The truth of the matter is that most professional level NLEs, or non linear editors, do the exact same thing. Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Avid and Sony Vegas will all splice video, add dissolves, titles, and composite several layers of video and audio just fine. So the question is not so much “what’s the best NLE?”, but rather “what’s the best NLE for you?”

The easiest way to determine what NLE works best for you is to simply try them out. Almost all of the NLEs offer a trial version that you can download and test out before buying. I’d recommend doing this and getting a feel for how each of them function, how their graphical user interface works, how they manage the media, how simple tasks are accomplished, etc. Sooner or later you’ll find one that seems to fit your style.

For me, Sony Vegas suits me well. It has a fairly intuitive user interface and isn’t as keyboard based as say Final Cut Pro or Avid, since I’m more of a mouse guy. It also works really well with my Shuttle Express, a job/shuttle controller I use in conjunction with my mouse. I also like Vegas for its powerful set of audio tools. It’s extremely easy to edit audio in Vegas and for me, that’s a necessity when it comes to any NLE.

Now that’s just my personal preference. As I said before, every professional NLE will do the same thing and each carries its own perks. Final Cut Pro and Avid are commonly used in the film industry and considered by many to be the standard. Both NLEs revolve around keyboard shortcuts – in fact, special keyboards containing colored keys are available for serious editors.

Aside from those two, Adobe Premiere is another very solid NLE. Probably one of its greatest strengths, like all other Adobe products, is the ability to easily integrate with other Adobe software titles. For example, you can do some advanced compositing with After Effects, and then export your project and bring it into Premiere without having to render your project out. The ability to work between multiple software tools without the need to render is a tremendous asset to have. This type of integration is typical with all Adobe products and can really save a lot of time and headaches.

Now there are a ga-zillion other NLEs out there, especially for PC. Don’t let anyone tell you that one NLE is the best or better than another. It all comes down to the editor, not the software. Heck, you could make an award winning movie using iMovie. The point here is, download all of the trial versions, try them out and get a feel for which one fits you.

Here’s a few links to get you started:

• Final Cut Pro
• Adobe Premiere
• Avid
• Sony Vegas

Once you find it, you’ve got yourself the best NLE. It’s that simple. Good luck and happy editing!

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Identify the keywords that you believe your target audience would use to search for your product or service.

Look for words and phrases that are the most relevant to your product or service versus how much potential traffic they bring.  For example, the keyword phrase “minnesota lawyers” may be too generic for a Minneapolis law firm that only specializes in criminal law.  A better search engine phrase may be “criminal lawyers Minneapolis,” because it’s more descriptive and relevant to its target audience.

Focus on finding two to three keyword phrases per page of your website’s content.

Below are the most agreed upon approaches by SEO experts to help improve your rankings. Use the keyword phrases you’ve selected as you write your meta tags and website copy.

Meta Tags

• Title Tag- The most critical tag in your website code that tells the search engine what the website/page is about. This is the text that search engine visitors ultimately click on to view your website.  Limit your title tag to 8 words or less.

• Description Meta Tag-  Found underneath your search engine listing and thus people will read or skim it before clicking on your search listing.  This tag is not required by most search engines; however it does improve the likelihood that a potential visitor will click on your listing.  Limit your description to 190 characters and try to repeat your keywords.

Web Copy

• H1 Headers- The top text header before a paragraph of content.  Header tags are typically labeled in the order of hierarchy they are presented in the website.  Therefore a second header in a page is usually labeled as H2, H3, etc.  Use your keywords in the headers.

• Keyword Density- Refers to how frequently the keyword presents itself in a page.  As in the example of the criminal lawyer, consider using the keyword “Minneapolis criminal lawyer” in the web page copy for every hundred words of text.

URL

• URL Structure- Refers to the actual URL address that the web page / website reside.  Purchasing a domain name that has keywords embedded in it like “criminallawyersminneapolismn.com.” may help improve your rankings.   If you wish to keep your company name or domain, you can change your internal URL to reflect your keywords such as: www.mycompanysite.com/minneapolis-criminal-lawyers.html.

