iditarod MySpace page.

• Battlestar Galactica, The Road Less Traveled - An episode of a popular TV show that can be viewed off Hulu.com and AOL Video.

My rating for each search engine (1 star for each correct hit of my five test videos.)

SPECIALIZED VIDEO SEARCH ENGINES
(These are supposed to crawl the web looking specifically for all sorts of video content)

Truveo                        *  *  *  *  *
Truveo found all five of the videos I searched for right away and presented the results so that each video could be played with a click of the mouse. It also provided lots of different ways to search (i.e. top ranked, most viewed, most viewed today, most recent, most relevant, etc.)

AOL Video                  *  *  *  *  *
http://video.aol.com/video-search
Results of this search looks almost identical to a Truveo search. This is no surprise since Truveo powers the AOL Video search these days. Going throug AOL provides a smaller selection of search choices than a pure Truveo search, so maybe the correct ranking should be four and half stars.

Blinkx                          *  *
A big disappointment. Blinkx gets mentioned by a lot of bloggers as their favorite video search tool. It found my Google Video/ Prelinger video and the right Battlestar Galactica show on Hulu.com. It also found 890 McDonald's videos using my search criteria and 83,000 IBM videos, but in each case the specific video I was looking for was not listed in the top 20 selections.

SearchforVideo          *
Lets you sort by date or relevance but produced awful results. The only one of the searches it completed correctly was for my Prelinger interview. Unfortunately the first result for the Prelinger search was "G Unit Rapper Lil Scrappy explains his blonde hair phase..." My Video was the 31st video listed. One star may be too high a rating.

Fooooo                        *  *
A Japanese video search engine ported to English, Russian, Chinese and French about a year ago. It found the two videos hosted on YouTube but nothing else.

SEARCH TOOLS BUILD INTO AGGREGATION SERVICES
(Video search tools built into video hosting or aggregation sites)

YouTube                       *
I know, I know, YouTube hosts the lions share of web video and can find everything it hosts. But the built-in search engine does a terrible job finding anything not hosted on YouTube. It found the YouTube McDonald's commercial, but from what my tests show nothing else. It did not even find the video hosted on sister site, Google Video.

iTunes                           * 
I love iTunes, but I find that the iTunes search tools get harder to use with each new release. The iTunes podcast directory search tool found the IBM video podcast, but I know the service well. I suspect most people would not even find that. The main iTunes search tool found some older episodes of Battlestar Galactica, but new episodes of the show have moved to Hulu.com and AOL video and were not listed in iTunes.

Google Video Search   *  *  *
The search engine built into Google Video did a better job than the YouTube search engine. It found the two videos hosted on Google Video and the McDonald's video hosted on sister site YouTube. It found promos for the TV show, but not the episode itself.

Hulu.com                       *
If you haven't tried Hulu.com you are missing a great free video on demand service. Hulu  offers free streaming video of more than 400 TV shows and movies, primarily from NBC and FOX and affiliated cable networks (USA Network, Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, G4, and Oxygen). The video it offers is also much higher resolution than found on YouTube. On the other hand, the built-in search engine only finds Hulu content (such as the Battlestar Galactica show I was looking for.)  Hence the low rating as a general purpose video search engine.

GENERAL SEARCH TOOLS
Google                            *  *  *  *  *
Almost a year ago I was meeting with a client, a large publisher of video podcasts. I advised him to pay closer attention to what Google was revealing about his podcasts. "Joe you just don't get it" he told me. "Google does not index podcasts".

"Not entirely true" I told him. "Google has got some skunk projects that are starting to look closely at video feeds. More importantly Google crawls almost every website. If you are offering video that is fed from an Internet landing page or if you include show notes about a video on the web,  your casts are going to be found by Google." He argued I was being dense until I asked him to do Google search on one of his episodes.

"See" he beamed at me "look at the terrible results Google is providing. It has found all this old screwed up material we fixed long ago and lots of comments critical of my podcasts. I don't want anyone to see any of this stuff!."

"And what are they seeing when they do a Google search" I asked.
"Oh" he said and spend the next hour yelling at his webmaster.

It is certainly true that a plain vanilla Google search does not provide as good a video search as Truveo does. Yes, Google found every video I asked it to find, but it also returned lots of other related info.   If you run a business that uses on-line video, you need to keep tabs on what sort of results straight Google searches produce.  If you are looking for video and only video, you are probably better off using Truveo. The interface is streamlined for video and it provides a variety of search criteria not available in a straight Google search.

