/Culture/ Pro video tips for web designers
21/01/2010 | Filed under Discover > Culture
Online video is rapidly taking over the web. Craig Grannell talks to leading designers and developers to find out how to make best use of it on your site
Online video has come a long way. Distant memories of postage stamp-sized, juddering videos seem comical in an age of broadband and YouTube, where video has become just another component of myriad websites. Plummeting software and hardware costs have also largely democratised the process of creating video – today’s online star can be an individual with a camera, an experienced television veteran developing new ideas or striking out on their own in a relatively low-risk manner, or a global corporation whose middle-management has been informed that video is the ‘next big thing’.
As a web designer, it’s easy to be seduced by video. Everything about YouTube excites: masses of content, great usability and oodles of interactivity. And this rubs off, with some designers trying to convince themselves that video is always the best way forward. But, warns Fi’s New York business director Jason Borbet: “Like any other element of web design, video should only be used where it’s the most appropriate medium. Videos should entertain, engage, and explain concepts and stories that are too complex to be expressed through words and static pictures. If someone watches your online video and then wonders what happened to the last 49 seconds of their life, you’ve failed.”
A tall order for success then, but that’s why we’re here to help. The remainder of this feature will take you through the process of creating online video, concluding with a look at what the future may bring.
Planning your video
Like any area of design, planning is essential when creating video, especially considering the potentially high costs involved when using pro-level kit and a crew. “Planning is the cheapest way to make mistakes – you can try out ideas on paper and work out how to get your message across,” suggests SugarSnap’s Simon Burgess. Depending on the project, such planning may involve sketches, a quality script or a detailed storyboard. “The level of preparation also depends on who’s involved,” adds Burgess. “Finding the right approach is vital for conveying the story to a client or your crew and production team.”
Regardless of planning techniques, story is crucial: you must identify what needs to be told and what you want the audience to think. Burgess notes that it often helps if you simplify everything to a few headlines that can be placed at the heart of the communication. The specifics of what you tell will depend on the production, but Nine Four’s Nathan Pitman recommends streamlining content when working on ad-oriented video: “Think of a long video clip as a lengthy passage of text and consider its placement – you wouldn’t dump 3,000 words of copy on your homepage, so don’t put a video ‘epic’ there either. Instead consider breaking your video down into bite-sized chunks.”
For those working in a more character-driven area, Hayden Black of Evil Global Corporation – the company behind online comedies Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s Teen Diary – has a couple of key tips. Along with stressing the paramount importance of compelling characters, he suggests that, unless you’re planning on releasing your video pretty much immediately, you should stay away from topicality: “There’s little worse than a show already past its sell-by date before it premieres.”
It’s also worth noting that, although online video is on its way to becoming mainstream, it’s not there yet. Therefore, as Adam Alexandroni of Outside Line says: “The internet is still seen as the frontier where you can push things further than in more traditional media, and clients are more open to new ideas.” Take advantage of this while there’s still time.
Lights! Camera! Action!
The shoot is often where things go wrong in video, and if raw footage isn’t good enough, no pile of shockingly expensive software will put things right. Beginners make critical mistakes, messing up lighting, forgetting tripods for steady shots, confusing roles and goals and not using the best shots. Ryan Vance, vice president, programming & production at Revision3, says you must always ensure you establish everything: “For example, show the outside of a building before the inside and start with a wide shot before you go in for close-ups – give the big picture before you go in tight.” Black agrees, but cautions that wide shots shouldn’t be too lengthy: “The scope for wide shots is lost on the web and iPhone. In time, when it’s popular for the general public to watch internet content on TVs, there’ll no doubt be a move back to wider shots.”
