Making video web friendly

Video on the web is a huge part of the internet experience of today. Being involved in video, I decided that I needed to stay with the times and post my video works online for the world to see. There are a number of struggles faced when publishing video including bandwidth, storage, time, clients, compression…I plan on sharing with you how I faced these struggles and host my weekly vidcast Video Class.

Compression

Editing the video is probably the most important part of experience your audience gets, so ruining the experience with pixellation is something you never want to do…

I use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit Video Class, and to be honest exporting the project for the web from Premiere is terrible. I have never been able to get good quality video compression from Premiere. However using Final Cut Pro is a great alternate for editing and their compression settings are far better than Premiere’s.

If you are stuck with Premiere, export yourself a high quality version of the video and compress using a third-party software.

I use Sorenson Squeeze to compress my video works for the web. Squeeze features eight output formats while allowing the user to choose the settings in each format. I use their MP4 format with their 512K streaming option, however you can customize the compression settings in each format to suit your needs.

Once your settings are tweaked you can hit the SQUEEZE IT button and wait for the compression to finish.

Hello web…

Now that your video is compressed you can upload to your website with your FTP client. I do this first before entering into bigger and better things.

This usually ties up my browser for about 30 minutes, so its a good time to get a snack or go some where.

When you get your video on your website you should integrate it into a page, I do my HTML coding in Nvu, and just add the zamtv banner and a few links around each episode of video class.

Linking to the video is the next step, this is pretty obvious though. Video Class has its on page with the variety of ways to watch it, we’ll get into that further down the road.

Getting it out there…

This is also the most fun part for the producer of the work…getting your work out to a number of sources.

YouTube

Lets start with a popular host, YouTube. I use YouTube because it allows you to upload up to 100 MB video files, as many as you want, and its a great way to find videos. YouTube features thousands of videos and by adding tags you can be found on YouTube as well.

YouTube also allows integration into blogs and websites as well. We get a number of hits on Video Class from people adding the YouTube video code to their blog or MySpace.

Podcasting

If you’re doing video a podcast is a must! Initially when I started Video Class I’d upload the videos to my Podomatic account. Podomatic offers 250 MB of storage and 7.5 GB of monthly bandwidth for podcasters totally free…not bad.

But I’d have to sit there and wait for files to upload on my server, youtube and podomatic…lame.

This isn’t a tutorial on how to podcast, so I won’t get nitty-grittily (hah) into that…but having a site to host your podcast something every video host should do. Integrating RSS adds the lazy group of watchers, who don’t want to have to check for new episodes…its does it for them! Also having a podcast page allows users to comment on your works which adds more integration and an overall more personal feel to your content. But make sure your content is iPod-ready, download the podcast yourself and check it out.

iTunes

When you sign up for a podcast you will be emailed a link from iTunes, when you click this link it opens up iTunes and goes right to your podcast in the music store. By adding this link to your site you score users the direct location of your podcast…do it.

Video Bomb

Publicizing your video is a must. Videobomb.com offers a digg like style site strictly for video content. I add our shows to Video Bomb to share it with their users, I also add a Bomb us link in the zamtv/videoclass page.

Broadcast Machine

I recently stumbled upon a great video organizer, the broadcast machine. I thought I’d give it a try so I added our content to it and made a Video Class channel. After fooling around for a week, I decided to release the BM link on zamtv.

Broadcast machine organizes the content, it adds a description, copyright, RSS, donation buttons, and an overall professional feel.

The best part of all if using the broadcast machine to publish a channel for democracy tv, which is insanely easy.

Und das ist alles

Well there you have it, you now have what it takes to make video happen on your site for a cheap rate…make sure your content is web friendly though!