Looking for sponsorship for your videos? Videorix is a site designed to help video creators find sponsorship for their online videos.  The site has a decent amount of advertising opportunities for video makers. You can browse through the advertising options on the site, pick an advertiser and submit a proposal. If approved you get the sponsors ad to put as a pre-roll at the beginning of your video, and you get paid.

The process is pretty easy, and could be a great way to earn some cash, and find some people willing to pay to advertise on your videos.  The site is still in beta right now, so you also may run into some kinks along the way.

Have any of you tried Videorix? How do you find advertisers for your videos?

According to Mediaweek, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has introduced a set of guidelines this week that are designed to standardize online-video advertising the guidelines cover three online video formats: interruptive video spots, non-linear ads, and companion ads.

The guidelines were created by the IAB’s Digital Video Committee, which has 145 leading media companies including big names like Yahoo and Google. The guidelines which are suggestions rather than rules, cover things like low long ads should be, what files size, color, and bit rate. You can read more about the guidelines in the Mediaweek article here.

For those of you that create online ads how do you feel about the new guidelines?

[via WillVideoForFood]

I was thinking about how to include this list in a blog post when I read a news story about Nielsen (the big market research company best known for tracking our television viewing habits) which has just launched a new service to help companies keep an eye what you and I are doing. OK let me be more accurate here -- Nielsen Online is building a consulting group to help advertisers manage their reputations on the Web -- specifically in user-generated content environments.  Proof that big brother is now watching over you. Makes you feel important doesn't it?

Seriously, social media is becoming an important tool in the business world. Companies need people who understand the blogosphere, understand YouTube, Facebook, viral videos, social media and the like. Turns out that all the stuff you have been doing for fun may actually lead to something. 

I figured that Rick Prelinger, the head of the Prelinger Archives and Prelinger Library, would be a great guy to interview about the repercussions of the newly drafted Orphan Works Act (see our last post about its creation for details).  Rick knew even more about the subject than I had hoped. Turns out that he, Brewster Kahle (the founder of the Internet Archive) and their lawyer Lawrence Lessig (a Stanford law professor and founder of the Creative Commons) are the three people who have done the most to push this new law into existence. They started the ball rolling when they sued the U.S.  Attorney General to fix a US copyright system that has recently become, in Lessig's words, "The most inefficient property system designed by man".  For details about why this is so take a look at this video created by Lessig to explain the problem.   

Why Rick Prelinger likes the new Orphan Works Act

Jehane Noujaim  is a well-known Egyptian/American documentary filmmaker who believes that moving images can be used to bring the world together. Two years ago she won a $100,000 TED prize providing her with the seed money to help her realize her vision. Since that time her organization, the Pangea committee, has reviewed more than 2,500 films sent in by amateur and professional film makers living in 102 countries. The committee weaned this pile of submissions down to 24 favorite short films that will all be screened during a four-hour marathon film festival on May 10. 

Live versions of the festival will be screened at thousands of venues all over the world. If you like, check the Pangea website to see if there any seats still available at a big screen near you. You can also catch the program on some cable stations or mobile phones.  I suspect however that most of the audience for Pangea Day will be hunkered down in front of their computer  enjoying the event by themselves or with a gathering of friends and family.

To see a list of the films that will be screened, find a local venue, sign up to host your own neighborhood viewing party, or for info on how to experience the event on TV, cell phone or the Internet, check out the Pangea website.

It looks to be a very moving experience.

Always wanted to be in a music video? Now’s your chance.

Zach Braff (from Scrubs) is directing a music video for singer/songwriter Jay Clifford. The idea behind the video is to get fans to record themselves lip synching to Jay’s song “Know when to Walk Away” and then mix the fan submissions in with Jay's performance of the song. You can download the song for free off the site and check out the official rules.

This is a great way to try your hand at shooting a music video if you’ve never given it a whirl before, and could earn you a spot in a real music video. It's an interesting idea- to bring in user-generated content to make a video. What are your thoughts on the idea?

CinemaTech just took a look at three websites that are designed to help filmmakers raise money online. They only looked at sites that were open for anyone to use to get funding which narrowed the discussion down a bit. The three sites they talked about were IndieGoGo, ArtistShare, and IndieMaverick. You can check out the article here.

The internet is certainly changing the way filmmakers raise money for their films. On the positive side a lot of these sites take a lot of the legwork out of finding people to fund you, and allow the option of having lots of smaller investors rather than just a few big shots. It seems like it might be harder to convince the masses to give you a small amount of money rather than a few big shots to give you a substantial amount of it. Have any of you used an internet site to fund a film? What was your experience?

