What is Reddit's opinion of Wistia?

She is wearing foundation, mascara, nude lipstick. Hair is professionally done, the eyebrows too.

Make up is probably used to make around the eyes redder, and the under eye circles.

If you are on tv, you wear makeup, your clothes and hair are professionally styled.

It isn't to say most actors aren't beautiful when they aren't wearing makeup. But that beauty is subtly enhanced by the use of natural looking makeup, because TV is really unforgiving of any error. Everyone is going to get a close up on your face, and with HD, any glare, redness or apparent pore is going to look ugly.

Another use of makeup is to make you look like the part of the role you are playing. Here the hair style, and eye makeup is used to fabricate a look (a bit distressed). It could be used to make her look like she is a mechanic or a classy business woman, like she is radiant or just cried...

http://wistia.com/blog/looking-great-on-camera-part-iii-15-hair-and-makeup-tips

http://www.cybercollege.com/makeup.htm

There are three principal reasons professional XLR mic jacks are preferable to consumer 3.5mm mic inputs.

I. Balanced XLR versus unbalanced 3.5mm

If you plan to put your mic on a boom and run a long cable (here is why you would want to do that), you should avoid mics with "unbalanced" 3.5mm output, such as the Rode Videomic Pro (VMP).

Unbalanced output from consumer mics is subject to Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) over long cable runs.

The 3 pin XLR output from a real pro mic, on the other hand, would be balanced - reducing susceptibility to RFI and noise.

II. Pro XLR microphone performance

A typical pro shotgun mic (such as the Azden SGM-250) will give you better performance than an amateur 3.5mm mic such as the Rode VMP, e.g.:

20-20,000 Hz frequency response (compared to the VMP's 40-20,000 Hz)
77 dB of signal to noise (compared to the VMP's 74 dB)

High end XLR mics are even better than the Azden.

III. Phantom power

Many pro cameras provide 48V of power through their XLR jacks. This allows you to power your mic and your camera from the same source (for pro camcorders and cinema cameras this usually means large V-mount or Anton-Bauer batteries) - and eliminates the self-noise generated by microphone batteries. If you look at the specs for microphones offering both battery and phantom power, you will see that they are quieter when powered through the XLR jack.

Bottom line: 3.5mm inputs are unbalanced and cannot provide 48V phantom power. To make things worse, even the best 3.5mm mics aren't that good. If you want decent in-camera sound, you want a camera with an XLR input.

Hope this is helpful!

A landing page should have only ONE goal. In this case, it's to get someone to fill out that form on the right-hand side.

That means you need to remove all other distractions on the page. This includes: the header menu (home, about us, etc) and the entire footer navigation.

Here's a great example:

https://wistia.com/account/signup

Notice they have only one goal -- to get you to sign up.

Everything else that's typically on their website (http://wistia.com/) is removed.

I like the length. Shorter videos will keep people's attention. Shorter, more specific videos, rather than one long video, will get people watching what they need to watch, rather than waiting through a longer video.

Wistia suggests to make 5 videos, not 1

What I personally would love to see, is a board game review series with a modicum of production value. I'm an assistant editor, and animation major, and while there are tons of things I am still learning about production, I'd love to see someone at least try, especially given the nature of how much easier it is becoming to film on a budget.

Far too many reviewers tend to point the camera at their face and "Go" without takes.

http://wistia.com/learning/sent-from-my-iphone

What I'm mainly against is the static shot and awful audio that seems to be a staple of board game reviews. You don't need to film with a 1000 dollar DSLR to make a decent video anymore.

Also? Get in on the board game! Too many videos establish this four to five foot distance to encompass the whole board and so many board game makers develop really cool miniatures. Also it would change the pacing of the action.

When I'm vaguely curious about a genre of games, I look for various reviews. Dice Tower is the most obvious, Wil Wheaton's show to me hardly counts as a "play through" show and mixes elements well enough.