It’s also important to decide prior to shooting and sourcing equipment what kind of video you’re planning on producing. There’s currently a certain cachet to ‘guerrilla’ video, which Vance argues is down to “people wanting to be taken where they can’t otherwise go, to experience things through other people’s eyes”, citing the explosion in reality television. Some argue that the proliferation of low-quality video and its gradual acceptance in mainstream media (such as mobile phone and YouTube clips being played on television news broadcasts) means image quality isn’t as important as content. “You’ll notice companies intentionally create viral content at a lower quality, to convey a homemade feel,” says Borbet. However, while downsampling is relatively simple to achieve using software, upsampling is not. In other words, shoot low-end video and you can’t later make it look professional if that’s what’s required.
Some also believe that the days of low-quality online video are numbered anyway. “It’s easy for someone to create a video with a mobile phone, but with a website being a shop window, professionally made creative video will yield more positive results,” argues Elemental account director Rachel Hawkes. Burgess agrees: “As the quality of online video gets better and its size increases, the quality of production will become more of a differentiator.” In other words, just because you’re targeting the internet, that doesn’t mean you should drop your standards regarding lighting, sound recording and other aspects of a shoot.
It’s all in the edit
Once you’ve shot your footage, the edit determines what viewers really see. It’s here that you get your audience to focus on specific things and keep them engrossed. In the internet age, this can be difficult. “People’s fingers are itchy and they’re always waiting to click on to something else,” says Airside’s Nat Hunter. “On TV, people will sit and watch rubbish for an hour, but online they’ll click away.”
Because of this, Hunter recommends editing for short attention spans, generally making your videos short and snappy. ATTIK’s Simon Needham agrees: “Online video works best when it’s short, sweet and to the point. The market these days is fast-paced, so the content should be as well. The last thing you want is for a viewer to be bored!” Nevertheless, Vance adds that, although pacing should be fast, it shouldn’t be so rapid that the viewer can’t see what’s being communicated in the shots.
The next major consideration is output, both in terms of format and where your video is likely to be played. As Burgess notes that: “Pictures aren’t a problem when you make them smaller, but text is – what works okay on a DVD or TV won’t necessarily be fine for a movie that’s only 400 pixels wide.” Therefore, don’t lose elements in small details if you’re targeting the smaller screen and consider creating variations on your video if outputting for multiple platforms.
When it’s time to delve into formats and codecs, it seems that H.264 has a vice-like grip, offering the best trade-off between file size and quality, along with it being fully supported by iTunes, iPods, iPhones and many set-top boxes. The type of container to use depends on where a video is being deployed, but Needham believes that Flash Player 9’s huge strides in video have made things easier for developers: “Its support for H.264 enables you to compress video into one format that’s compatible with multiple delivery mechanisms that aren’t restricted to Flash.”
Hosting and deployment
Even with the best compression format, the downside to video is that it’s bandwidth-hungry. This impacts on your next major decision: how and where to host. “You must identify whether to host directly or leverage an existing delivery service such as YouTube,” says Borbet. “People are often devastated to discover the cost of uploading and streaming video. If you don’t have a smart deal in place, one popular video on a user-generated content-based destination can send the best of companies to the kitchen, where they’ll be forced to do dishes for 10 years to pay off their streaming debt.”
Although he avoided such menial tasks, this is largely what Black discovered when the audience for his online comedies exploded. “We began by self-hosting, but within months it was costing too much,” he says.
“We moved to services such as Revver and blip. tv, but despite being free, they have their own problems: poor playback and distracting ads. Our new episodes are available only on the babelgum.com platform, so this isn’t an issue. Looking forward, we’re starting to explore the options that are available for our new series, Cabonauts, including private hosting companies that can deal with huge audiences.”
Even if you’re not expecting the entire world to tune in, it’s important to settle on the best service for the job. As Black notes, the last thing you want is for your audience to be unable to access your material because they won’t keep coming back to try again. On content delivery networks, Revision3 founder David Prager suggests you read the small print: “There are many options, such as Vimeo and YouTube, and each company has its own terms of service, privacy policies, and other variables. The bigger you get, and the more your content’s value increases, the more you’ll want to ensure you retain control of those variables.” With those we spoke to, Akamai seemed to be a popular service, while Revision3’s videos, when downloaded or streamed, come from BitGravity.