Link Popularity

Increasing your website’s link popularity is the second component to the search engine optimization campaign.  I’ve attached the two links below to provide more detail.

Places To Promote Your Website for Free - Part 1

Places To Promote Your Website for Free Part 2

If you are unsure how to deploy these optimization techniques, you may prefer to outsource these services to a firm that specializes in search engine optimization.  As you may have gathered, small changes in optimization strategy can greatly influence the results.  As such, it’s important to find a supplier that upholds the most current optimizing techniques.  To find a highly ethical and reputable provider of SEO, the Better Business Bureau and the SEO Consultants Directory provide easy look-up options.  For more information regarding search engine optimization techniques or best practices, be sure to check out other posts on our online marketing blog.

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Many websites are created in-house by various different employees, which is usually a big mistake.  Just because your administrator took a class in college or plays on the internet a lot does not mean they are capable of creating and designing a workable website that will generate leads and grow your business.

Another common mistake is not putting your contact info on the homepage in the upper right hand corner. Rather they put it down on the bottom of the page or only on the Contact Us page.  The issue with this is that we are all time poor and have no attention spans while surfing the web.  We know what we want and we want to get it in about 30 seconds by searching via Google, Yahoo or MSN.

I have also come across several Brochure sites meaning they are used as a reference only.  A reference only site is not really a working site, but an online brochure that you can direct companies you already have contact with to but does not work well to generate new business.

The last mistake people make is a lack of links.  There are sites that will link to your site and sites you should link yours to.  This adds credibility to your site, making it more resourceful if you have good links, but more importantly, the linking process helps gain relevance for Google, Yahoo and MSN Search algorithms. This will help your site show-up higher in natural or “unpaid” listings in the search results.

So How Do You Make Your Site Fabulous?
A website that works is one that has several different elements incorporated into it.  Everyone knows that your website should look nice and be in keeping with your specific industry and branding, but there a few other things you need to do before your website is fabulous.

• It should be updated every 1 to 2 years depending on your industry.
• The navigation should be easy and clear for your visitors to understand.
• You should always have your contact information (phone #) visible on every page.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) is an element that is more important than any of the other elements.  SEO is what gets your website found by consumers and businesses searching for your product or service.
• Tracking with Google analytics or any other analytics program is an easy way to gauge the growth your company is driving from your site.

By optimizing and building a working website, that incorporates all these elements, you can generate leads online and find your business growing.

Advice: Use a professional web designer/developer to create and launch your website.

Chio –
Lennea Israelson

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Getting that perfect shot right the first time, out in the field, is always going to be better than trying to fix your mistakes later in post production. Plus, it’s going to save you boatloads of time and frustration. Trust me, you’re better off spending more time getting your camera settings correct, than spending hours upon hours in front of a computer monitor, pulling your hair out and wishing you had paid more attention to those zebra stripes!

Now, generally speaking, getting things perfect the first time is something we all aim for. And usually (if you know what you’re doing, and take your time) it’s really not difficult to get the shot you want.  But with that said, sooner or later it’s going to happen – it happens to every videographer at some point. You set your iris, white balance, adjust your focus and shoot your footage. Things look great in your viewfinder and/or LCD display, but when you dump your footage onto your editing suite and review it, things look nothing like what you expected; particularly, the color looks way off. This is one of those few instances where color correction can really shine.

Let’s take a look at some footage I shot a couple months ago.

As you can see, there is an overall orange/warm tone to the footage, even though the subject was well lit and the camera was properly white balanced. More than likely, this color “offset” was caused by the nature of the set (which consisted of tan/gold painted walls) combined with some spill off from the lights. The viewfinder and color LCD screen on my camera does not pick this up.

To correct this, I’m going to bring this footage into my editing software and use its color correction tools to compensate for the color offset.

