Fun With Video and Other Stuff From Friday April 3, 2009

OK, fantastic. Today was a lot of budget hacking and web posting. We hacked over 100K from the budget, which means I will not only be taking out the trash, I will be wearing the bag. And, if you've never done it, you really must lay off your mother-in-law. She took it better than I did.

Part of our problem is the unexpected limp performance of teleconferences. Teleconferences are exactly what we thought people would want since they can't leave their seats. Now, we had some other factors that may be toying with us (more about that later in a post entitled: "How to Hose Your Lists"), but maybe the people left to do the work after all the layoffs just don't have the time for 100 minutes of thigh-slapping legal education. I've heard others are down, but talked to someone else today who's teleconference business was holding up. On the other hand, we had a great one this week with 70 attendees. What a tease! We had another one with 5 if you count the operator. My team makes fun of that fact that I like to call those "recording sessions."

We've been shooting video, which helps our SEO. Our site is young, but we'll probably have 100,000 visitors this year. Not bad given we're in a narrow market. We will have easily double that when you count all the other sites that pick up our content through direct arrangements and press releases. Let's see if I am clever enough to post a video here . . .




Wow. Been here since 4:30 a.m. and still have my wits. Or at least one wit. This is shot with two cameras in high quality, which gets lost when uploaded to YouTube. We're using it to enhance our site and sell the video package. We've already had several orders. This video was shot by GiantAntMedia.com. I highly recommend them. Visit their site not just to see what you can do with talented people and a couple cameras, but to have a little fun.

Here is one shot with less definition, and edited by yours truly, who after he takes out the trash edits video using either Windows Movie Maker or borrows one of his kids' Macs and uses iMovie. He then stops talking about himself in the third person and inserts the video.




Not great. Not bad. But the speaker was intelligent and prepared, so the content makes up for the single-shot look. We worked with a local video guy on that one. He's great to work with and is learning his craft, but the conditions for shooting weren't the best.

Below we completely failed on quality (shot by yet another company), but the content was outstanding and we're selling recordings.



I learned from this that the audio is more important than the video. Fortunately the video is so bad you can't tell the audio was synced up later, but missed by a fraction of a second. It's a bit like watching the English language version of a movie with English dubbed in. It was on this one that I learned the magic of converting PowerPoint slides into Move Maker slides. I have to say that during this process I decided to love Microsoft since stuff works so well together, and it's already on my PC. I love the Mac too, and anyone I come into contact with in the video world insists on it. I've found free programs to convert Mac files into Windows files, but if anyone has one they love, please tell me. My kids never have problems with their Macs and quickly learned movie editing, much to the disappointment of our family chinchilla, Gizmo (below), who's now on YouTube. Speaking of YouTube, I use that for all our promotional clips. It's super easy to use and gives you the flexibility to insert clips like I did in this post.





My daughter, 17, shot that using the camera on her laptop, inserted photos, slides and music, converted it and posted on YouTube between the time I showed her iMovie was on her Mac and sat down at my desk at the office just 5.5 miles away. Next I am going to show her my budget.

OK, enough for today. I need to sweep our PayPal account and go home. PayPal, by the way, was a godsend. Their rates are higher than you'd pay with other merchant account services (anyone may feel free to suggest them), but since we were considered a startup banks would not let us take credit cards. PayPal approved us in 24 hours and not only were we taking credit cards, but creating and customizing buttons for our site. And for a hoot, whenever someone purchases something from us, I get an email notice which I've set to trigger the sound of a cash register, which I downloaded from SoundSnap.com. It's a great site to get any noise you like. Anything from "glass breaking" to "woman vomiting." Hours of fun for the entire family.

Thanks to a truly spirited and willing staff, the lights remain on at HB Litigation Conferences LLC.


Future Posts (this is really here for me more than you): Fun with WordPress, Lexis Web 2.0, Podcasting, Blogging, Creative Madness, and why I hate Comcast, NAPA Auto Parts and Salmon, reprising "Schmoozing With The Masters," and why I drive a car that looks like a wet cough drop.