Edit - Also, for the love of god, do not let in the friend that you think is funny and if he/she makes it in, do not let them riff. Too many videos are guilty of having these guys who just produce horrible eye rolls. Edit out the good dialogue, write the rest.

The other replies here are good suggestions, but everyone is suggesting new lenses. Personally for someone starting out I would suggest crawling craigslist or KEH for some used nikon or super-takumar lenses. You'd have to buy an adaptor ring but even with this you can get two or three solid lenses for the cost of one new one.

There would be no automatic/electronic components meaning you would have to do everything manually, but if you are interested in getting into cinematography this is good as it forces you to learn how lenses work and what looks best.

Audio is best recorded separately, but in a pinch having a mic that attaches to your camera is better than nothing. I would suggest a Rode Videomic as they can be used with a small external recorder or your new camera.

Lighting equipment is expensive, but a DIY set can provide great results on a budget. Some wax paper, PVC, and work lights from Home Depot can look good if used correctly.

I say this with love: Your landing page video is fucking terrible. The narrator opens by saying "they say it is easy. they say a lot of things". What's easy? Who says it is easy? Who the fuck are they saying that to? Then it shows someone online googling "how to edit a post on wordpress" and declares "Sidekick helps you get things done online". This seriously made me think sidekick was a collection of how-to guides for sites throughout the internet. But after the video it seems this is for website owners to provide support/tutorials to their users? (Maybe?) If so then why the hell is the video targeted at the users instead of the owners? Are my site users going to be paying you? I might be the dumbest person ever, but I still don't know what you do. "Help yourself or your customers learn and use WordPress more effectively". Now I'm really confused. Is this a wordpress thing? Why is your site littered with wordpress mentions? "Create interactive, voice-guided Walkthroughs for any website". I'd probably change "any" to "your"?

EDIT: Also, you make this post and you don't even include a link to your site or the article. You might want to switch your video from youtube to Wistia to get fantastic analytics. If you did, you could see where I clicked on your video and how I went back and forth trying to figure out wth is going on. :)

If you ever plan to put your mic on a boom and run a long cable (here is why you would want to do that), you should avoid consumer mics with "unbalanced" 3.5mm output, such as the Rode Videomic "Pro" (VMP).

Unbalanced output from consumer mics is subject to Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) over long cable runs.

The 3 pin XLR output from a real pro mic, on the other hand, would be balanced - reducing susceptibility to RFI and noise.

In addition, a pro shotgun mic (such as the Rode NTG-2) will give you better performance than the Rode VMP, e.g.:

20-20,000 Hz frequency response (compared to the VMP's 40-20,000 Hz)
76 dB of signal to noise (compared to the VMP's 74 dB)

If you're plugging the NTG-2 directly into your camera, you will also need a $22.95 Hosa XLR to 3.5mm line matching transformer/adapter to match the mic's low "Z" XLR output to the camera's high "Z" 3.5mm input.

You might also want to do some reading. I recommend you download a $15.99 copy of Ric Viers' <em>Location Sound Bible</em>. It will save you a lot of time and headaches on the set and in post.

Hope this is helpful, good luck on your shoot and best of the holidays!

You might want to consider green photographic paper instead of stands, crossbars and unwieldy sheets of muslin, as seen in this video from Wistia:

Background paper will give you a lot more bang for your buck than a standard green screen kit.

Hope this is helpful and good luck!

I wouldn't collect emails in the store..it's too late. You need to collect them online and the best way to do that is to produce really good content and promote it.
What is the problem that your customers have? How to choose a comfortable mattress? What to do with their old mattress? How to choose a mattress if partners prefer different types of mattress (hard / soft)? Produce some content that addresses your users' problems and capture leads from it.
Check out tools like sumome for capturing emails on a blog and I like Wistia if you have the budget to produce some basic in-store videos with how to guides. With Wistia you can gate your videos (ask for the email before the user watches it) or ask for the email after they finish watching it.
Suggestion: offer a discount code for in-store purchases that they will receive via email if they provide their email. That should see a high conversion ratio. Squarespace is a good CMS that you should look into when you convert all your stores to one site. It's got a great blogging system and supports shopify.