Here’s what it looks like:

This is the color correction tool found in Sony Vegas, which is what I use to edit my footage. Most editing programs (such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Avid, etc) use a similar set of tools. There are three color wheels here, one for low tones, one for mid tones, and one for high tones. Low tones are generally the darker colors such as darks grays and blacks, while high tones are the brighter colors such as whites and bright yellows. Mid tones are pretty much everything in between.

Since the low tones really aren’t the problem here, I’m going to begin by adjusting the mid tones, which will affect the overall tone of the footage along with most of the skin tone of the subject. I’m going to move the adjuster towards the light blue, which is opposite of the light orange. This will help counter the orange-ish hue of the footage and balance it out.

Here’s what the adjustment looks like.

Not bad, but we can do better! The skin tones still need some slight adjusting, primarily around the areas of the forehead where there are a couple minor hotspots created from the lights.

For this, I’m going to adjust the high tones wheel, bringing the adjuster (again) towards the light blue.

This looks pretty good. But the shot does look a little flat.

To enhance this, I’m going to adjust the brightness and contrast.

I’m going to start by turning the brightness down slightly. Then I’ll increase the contrast just a little to separate the subject from the background. This will give the shot a slightly more three-dimensional look and add a nice final touch.

Here’s what we end up with.

Pretty slick, huh?

As you can see, you don’t need to make huge adjustments to create good results. Once again, I wouldn’t recommend relying on color correction to save your butt. It can be very useful when you don’t have much control over the tone of the shot (such as in this case), but even then you should do everything you can to get the shot as perfect as can be before dipping into post production tools. Remember, garbage in equals garbage out (in most cases.) I tend to use color correction as a last resort since it’s never 100% reliable and can be quite time consuming. This particular shot was a rare case, and I’d say on average, I  use color correction as a “fix” maybe one out of every 10-15 shoots. Most of the time I’ll use color correction merely to enhance a shot and/or give it a certain tone or “feel.” Experiment with the tools you have at your disposal. Learn what each one does and what you can and can’t get away with. Knowing the boundaries is going to really be beneficial both on and offsite and will save you a ton of time. Good luck and happy shooting!

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#1 Branding- Businesses and consumers trust other businesses that have good ratings with the BBB.  The mere act of showing your BBB Accreditation tells other individuals that your company has high ethical standards and Integrity.

#2 Business Resources- the Minnesota BBB offers several luncheons and seminars throughout the year that businesses can attend for a nominal “BBB Member” fee.  Which are typically hosted by well recognized experts in the field and Minnesota’s business community.

#3 Paper and Electronic Advertising- the BBB of Minnesota now offers a new paper and electronic publication entitled the BBB SmartSource that has circulation to over 700,000 households in the state of Minnesota and North Dakota.  In addition, they offer a free ND & MN Business Directory for consumers and businesses so that they can easily locate other BBB accredited businesses.

For more information about how the Better Business Bureau can help your business, check out the below video (produced by TMA E-Marketing) or visit http://www.thefirstbbb.org.

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Web friendly press releases

More people get their news and information about products and services online than ever before. Regularly submitting online press releases is a great way to create news about your business, communicate directly to your consumers and build link popularity for your own site. But to make sure you get the most from your online press release and that it will rank well in the news search engines, it needs to be web friendly and search engine optimized.

Here are a few quick tips for optimizing and writing web friendly press releases:

• Use important keywords that your audience is likely to search for in the title of the press release.

• Repeat those important keywords a few times in the body of your press release, especially in the first paragraph or summary.

• Link those keywords back to your own website, but not just your homepage. You’ll get better link popularity if you can link them to an internal page or landing page that deals specifically with that keyword phase.

• Use images; insert your company logo, photos, video and graphs to show your reader what you’re talking about.

• Structure your press release just like you would any other piece you’d write for the Web with headings, subheadings, bullet points, bold and italics.

The Internet has changed the way we communicate in so many ways and now has even changed how we communicate with press releases. However, it is still important that your press release remains newsworthy. When using online press releases to communicate with your consumer, it can become easy to forget the actual news story and write one long advertisement. This could hurt your credibility and the reach of your release. I hope you find these tips helpful as you begin utilizing online press releases as a way to communicate directly with your consumers.

