Tools For Your Video Career
Very few would argue with the statement that video is hot right now. From the cultural phenomenon of YouTube, through to the rise of live streaming services, money is pouring into startups from content creators through to service providers. Getting into video isn’t as easy as setting up a blog, so here’s some advice of which direction to head in.
The basics
Obviously you’ll need a camera to get started in video; if you’re a Mac user you might have a cam built in, but if not web cam’s are fairly cheap. Alternatively people like Chris Pirillo stream from a professional video camera, but even a second hand older model can also work, for both live and recorded shows to computer. For camera effects, CamTwist for the Mac is free and fully featured with effects such as text, clocks, image overlays, Picture in Picture, and much more. Fix8 (our coverage here) offers cartoon style overlays if animation or funny faces are more your thing.
Recording
You’ll have two ways of recording a video: local or to the web. Local could directly on to a camcorder through to Quicktime or something in-between. Quicktime Pro (between $30-$45) does the recording and it’s a quick and easy solution. To the web means recording your video directly to a website; the advantages are that you don’t have to upload it and it’s available immediately, however depending on your internet connection the recording quality can be significantly poorer than recording a video locally and uploading it. YouTube offers the direct recording option and is an obvious candidate, but the Live streaming services also allow you to record to their services and even distribute your video out to sites like YouTube later. I’ve also found that the quality of the live stream services can often be higher in recording than YouTube.
Streaming Live
Live in the newest sector in online video with venture capital being spread around a range of services. Live offers some advantages over doing recorded video alone (although they are not mutually exclusive); streaming live means you can interact with and network with your audience while creating archive footage than can be distributed later. Companies in this space include Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, Mogulus, BlogTV, Stickam and others. All of the services have strengths and weaknesses and you should explore each one, but if you haven’t got time for that I’d recommend Justin.tv or Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is attracting the professional, higher quality streaming shows so if you want to be in that space, you’ll be well positioned. Their tool set including full video conversion makes for a solid product. Justin.tv has a slant towards a younger, Gen Y audience, and if you’re pitching more to that audience it’s the better place to be. I also found when testing both that Justin.tv was more reliable for streaming quality from outside of the United States, and at times Ustream.tv was unusable for me, even on a 14mb down, 1mb up ADSL2 connection; you wouldn’t experience this in the US however. Of the others, Mogulus has a stronger emphasis on professional video and doesn’t have the strong community yet, BlogTV has a lot of potential, and Stickam seems to be dominated by soft porn, at least when I visited it.
Distribution
I asked Chris Pirillo for some tips for this post and one of his key points was simply: “you must understand that (a) It’s all about YouTube, and (b) It’s all about YouTube.” Like it or not YouTube dominates online video today more than Google dominates search in the 
United States. Other video bloggers I’ve spoken to suggest distribution to many sites, but always making sure YouTube is top of the list. TubeMogul is one the oldest of the video distribution sites, and is simple to use and free. You upload your video to their servers, enter you user name and password for a list of sites (first time only) then press the button and off they go. TubeMogul also tracks traffic statistics from each site so you can see which videos are being watched there. An alternative service is Hey!Spread (our review here).
The other consideration in distribution is getting your video onto other devices, like iPods. The key is to provide the correct file type and feed for services such as iTunes. You can do it manually with a WordPress plugin and by making sure the file is available on your server in the correct format, or you can use Blip.tv.
We’ve covered the occasional content deal on Blip.tv but we’ve never seriously looked at their distribution platform, and it’s the reason shows like Rocketboom, Mahalo Daily and Moblogic are using Blip.tv. On top of the obvious video hosting everyone in this space provides, Blip.tv also offers distribution to external blogs (including an automatic option), the Internet Archive, de.licio.us (links), Flickr (pics from the video), Adobe Media Player, MySpace, Twitter (text alerts), Facebook, Yahoo Video, AOL Video, Akimbo, Lycos Mix, MeeVee, MeFeedia, Meebo, Blinkx, Splashcast, Pando and the most important one of all: iTunes. Blip.tv offers an iTunes subscription feed and file conversion service; users do have to manually go to the dashboard within Blip.tv and request the file conversion on a free account, but with a premium account ($8/ mth or $80/ yr) get the conversion done automatically. A premium account also has other benefits, such as priority file transcoding that in my testing made it the quickest service available (that is time from when the video was uploaded until it was ready to view).
There was an argument between Ze Frank and Rocketboom a year or two back where Ze Frank disputed Rocketboom’s viewer numbers as they were reporting 10x the traffic of Ze’s The Show. The key to Rocketboom’s success has always been distribution, and for a long time you couldn’t open a media player without seeing Rocketboom pre-loaded. Distribution is key, and combining services like TubeMogul and Blip.tv make it a lot easier.
Content
Chris Pirillo told me that the key is to make sure every video has something different, and that you should use supportive text with each video posted as Google loves text. Ultimately what you decide to create is up to you: it may be something simple like a web cam chat, or you may want to get more creative. We cant tell you what will work for you, but the easiest way to start is to get on YouTube and just see what different people are doing, you’re sure to find something to inspire you.
用户不需要“视频评论”的五个理由
视讯网 4月26日消息 昨天在视讯网的文章里看到“Seesmic的Wordpress插件支持视频评论”，我个人认为，用户根本不需要“视频评论”功能，理由如下：
第一，“视频评论”无法快速阅读
我们知道，很多文章的评论只需要用户“扫描式”阅读即可，而视频在这方面的表现绝对不如文字。假如一篇文章有很多个评论，用户是不可能花太多的时间在视频评论上面的，因为如果一个文字评论你可以用10秒钟看完的话，那么视频评论你至少要用45秒钟才可以看完。
第二，垃圾评论很难鉴别
正因为“视频评论”无法快速扫描式阅读，所以每一个评论用户必须从头到尾全看完才能知道是不是垃圾评论，或者是广告、文不对题的无意义评论，这将浪费太多的时间；而且，对于网站管理员来说，垃圾评论的处理将是一个天大的难题。
第三，“视频评论”制作门槛高
这点不用多说，没有几个用户会为了一篇文章去专门制作一个“视频评论”，除非特殊情况，我相信大部分文章是没有这个必要的，更何况，制作“视频评论”并不是一个简单的事情。
第四，无法给“视频评论”加超链接
超链接的作用每个用户都知道，而“视频评论”在这方面却做不到！当然，你可以选择在“视频评论”里大声重复你的超链接网址，但你能想像的出阅读者当时的心情，简直糟透了。
第五，“视频评论”导致页面载入时间增长
如果你乐意等的话，可以留下来阅读“视频评论”，但我相信，没有几个用户会这么做。要知道，无论网站管理者使用什么样的播放插件，都将会增加页面的载入时间。
结论：
“视频评论”相对来说是一个新生事物，所以它今后的发展如何我们还很难下定论，毕竟“存在就是合理的”，有些情况下“视频评论”还是相当不错的应用，比如，某某名人或某某权威的“视频评论”，对用户来说还是相当有阅读诱惑力的。
这里有一份到目前为止（作者发稿时）的投票结果，投票还正在进行中：
-
Skype to me