You might want to consider green photographic paper instead of paint, as seen in this video from Wistia.

Here is what you will need [Referral Links]:

Hope this is helpful and good luck!

If you're going to get the Rode, you might want to consider getting one with a boom for $170. It will cost a few dollars more, but it will be worth it.

Here is why you want to use a boom.

By getting the mic closer to your actors'/talent's voices, you will improve your sound quality significantly.

Hope this is helpful and good luck with your films!

> Why did you go up to 77mm? Is it because 77mm is cheaper?

I chose 77mm because it was as large as my largest lens. Step up rings are easy. Buying a filter to fit each of my lenses would have been expensive.

> Is it good enough to stand in until I get a good mic in a while?

Yes - but please watch this video to see why internal mics are to be avoided.

Best of the New Year!

Did you get that html from the raw html, or is that from an actual browser with javascript executed? I believe that is one way of wistia to embed videos in a site. An example from that page is

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "link to another website"? Do you want to embed the video in another web page, or do you want to be able to send a direct link to the video?

Awesome, I was looking for a cheap video host and now I'll be able to use them for my local business - for free! 25 gb is enough for what I need. FYI, it's about 3500 plays of 30s -1 minute videos, which should be about the length of an explainer video.

See here: http://wistia.com/pricing/bandwidth_predictor

You really just need to get close enough that your voice keeps the microphone from seeking for quieter sounds. Essentially boosting your vocals higher above the noise floor so it drowns the background sounds out. The auto volume will probably cause some weird pulsing if you get your voice louder too since it'll turn the gain up and down on its own. You'd want to turn that off and find a good level to leave it at.

This video does a pretty good job of showing what happens and has some advice on what to use. http://wistia.com/learning/choosing-a-microphone

You're essentially using the Zoom like he's using the built-in camera mic at the beginning of the video.

A good rule of thumb for autoplay video is to use it only when it aligns with the viewer's expectations. If a person clicks a video thumbnail link in an email campaign, or clicks a thumbnail image on your website to launch a video in a lightbox, they expect the video to play. To them, the thumbnail image is equivalent to the play button. In those cases, not using autoplay would mean folks would feel like they're clicking play twice, which is a bit redundant, and a crappy experience.

I can't say for sure how Google looks upon that since I'm not Larry page (or if it'll even index at content within a lightbox/in an iframe, since it's not quite on your page), but from a UX perspective autoplay seems pretty darn appropriate here.

Full disclosure: I work at Wistia. We advise customers not to use popover embeds (aka lightbox embeds) if SEO is a priority.

I think this is a great video – but the audio has room for improvement. You may risk losing the attention of people who are too lazy to read the text on screen. Adding an engaging voiceover here could help get your message across more effectively. Then people can sit back and learn, without doing any work to absorb the information.

Shameless plug: Wistia (the company I work for) can show you how people are engaging with your video, which can be more useful than just seeing how many plays it gets (and definitely more useful than the subjective opinions you'll get from goofs like me!)

Really?

"On an average day when we were drafting this post, we found that in the top ten most popular YouTube videos, the shortest was 42 seconds, and the longest was 9 minutes and 15 seconds.

The best video length for your purposes

Here’s what we think about the best length for different videos on YouTube:

Favor short videos. If you can make it shorter and make all the same points, do so.
Make sure to start off energized, and get the important stuff in. Your audience will start to disappear over the length of your video. Wistia reported thatfor a video of 4-5 minutes, fewer than 60% of your viewers will still be with you–against 75% for a 1-2 minute video."

I have around 42% and my videos are 4-5 minutes long. As it is mentioned, it depends on the length of your video.