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Bitrates aren’t the only factor involved with determining quality and file size. The physical dimensions of your outputted video have a direct relationship with the file size. Read that again. This means that a video displayed at 640×480 is going to be much larger in file size than a video displayed at 320×240. Also, a video at 640×480 will require a higher bitrate than a video at 320×240.  This brings up something new to think about. What dimensions should your video be displayed at?  Again, this comes down to a lot of trial and error.

Let’s look at two extreme examples:

1)    A video containing highlights from a football game, recorded in DV (720×480.)
2)    a software tutorial screen captured at 1024×768

First, let’s analyze the football video. We know there’s going to be a ton of movement and motion graphics highlighting the plays. Therefore a high bitrate will be needed. Also, since there will be graphics to highlight the players along with a commentary, displaying the video at large dimensions probably isn’t necessary and by lowering them, we can help decrease the file size. I’d probably aim for 400×300 or 320×240 using square pixels and a bitrate somewhere around 600-900kbps as a starting point.

Second, let’s look at our tutorial video. We’ve got a 15 minute tutorial on using Microsoft Excel containing lots of highly detailed graphics and small text. Since the ability to read the small text and graphics is crucial, shrinking the dimensions of the video isn’t a practical method for keeping the file size down. Our best choice is going to be the bitrate. As a software tutorial, the video contains very minimal movement. Other than some mouse movements, typing and a few scrolls, there isn’t any real motion involved.  I’d start with a bitrate around 900-1000kbps as a starting point and go from there.

So that’s a couple of the extreme scenarios you might face. Regardless of the video content and dimensions, I always try to keep my videos under 5mb per minute. For broadband users, this seems to be very tolerable. Again, play around with the settings and get to know the relationships they have with each other.

Other Tricks

The bitrates and dimensions of your video are your bread and butter for determining the quality and file size of your video. There really isn’t any special tool out there that’s going to magically give your video better quality with a smaller file size. If you’re willing to spend a bunch of bucks, you can buy fancier encoders that can contain some better codecs, but it’s usually very hit or miss. Instead, when I’m stuck with a large video file, I like to trick my audience into thinking it’s a smaller file size. What I mean by this is there are some methods that can be used to make it less painful for your audience to wait while your video downloads.

Before I get into these, keep in mind that I’m speaking about a video that’s embedded in a flash player on a webpage. This does not apply to videos that are downloaded onto the user’s hard drive.

• More than Less - This one is kind of a no-brainer. If you’ve got a very long video, say a tutorial, demonstration or presentation, break it up into sections. If it’s a 60 minute video, try breaking it up into six 10 minute segments or chapters. Most people have an easier time with multiple shorter segments, than one long video. Plus, they will be more inclined to sit through it and can easily jump through the video since it’s in convenient sections.

• The Preload - This one’s my favorite and I use this “trick” all the time. Most flash/player encoding programs have an option to use a “preload movie.” What this does is adds a little graphical progress bar to display as your video loads. Generally, you can set the amount of video to load prior to playing it. For example, when I have a longer video or one that’s very large in size, I’ll set the preload to something like “5%.” This means that when a viewer clicks play (or if the video automatically is set to start), they’ll first see a logo or graphic with a progress bar, stating that the video is loading, and when the video has downloaded/loaded 5%, the video will begin playing. The big benefit here is that now there is a little cushion of video already downloaded so the viewer should be able to watch the entire video smoothly without the play bar catching up and causing the video to halt. I mean, let’s face it. About the most annoying thing that can happen while watching a video is having it stop playing because more of it needs to download! This gives you that insurance without losing your audience.