Nokia just signed a deal with Spike Lee to do a short film for cell phones. The idea behind the film is to have Lee use some user-generated content that has been shot on cell phones, and then to put together a film that has three 5-minute parts. In talking about the project Lee said “Within five years, new movies will be made with devices like these.”

Do you think that’s actually the case? Sure movies are starting to skew more digital than film. The release of the RED camera is adding a whole new level of quality to digital video and making it possible to shoot some pretty amazing stuff digitally….but cell phones in 5 years? Really? Truth be told I was shocked and amazed Spike Lee signed up for this project in the first place, much less made a comment like that about it.

While I can see mass online quality videos being shot with cell phones in 2013 (probably MUCH better than what we would classify as web quality now) I can’t imagine seeing a Blockbuster shot on a video camera from a cell phone. Can you?

I like to do trade show interviews with a tripod and a wired or wireless mike. I can't stand shaky shots of video screens or listening to the din of the crowd in the background. Apparently this puts me in the minority.  The only other guy I saw with a tripod was Brian Shields the Online News Manager and roving camera guy for KRON 4, one of the local news stations in the Bay area.   Everybody else I saw was using a hand-held camera and an on camera mic.  The one exception was Robert Scoble, uber blogger and new managing Director of Fast Company TV.  One of  Robert's specialties is capturing and posting instant show floor discussions.  He captures these on his Nokia N95 cell phone and posts them immediately using qik.com. 

I am currently working on a couple posts about the many different styles that can be used to capture events.  Love to hear your thoughts about equipment you recommend and your preferred way to go about capturing video from a conference or show floor. In the mean time, check out the results of these different styles of show floor recording.

•   Brian Shields of KRON 4 used a Sony HD camera, tripod and wireless mic to interview a variety of luminaries at the Web 2.0 Expo

•  Robert Scoble, the influential video podcaster and blogger at Fast Company likes to do live posts of interviews he captures with his cell phone.

• The official Blogger Lounge at the Web 2.0 Expo came equipped with a couple of chairs, good  lighting, microphones and a tripod mounted camera that produced great looking and sounding video. 
  

Last week I spent a few days roving the halls and filming interviews at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.   The place was swarming with  camera people grabbing interviews.  The equipment we used to capture interviews varied considerably.   In fact, the only constant I could find was that none of us bothered to get a signed release from anyone we interviewed.  Are releases too old school, or is it just that news capture is a special case?

I always recommend that business clients get a release for any interview they capture and plan to put on the net.  The bigger the company, the deeper that company’s pockets, the greater the likelihood that sooner or later you will get sued by a disgruntled ex-employee or business partner. 

Can a good release really prevent lawsuits from happening?  Consider the case of the arch comedy Borat about a fictional Kazakhstani journalist. There is no question that some of the people who appeared on the film were way too drunk to be considered competent when they signed the releases they were given.  Best as I can tell, it didn’t make a difference. None of the lawsuits made it very far.  If a good release can protect producers who create outrageous scenarios to trick drunken buffoons into singing "throw the Jew down the well" on camera they can probably cover most legitimate uses of web video.    

Lets face it, iTunes exists primarily to help Apple sell music, movies, and iPods. Yes Apple did a great job loading up the service with free content in the first couple of releases to build market share. Now that it has that market share, finding and downloading the free content is becoming much more difficult. 

Adobe's Media Player takes an entirely different, and much more business friendly, approach. So far, all of the content provided by Adobe TV (the on-line channel associated with the player) is free.  Adobe plans to make money by helping companies brand their video and/or to embed advertising within the content.  The Media Player is based around a new programming environment (AIR) which gives content providers a great deal of control over the look and feel of both the video and the player.  Adobe will also provide much more complete tracking info than you can get from iTunes or YouTube. For example, Adobe can tell you when a user has watched a whole video or cut off watching half way through.  Adobe will also work with content providers to help them embed and get paid for advertising.  

If you want your video to be seen by a lot of people, submit it to iTunes or YouTube.  If you want more control over the look and feel of that content, or want to embed advertising and track the demographics of who is watching your videos you might want to talk to Adobe.

Be warned the Adobe Player has a very different (and much more flexible) interface than iTunes.  Spend some time with this DVR influenced interface and you may like it.  To find the tutorials click on the CATALOG button on the opening page and then type in the name of the application you want to learn about in the search bar.   The screen on the right shows a few of the 21 free tutorials that are offered on the subject of  "Using Photoshop with Video".  Many of these were already available on the Adobe website, but Adobe TV brings them all together in one easy to search centralized repository.  Enjoy.