For today’s installment of the Crafting an MBA video challenge, we’re forgoing a video in favor of some link love. Here are some resources to help you take your videos to the next level:
Video Equipment
When you’re just starting out, the best thing you can do is use what you’ve got. But if you get really interested in video, you may want to upgrade your equipment. If you’re looking to buy new, I recommend B&H Photo Video in New York City. (You can shop online too.) You can also scour craigslist for great used equipment.
Audio + Music
When it comes to adding music to your videos, you can’t just use any song from your iTunes playlist. Instead you’ll want to find music that is licensed for use under Creative Commons. A few sites worth checking out:
Creative Commons also has a list of other sources on their website.
If you’re working in iMovie, the audio editing capabilities are pretty limited. Audacity is a free sound-editor that you can use to make your music perfect before dropping it into iMovie.
Screen Sharing + Slideshows
An easy way to make video even if you’re camera shy is to do some screen capture recording. I use iShowU HD (available for the Mac) and I’ve also heard a lot of good things about Screenr.
You can also create video slideshows just using your photography, text, and great music. Animoto is an online software that lets you easily create video slideshows with music. Or, you can always drag and drop images into iMovie (or whatever video software you’re using). And, both Powerpoint and Keynote let you create movies of your slide presentations.
Advanced Video
Video Converter for Mac lets you convert your videos into pretty much any format – including those optimized for the iPhone and iPad. Two other features that I think are really great are the ability to pull audio and still photography from your videos.
Inspiration
If you’re serious about making video work for your biz, then you should always be looking at other video to get inspired. Devour and Abduzeedo both share great videos daily. And of course, don’t forget to check out YouTube to see what other people are doing.
Getting Help for Your Videos
When I launched the video challenge, many of you were probably thinking, “great, one more thing for my business that I don’t have time to do!” Well, just like any other aspect of your business, you can have someone else help with your video. From editing the footage you shoot to full on videography and production, you can hire someone to help make your videos great. I send all my raw video footage to Tim of Auman Video Productions to be edited. (And no, that name isn’t a coincidence. He’s my brother – who just happens to have studied digital media and film in college and now works as a professional video guy.) And as I delve into video more, he’ll be working on larger productions for me as well.
Hopefully, these resources help you make your videos great. And don’t forget to upload those videos to YouTube with the tag “craftMBA”.
Magnatune.com also has some pretty good audio. Last I checked, you could use its music in any online video you wanted so long as you paid for the download. I also like using SoundSnap.com for sound effects.
I just picked up a song off of jamendo, and it was perfect for what I needed.
Thanks for the list of resources…I used music from incompetech.com … you might recognize many of the tunes on Youtube 🙂 It can certainly be annoying trying to edit and make your video look professional. It seems very helpful to create all your segments and prep your graphics, everything ready… then you don’t have to do much editing, except stick it all together!