Here is a nice graph to give you an idea. http://cdn.verticalmeasures.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/How-long-should-your-video-be-stats-on-video-length.jpg

This article is also really helpful. http://wistia.com/library/understanding-audience-retention

Hi! I was wondering if someone could give me some advise. My brother wants to make some video's for his company and he is not sure which camera to buy. He says he wants the same quality as this video http://wistia.com/blog/becoming-a-community-manager (scroll down a little bit to see the video) . He was thinking of buying a canon 5D mark III, but now he's wondering whether he can't achieve the same quality with a lower budget camera such as the canon 7D mark II or even the canon 70D.

What do you guys think? Would the quality be okay when using a cheaper version or is the 5D a requirement? Also maybe he's just overlooking some great camera's that he doesn't know of?

Thanks in advance :)

Interesting... Lets assume that people are more likely to bail on watching a long video some support here there would be a length 'sweetspot' long enough that they watch fair bit of it and short enough that they don't bail

I don't think pumping out two 15min videos would be as profitable as six 5min videos...

Try Wistia, the likely source for any question. The page will have a complicated title you'll have to decipher, like...

Wistia and MailChimp

Try using your Captain Obvious decoder ring to crack this code!

At first glance, your site doesn't say much to me. If I wanted one of your products, there's nothing that would stop me from buying, but your site doesn't say anything to me. It says nothing about your culture, your values or your personality (implicitly, not explicitly). People aren't rational decision makers -- we make our decisions based on emotions, including who we like. There's not much that would get me to like you can come back again. You'll have a tough time competing on anything other than price (assuming your competition has access to the same products as you, or similar quality products).

Compare that to a site like http://wistia.com. I see a lot of faces there, and their videos allows me to get to know their company. I see a sizeable team and it garners trust. Even showing their dog gets me to know them a little better. Of course they still need a rockstar product for me to buy, but there's an emotional aspect of the purchase as well.

Here's the Wistia lighting guide which has a ton of options depending on your budget. You might want to look at an even more diy friendly post here.

To piggyback off the other comment, I would start with investing in lighting, mic (maybe something like an Antlion for a cheap initial option), and using you smartphone. You can get some good results with high-end smartphones these days, as long as lighting is on point. Then save up for a better recording device. Lighting and good audio are key for this style in my opinion, more so than 4k video quality.

Wistia has some good tips on how to get decent video on a limited budget: http://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone

We use Follow for competitive analysis. You can see where your competitor's ads run, their display and text ads as well as their landing pages.

YouTube pre-roll are a great choice if you just want to showcase the video itself.

I personally would use a static image on display networks and send traffic to a hybrid landing page. This strategy would allow you to use both video and text on your landing page.

This way you can include additional information and calls to action. Keep in mind, that users are not always able to watch a video in a work environment.

We really like Wistia for hosting. The metrics they supply will tell you how long the video is watched and if the video is started over. You can also embed calls to action within the video itself.

I prefer a hybrid VSL with autoplay on and sound off. Keep in mind that if they are surfing the web while at work, they will quickly bounce if they start blasting your video's sound.

I would also host the video on both YouTube and Wistia. Use the Wistia video on your site. You get an incredible amount of analytics and visitors won't bounce from your site to cat videos.

I'm an Android user myself and it would largely depend on the type of iPhone you have. My guess is is that you have the phone on the top setting; it's just that iPhones weren't meant for professional recordings.

I did find this resource for you. http://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone

Happy recording!

It sounds like you don't have a lot of funds, but you can still up your lighting game for pretty cheap.

http://wistia.com/library/down-and-dirty-lighting-kit

You doing all the work alone and being every character in the video explains a little bit some of the creative choices. I'm a little surprised that you can't get at least one person to help out though. Have you tried your school's AV Club or even something like craigslist? You'd be surprised at how many people just want to do projects and learn.

As for the story. When you do things based in reality, like a card game, it's much more distracting when you make it so "wrong." Like for me, instead of being engaged and enjoying your music, I spent the entire time thinking to myself that "this looks more like poker, but no one holds cards like that."

