Internet Video Workshop - Part 1

Siting in front of a webcam or video camera is a hard ask. You have to have good content, a good presentation and good delivery. If you can't deliver continuously for a period of time and have to edit - then don't do a talking head ( ie person in front of camera.) Either do slides, screen capture, pictures and photos with voice over.

Why? Editing talking heads content leads to a choppy video. You can get round that with 2 cameras and switch direction at each edit. This in itself leads to added complications, syncing multiple videos and audio.

There is a lot of pressure with sitting in front of a camera, so don't do it to yourself - yet. The worse scenario is to jump right in, do a bad job and give up saying - this is too hard, I don't like how I look on camera, I don't like how I sound on camera, yada, yada, yada.

So start with the easiest video to do - a single graphic and a voice over. Not the most earth shattering, but remember we are taking baby steps here:

• Write a script
• Record the audio
• Edit the audio
• Create a slide
• Import and edit Audio and slides in video editor
• generate a video file
• register with you tube
• upload video to youtube

Congratulations - you are now a video publisher.

These pages contain a series of tutorials using only free software that is either already on a windows XP system, or that can be downloaded for free. The only initial investment I would advise is to buy a USB headset (microphone and headphones) - to record semi decent audio.

The tools that we will be using during this workshop are

• Windows Moviemaker
• GIMP
• Open Office
• Audacity
• Firefox / IE

Moviemake comes as a standard part of windows xp. GIMP, Openoffice, Audacity and Firefox can all be downloaded from the portable apps project (See Link Below).

Audacity

Audacity is an audio editing program. We will use this with the USB headsets to create, edit and adjust our audio tracks. Audacity works extremely well for this purpose.

Open Office and Gimp

Open Office Impress will be used to create some slides. Impress is a free version Microsoft Powerpoint. Since these tutorials are based on free tools we will use Impress - it goes without saying that all the slides created with Impress can be created with Powerpoint if you own the product.

We will also use GIMP (a free version of Photoshop) to edit the slides. Initially we will use GIMP to create the most simple slide. We will then generate slides in Impress and use GIMP to reformat, crop and edit the slides.

Movie Maker

The windows program movie maker is a simple movie editing program. It is very constrained but will enable us to generate our first video.

Firefox / IE

The firefox and IE browsers will be used to register with youtube and upload the movies.

Uploading to Video Sites

These days, using video, it is possible to get multiple listings on the front page of google. One way to do this is to post videos to multiple sites. This is very time consuming. There are two tools on the market Traffic Geyser and Tube Mogul. Both work on the principle that you upload the video to 1 site, then that host loads to all the sharing sites. Pretty cool and a great time saver.

The portable apps site contains downloads for GIMP, Firefox, Openoffice and Audacity. By downloading these versions, they can be installed to, and run from a USB key. Alternatively the lastest versions of these applications can be downloaded from openoffice.org, gimp.org, audacity.sourceforge.net and firefox.com

Dr David Kyte is an SEO, CMS and Video coach for a small number of clients. He offers SEO and Video workshops.

This workshop will be split into seperate modules:

• Part 2 - Creating your script.
• Part 3 - Recording and editing Audio
• Part 4 - Generating Slides
• Part 5 - Pulling it all together
• Part 6 - Generating Video
• Part 7 - Registering with Youtube
• Part 8 - Uploading and distributing you video

As the modules come live, I will turn the above list into active links. If you would like to be informed when each module becomes live, register on the www.DrKyte.com site.

In the future, we will get slightly more sophisticated and use wordpress as a self managed website. For those that are interested we will

• Create wordpress blog.
• Use wordpress as a Content Management System
• Open a 1shopping cart autoresponder
• creat a landing page
• create and publish some videos
• create an optin page
• buy some PPC
• build a list
• Sign up for some affiliate programs
• Sell something
• Measure
• Then do SEO

If you are impatient, you might like a jump start by getting a wordpress blog. If you need help, register for Sherman Hu's Wordpress tutorials

Talk soon.