As for the actual player, bespoke seems the way to go. Although off-the-shelf components initially speed things up, they don’t provide clean integration with a site’s design, and you can come unstuck should you need to customise or tweak code. With bespoke solutions, you can always recycle code for later projects anyway.
Rights issues
Once your video is online, the thorny issue of rip-offs rears its head. Motion graphics expert Rob Chiu has experience of this, with videos he’s worked on being stolen and used in places he’d not agreed to. Despite having access to good representation that’s been able to sort legal issues, Chiu admits he remains worried about rights infringement, although not enough to compromise his work. “I’m not prepared to ruin films by watermarking them or lowering compression to the point where you’re compromising the viewer’s experience,” he says.
Borbet adds that, legally speaking, things also change rapidly online: “Agencies must make it their business to understand the legal ramifications wrapped around content because laws change daily and each case sets a new precedent. Every Tom, Dick and Harry looks at YouTube and thinks they can create something similar and make a fortune, but they haven’t necessarily heard of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If creating a YouTube was easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only site out there big enough to be purchased by Google, generate tons of traffic and project a half-billion dollar operating loss for 2009!”
More positively, online success can lead to large audiences and a demand for more content. “If you’ve a large library, a branded video channel can be a great way to go,” claims Black. “When you add new videos, it makes sense to channel them through a branded network that will become synonymous with good content.”
Of course, you must still question relevance. Borbet recalls that Skittles “put its neck out there” with the skittles.com video channel, generating tremendous buzz in the process, but its ultimate success is yet to be determined. “Ask yourself whether consumers want access to branded video content,” he says. “I don’t know about you, but my love for candy won’t translate into spending significant time watching Skittles-related videos.”
The future
Video’s going to be ever more important over coming years. Budgets for online video will rise as companies understand online isn’t a poor relation to broadcast and consumers increasingly watch online rather than via traditional means.
The nature of the internet and its being an interactive medium with various kinds of embedded content also provides potential for advancement and evolution. Paul Cripps of Nine Four reckons we’ll increasingly see sites “dispensing with large header graphics, instead choosing subtle videos and overlaying a simple typographic message, thereby adding life to otherwise static web pages”. Elsewhere, designer Martin Cajzer reckons live tagging will become prevalent: “This will enable users to click on items of interest to receive information about them, or access shops where the items are in stock.”
Cajzer also believes static ways of watching videos will diminish, replaced by interactive experiences, and this is an area Odopod has been immersed in. Directors Tim Barber and Damon Nelson explained to us how a combination of video and interactivity is enabling branching narratives, enabling users to have customised interaction with brand characters and storylines. Examples include Nestea, which enables users to control contraptions and test the super-human powers the protagonist believes he has, and whitegoldiswhitegold.com, which provides an interactive music video with unlockable content and simple videogame-like techniques.
Shooting this kind of video is tough. Footage isn’t a static production – it’s instead a system of videos with alternate branches and loops, dynamically assembled on the fly for each individual user. Scripts must be honed and user flows rigorously tested to avoid awkward cuts and continuity issues. However, to draw jaded users further into the waters of online video, Odopod considers this effort worth making.
Chiu leaves us with a final thought – that the importance of web video will soon stretch further than such interactive online experiences, even YouTube, and finally escape from PCs. “Online compression, streaming and quality is now at a point where it makes little difference whether you watch video online or off,” he points out. “One day the web will be TV – and online video will become the only way of watching anything.”
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Comments
Anna / 26/01/2010 / 17:16 / http://www.crearedesign.co.uk
I agree with this post, video is becoming more and more used within in websites. And there are more and more sophisticated ways of it been used popping up all over the place. If you want to stay at the forfront of the design industry get friendly with some video experts... That's my advice!