Last Notes

Some of you may be wondering what specific software and settings I use. Well, while I can’t get too specific (since each project differs), I can give some general settings I use on average. Most of my projects are natively recorded in DV (720×480) and brought into my suite as DV AVI files. My projects are edited in the same format and then rendered out as 640×480 QuickTime .mov files (using square pixels) using the “animation” (or sometimes “photo jpeg”) codec. From here the QuickTime (.mov) file is brought into my flash/player encoding software. I use a program called Camtasia Studio. It’s a program I use for screen capturing and recording tutorials, but it also contains a very nice set of tools for creating and encoding flash videos and players. This is where I set the bitrates and dimensions of my videos as well as the preload (if I decide to use one.)  As an example, a recent project I did resulted in a video that was just over two minutes. The video contains lots of detailed motion graphics with text so I only shrunk the dimensions to 500×375 and set a video bitrate at 900kbps with an audio bitrate of 64kbps. I set a preload of 2%. The result was a high quality product video under 15MB. It’s still a little larger than I’d like, but the size was unavoidable due to the detailed graphics and text, which is why the small preload in front comes in handy. That’s just one example, but hopefully it helps!

As always, I hope these blogs provide some insights and useful information. Again, it’s going to take a lot of trial and error to get familiar with how these settings work. I encourage you to experiment and play with each setting until you know it inside and out. I’d recommend taking several short, 10 seconds clips of various content and toying with the settings. Trust me, you’ll save yourself tons of time in the long run (and make your videos look better too!) Good luck!

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Blogs are great for keeping up on the latest and greatest in the world and can also be beneficial for link building and driving traffic to your website. Regularly posting accurate and interesting subjects to your blog is the key to having a healthy blog life.  Once you create and generate readers you are bound to succeed.

Blogs can be created and utilized by anyone.  If you know how to turn on your computer and search via the engines online you can create a blog.  Very little technical knowledge is needed which is great for small business owners to large business owners or you and your friends.

Here are a few links to some user-friendly, free blog sites to help you get started:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• blog.com
• thoughts.com

If you’re new to the whole blogging craze and just aren’t quite ready for your own blog, you can start by posting on other people’s blogs. Find a blog that’s related to your business in some way, but that’s not a competitor, and start by replying and commenting on its posts.

Remember the most challenging part of a blog is posting creative and accurate information to capture an audience.  If you know who your audience is, what they like and what their interests are, then you are set.  If you are unsure you may want to do a little research or test market your idea’s before you start the posting process.

Turn your business on and start blogging.

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The mere act of “having a website,” doesn’t guarantee success.  But make no mistake about it; the Internet is here to stay; which means that you need to plan your website’s future.

What is Search Engine Fuel?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or search engine fuel is the continual practice of making your website easily found by the search engines and your target audience.

As an online marketing consultant, I’m often asked, “What would I do?”

It’s important to note that your website should never follow what someone else does.  Your personal brand, reach, customer demographic, etc. is unique and therefore your marketing strategy should never be cookie cut.

Marketing your company on the Internet should be viewed no differently than how you have marketed using traditional media.  The only component that has changed is the medium.  For that reason, I’ve found that success with your website can be attributed to two things:

• Sending The Right Message- Clearly communicate, with words and design, how your company will meet your target audience’s needs.  Overall, your site should be equal to or better than your competitors’.
• Receiving The Right Traffic- Use your website to attract qualified sales leads so that your marketing objectives can be met.

Crafting the Message

Features and benefits mean nothing, unless they address the greatest “pain point” of your target audience.  The important thing is to address your target market’s emotional buying motive.  Customers will judge your brand and your company’s strengths and weaknesses from the way it is presented on your website. Here are just a few questions to help focus your efforts:
• How does your company compete?  Better services or products, best price, etc.
• How do you define your target market?  Are they young, middle aged, or senior citizens?
• Do they exhibit similar behavioral traits?
• What should your brand look like to potential buyers?

Driving in the Right Traffic

How do you to get potential customers to visit your website and help you meet your business objectives?  The answer:  A strategic search engine optimized campaign.

There are two components to the campaign:
• A properly search engine optimized website and
• Link popularity (getting related websites to link to your site).

In my next post I’ll discuss these two components in more detail.

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As 2009’s recession sets in, this humorous cartoon depicts one way to make room for your online marketing budget.
 

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