Making the "quick tour" video
Marc Palmer
I spent a couple of days making the all-important "quick tour" video for our startup over the last week.
You can see the results here:
http://info.test.noticelocal.com/tour
...but here's what I take away from the experience:
* Screenflow for Mac is excellent for doing this stuff, if a little buggy. It was all put together in that.
* It is very time consuming to get a polished result
* You need to pre-plan what you want to show, and record specific clips to suit each part
* It helps to create some real-sounding people/data to help people identify with it
* Keeping it short while also not too fast for viewers grok is really hard - especially because you have much more understanding of the screens you are showing and editing it is boring
* Keep it light and remember good intro and outro slides
* Vimeo for video hosting/embed is great, has a great customizable player, but even if you pay you're not allowed to use it for "commercial use". This seems fuzzy, and we're still using it for now. Alternatives seem to be Vzaar and Brightcove (much more expensive)
* We chose text slides instead of video narrative, for now at least. It allows us to have some nice music which draws people in, and means we don't need to get a voice actor in yet. Doing it with an in-house voice would IMO sound too unprofessional :)
* You can bet that any UI ugliness/bugs will show up while you're recording. Judicious editing and/or fixing them as you go along is to be expected!
Has anybody else done one of these yet? Any other experiences?
Marc
~ ~ ~
Marc Palmer
Blog > http://www.anyware.co.uk
Twitter > http://twitter.com/wangjammer5
Grails Rocks > http://www.grailsrocks.com
Adrian Hass
Looks really nice! And I think the music makes it really catchy... I
also like those draw on paper, shuffle around intro videos. We did that
for a little toy project a year ago. They have a somewhat nice "the guy
around the corner, who just made this website" appeal.
But it depends on the target audience, so I think the most important
think is the planning and develop some really realistic use cases, where
the specator can just nodd in agreement.
Cheers,
Adrian
P.S.: There is a germany webservice that sounds just like noticelocal:
placeboard.com it is in german, but in case they internationalize you
can add it to your watch list.
Mengu
The video is really good at "how to" by the way.
I have a suggestion, in this page: http://info.test.noticelocal.com/index
there is a "Find out more" link, it would be good if that was linked
to the tour video.
I wish you all the success. Congratulations. :)
gavingc
The video in you're link has no image, just sound for me in Debian 6.0, Iceweasel (Firefox) 3.5.16 with Flash player 10. Other Vimeo videos do play but could just be here.
Here is our intro video:
http://www.youtube.com/user/gnuMims#p/c/21DF8CB1785B2DE1/0/p47CF7vLTfo