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Video Tip: Add a video wall to your website.
Hello, What a fabulous weekend. It's still a bit crisp here in the North East of the U.S. but a fine weekend none the less. My son Harrison (15) played in a lacrosse tournament in Maryland and the missus and I went down to watch. The team ended up 1-1 for the event but the bonding that they did will last a good long time. As a freshman on the team, Harrison got his head shaved! Ah, traditions! Speaking of traditions, we celebrated Easter and had a few too many candies. Harrison and I went to see "300" - now we get into the VIDEO part of this newsletter! If you haven't seen 300, go tonight (Note: it's R rated). If you enjoy movies and you are at all interested in Green Screen and Chroma Key technology, you must see this film. The effects, while very stylized, were simply seamless and amazing. Plus the best part of the movie was that the story line was very inspiring - live free, fight to protect that. As a guess, and based on some production stills I have seen, I'd say over 75% of the film was done using green/blue screen. Why is chroma key technology a huge part of film making and videography these days? It's easy, it's cheap, and it's effective. Filmmakers like flexibility and shooting green/blue screen gives you control over the foreground and background. I'm currently editing a sales piece for an investment training firm. The salesman was shot on green screen and I'm compositing him over various backgrounds. The art director can easily change his mind and replace the background at will. As an added bonus, the same footage can be put over a different background when the website changes. Speaking of chroma keying, I have imported a software product called Composite Lab Pro and it's available in the Products section of the website. With Ultra costing $499 (if you can find it) and AfterEffects costing $599, this application, at $125 for members, is a must have. You can have a look here: http://www.askmrvideo.com/products/item7.cfm Composite Lab Pro is available in PC and Mac versions and is a boxed product. Amazing tools are cropping up everywhere on the web these days. I just added a video wall to the website. With a few clicks, I had a video wall that's customizable to my area of interest. This tool scours the net for video and displays it as a grid of screens. Clicking on any screen takes you to that video instantly. You can see my implementation here: http://www.askmrvideo.com/public/department48.cfm The service is called blinkx.com and is simply amazing. As I mentioned, you can customize the feed for your specific niche area of interest. How's THAT for fun? Important Note: I am so grateful for all you subscribers to this newsletter and also for all the members of AskMrVideo.com. The community is really helpful and there are some major launches being discussed and trade secrets given away on the forum. I really appreciate the attitude of helpfulness that is present there. I'm happy to say that the charter membership drive has been a huge success. But as with all good things, it must come to a close. At the end of this month, the charter membership drive will officially end. The Good News: Everyone on this list will continue to get prime video tips, each and every Monday. The Bad News: There will be an initial sign up fee and the weekly video tip archive will be available only to paid members. You'll still get access to each tip for a week but once the week passes, that tip will be available to members only. The Solution: If you join now, you will lock in the lowest rate available, for life. Your rate will never go up and you'll never pay a sign up fee. Got friends who would benefit from the info on AskMrVideo.com? Forward this email to them and you can save them some money (and gain some points!). Is it worth it? Here's what members are saying about AskMrVideo.com: "It's stuff like this that makes this place one of my favorite stops on the WWW Superhighway. Thanks Perry." - skydiver "Getting my monies worth here with all the questions I have :-)" - adaum "I had no idea about Amazon S3. Just finding out about this service is easily worth my first month's fee to this site (at least)! Thanks Perry." - stupub If you have found the weekly tips of any value at all, I believe you will appreciate the content, community and support that are available as a full member. OK, that's it for my "pitch" but I had to alert you all to the changes that are coming. Again, if you have friends that would benefit from these tips, forward this message to them. The Video Tip Archive is still available to all for the rest of the month here: http://www.askmrvideo.com/public/department27.cfm I encourage you to print them out for your future use. That's it till next week. Drop me a line if you have any video or marketing questions. You can email me directly at perry(-at-)askmrvideo(-dot-)com. All the best, Perry |