Information Sells

You’ve heard the statistics by now: If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous country in the world, behind only China and India Facebook had over 40 Million users in January, 2010 Facebook users are glued to the site and spending more and more hours there every month (up 10% just from [...]

Tags: facebbok, fan page, social media

If you do anything on the web, sooner or later you are going to need a place to store files. You may want to host photos for your eBay auctions without having to worry that the service you use will suddenly go out of business or raise prices. Or you may want to add video [...]

Tags: amazon cloudfront, amazon s3, storage, streaming video

Sony has an amazing upgrade deal on Vegas Pro 9 – you can upgrade any version of Vegas Pro or any version of Movie Studio to Vegas Pro 9 for only $149.00 You’ll get the full, boxed, retail version, including DVD Architect Pro. This is a must have upgrade if you shoot and edit in High [...]

Tags: Software, sony vegas, upgrade, video editing

If your videos will be mostly software demonstrations and tutorials, you may need nothing more than a copy of Camtasia. However, if you plan on making live action videos, even if only for You Tube, you will be adding complexity to your project. You will certainly need additional hardware, including camera, lights, and a microphone, [...]

Tags: camcorder, canon, flip, You Tube

Making videos of any kind – whether Camtasia training screencasts, video for You Tube, flash videos for your own web site or blog, or How to DVDs for sale on Amazon – can be dauntingly difficult if you don’t know where to begin. But don’t despair. Although video production is full of unfamiliar jargon and [...]

Tags: Camtasia, info product, screencasting

You Tube has introduced a raft of changes in the last few months. Most have led to better looking videos. Today, MakeUseOf.com posted a cheat sheet of URL tricks that will allow you to take advantage of this improved video resolution when when you embed videos on your own site or blog. We’ve mentioned some of [...]

Tags: You Tube

Today, March 31, Give Away of the Day has the SoThink Flash Video Encoder for free. If you want to host your own videos on your blog or web site – rather than rely on YouTube – you need to be able to produce those videos as Flash. It is the most universally recognized web [...]

Tags: flash, give away of the day, sothink

Google has just released Google Earth 5, which, like most Google products, is free. Most of the images created with Google Earth are also free to use in your projects (get permission before using them commercially -  a few are copyrighted). This is a great tool for information product producers. With Google Earth 5, you [...]

Do you wish you could create green screen effects? You know the ones – everything from Superman flying over Metropolis to a weatherman standing in front of a local map as cold fronts swirl into view. It’s easy, if you have the right tools. The secret to greenscreen (also known as chromakey) video is two [...]

Tags: chromakey, green screen

Why do even smart eBay sellers forget everything they know about selling when they turn to video? Whenever I do a video workshop, I am struck by the number of sellers who say something like, “Video is OK for cars, but I’m selling used blue jeans. Why on earth would I use video? What is [...]

There’s nothing like a swooping high to low shot to add excitement and professionalism to a video. Hollywood film makers use cranes for these shots – which, of course, are far outside the budget of most independent videographers. Many professional videographers use a less expensive tool known as a jib, but even these can still [...]

Tags: crane, jib, tilt

Do you want to look like Pixar without spending millions? Here’s a neat effect you can do for free. You’ve probably seen TV commercials or films where live actors appear to be cartoons. It’s a fun effect, and can even be quite artistic in the right hands. A 2007 Sundance Festival selection, Year of the [...]

Tags: cartoonr, newbluefx, sony movie studio, special effects

Back in the paleolithic era of the internet, all web pages were static. In time, animated GIFs appeared, proliferated, then faded away. Banners flashed, hamsters danced, babies burbled. Some of these innovations were amusing, some annoying – but all were constrained by the limited download speeds of the average user’s modem and the immense size [...]

Tags: embed, flash, Video, You Tube

The secret to better Flip Videos is already on your computer – and you may not even know it! Chances are you already own everything you need to make professional Flip videos. Windows Movie Maker, a powerful yet easy to use video editing program, is included with every copy of Windows XP and Windows Vista. [...]

Tags: cindy shebley, flip, video editing, windows movie maker, You Tube

When you are taking videos with the Flip – or, really, with any camera or camcorder – avoid the digital zoom. Better cameras will be equipped with an optical zoom. This is an entirely different creature. An optical zoom extends the focal length of the lens. The number of pixels in the image will not [...]

Tags: cindy shebley, flip. digital zoom