Web Video For Businesses

Your Recording Setup Depending on what your audio-visual sales concept is, you may or may not use the information in this chapter. But many of the best audio-visual concepts do involve video recording, even if it's just a quick product demonstration or a testimonial clip tucked into the midsection of your sales page. So even if you don't think you'll use this information with your current page, it's not a bad idea to quickly browse this information anyway. If nothing else, you may get a few good ideas for a more elaborate direct sales site in the future.

Cameras: Dos and Don'ts In order to really translate your idea into a video presentation that you can work with, you'll need to make sure your camera is equipped with a few vital functions, and you'll need to make sure and avoid a few common errors for first-time camera buyers. Above all: make sure that your camera has a jack for an external microphone. We talked about the reasons for this in the last chapter--you need to avoid capturing humming feedback from the camera itself, you need to make sure you can record strong directional audio--but it's important enough to repeat here. Having an external mic jack frees you from dependence on whatever equipment you start with and lets you record audio in a variety of situations. It also--and maybe more importantly--ensures that you don't have to record and synchronize your audio separately, in the editing room. Anyone with painful experience editing video and audio together will appreciate the ability to avoid this extra step.