Give us a sense of the landscape out there right now. What percentage of your clients are producing videos for marketing on the web?

It seems that every marketing department of almost every company is clamoring to produce video for the web. At least 70% of the marketing videos we produce are are created to live online. Sometimes these videos are also intended for trade shows and company events, but we always recommend that our clients leverage their video for their website. Not all videos are web-friendly so sometime we re-edit them and produce new graphical elements that will play better for web distribution.

There are many advantages to web-based marketing. For one thing, distribution on the web is free, which is perhaps its biggest selling-point. Secondly, well produced web videos drive a lot of traffic which in turn build customers, brand loyalty and ultimately delivers sales. The fact that anyone and everyone can access a company's website at any time from anywhere makes it a powerful way to distribute videos, not only for marketing, but also for training and education.

Video on the web is huge right now and it's only going to get better and more popular in the coming years.

What is the ideal length of a web-based marketing video?

As web compression gets improves and the down-load times get faster, the ideal length of web videos is expanding. However, people still have a short attention span when it comes to viewing videos online. Viewers are now accustomed to watching short clips on YouTube which usually run under two-minutes. Also, when people are watching video on the web they are in a "surfing mode" and are looking for quick hits of entertainment and information. For that reason we advise our clients not to exceed three and a half minutes in length, ideally closer to two minutes.

Length also, depends on content. People have more patience for entertainment or educational material than for straight-forward marketing. With this in mind, it's necessary to keep web videos concise and highly engaging or you'll loose your audience. In short, the true limiting factor isn't the technology but attention spans.

Are there specific challenges that exist when producing and serving web video?

Up until recently, one of the biggest challenges in producing video for the web was all of the many steps required to prepare it, transcode it, upload it, and test it. The compression software was difficult to comprehend and it was often difficult to know all of the variables in order to optimize the quality. That has all changed in the last year or so. The latest versions of Final Cut Pro and other NLE systems have easy-to-use presets and YouTube employs server-side encoding software that will take just about anything you can upload and make it look decent. As a professional video company we of course are striving for better than that, As a professional video company we of course are striving for better than that, so we typically encode web videos to the industry-standard H.264 format with either Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder. Both produce great looking video with a relatively small file size.

What format do you shoot in for the web?

We produce everything we do in either 4K, 2K or 1920x1080p even if it's ultimately intended for the web. Depending on the job we shoot with either the Red One, our Panasonic 2P card-based Varicam, or if our client is on a tighter budget Sony EX1.

Why shoot in HD if it's just intended for the web which is going to be compressed?

There are several advantages to shooting in a higher resolution format even if it's overkill for the web. One reason is that it gives the editor the possibility to re-size the footage (crop in) without loosing a lot of image quality. Another value in shooting in a 4K, 2K or HD 1920x1080p is that you are future proofing your videos so that when web quality does catch up your videos are already in high quality HD. The other advantage is that you never know when you might need to repurpose that footage for a sale presentation on a larger screen.

What do you think is the future of video on the web?

I think we will see more interactive engagement such as clickable hot spots, 3d manipulation of images, synchronized web page events, sidebar video segments, which will extend the experience of web video viewing beyond the 16:9 frame and onto the web page that surrounds it.

We just produced a video for Adobe about a partnership between Adobe and Wired magazine and the future of electronic publishing. We were blown away by the experience of reading a magazine on the web. You can now have a magazine with embedded videos, web links, sound, and motion graphics all within an magazine article. The fact that you can access all of this from an iPad or other mobile devices makes this a technological development with real staying power.

Another great advantage of video on the Internet is the access to your market with more interesting and valuable analytics now available. As they become more and more sophisticated, we'll be able to tell even more about how groups of viewers react to a video segment, second by second, and relate those reactions to commercial calls to action, such as buying a product, signing up for a cause or casting a vote.

About the Author:

Studio B Films, Inc. is a San Francisco Bay Area video production company specializing in corporate, marketing, sizzle and web viral videos in the San Francisco Bay Area. Studio B Films also provides video production crews or crewing services in SF.http://www.studiobfilms.com/