Wistia.com, a commercial video host and alternative to Youtube/Vimeo recently redid their homepage using background video and they released a how-to, as well as a "Labs" feature that automatically crops/positions the embedded video to a container.

It may not be the "best" way to implement video, but it's certainly the easiest.

Wistia's Post: http://wistia.com/blog/fullscreen-video-homepage

Comment from Wistia regarding A/B testing results: http://wistia.com/blog/fullscreen-video-homepage#comment-1602512788

Wistia's Crop/Fill Labs Feature: http://wistia.com/labs/crop-fill/

No problem! I've linked this video before - Make 5 videos, not 1 - from Wistia. Really short and to the point and it'll give you a good idea about how to break up the idea.

The lighting needs to change. Sound & talent is good!

Have a look at this link for some lighting tips. You can do this on the cheap with some lights from Home Hardware. It will make a WORLD of difference to your video.

You should use AmazonS3 + Cloudfront. A CDN is only helpful if you have visitors from around the world. When your visitors are only from the US, AmazonS3 is enough.

About the prices, Wistia has a bandwidth calculator: http://wistia.com/pricing/bandwidth_predictor But these numbers are really theoretical so calculating them upfront is kinda difficult.

By the way, if you will be hosting the videos yourself.. I've made a tutorial on how to encode videos for HTML5 so that every browser plays them: html5video.me

How does your product differ from Wistia? I have not used them as a vendor, but I have been a consumer of Wistia-hosted videos. I am under the impression that Wistia has the best analytics around for how the videos are being viewed.

There's no point in traffic if it's people who ultimately aren't going to stick around. Wistia is a startup with a method of building an audience rather than thinking in terms of the traditional marketing funnel resonates with me for its sustainability. (e.g., mission based marketing & beyond funnel vision.

I think it's helpful to get eyes on it sooner than later because then you learn about what to build, and you can do this while building an audience. Though this might very well be different for building physical products with less flexibility for change.

Given that the url for embedding an iframe is something like

http://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/479268413a

You probably can send the video by replacing the last part of the url with the id you removed.

The <div> method used above is using their Javascript Player API to show the video. I suggest you use the simpler method of embedding an iframe, which would look something like this

into your HTML.

I should point out that after a long day of research http://wistia.com seems to be almost what I need. It's quite a bit more expensive than Vimeo but seems to offer the simplicity and freedom I want.

I will also be checking out clowdy.com, as suggested.

Yea, you're essentially creating two pages about the same thing which would compete against each other in search. You might think that it's better to be in two places than one, but it doesn't fit into any well-defined strategy, especially when talking about organic traffic.

You might release a video on Vimeo Pro (or Wistia) first, because you have access to a lot of features like lead gen and no advertising, and then after you generate the leads or links you are going for, syndicate it on YouTube. It really depends.

Here's some good info, especially the comments, that should point you in the right direction. Nearly everything I know of Video SEO has come from Phil Nottingham and the content he has produced across Distilled and Moz, he knows his stuff. As mentioned, if you're providing something educational and have a tiny platform, then YT might be the best path.

First thing's first, don't use mysql_, it's an old method of connecting to MySQL that has a number of major flaws and will be removed from PHP in the nearish future, but unfortunately a lot of online tutorials are outdated and recommend it. Change all your MySQL functions over to PDO (now, before you do anything else): http://www.sitepoint.com/migrate-from-the-mysql-extension-to-pdo/ (skip down to the "Basic Querying" section).

About the video thing, like I said, you need to figure out how to display whatever videos you have inside of a web page, the sample code I provided was to demonstrate how to get PHP to load the URL for you from the database, not how to show a video on a page. Try searching for things like "html mkv video" if you have MKV's, or "html flv video" if they're flv's.

Keep in mind that hosting videos on your own server is generally not recommended. When you launch your website, if you only have one server (and that's what you'll have at a beginner level), your website will get very slow very fast. (100 users watching videos on your side at the same time will probably bring it all the way down, depending on the type of video).

Generally what people do is upload the videos to Vimeo, YouTube, or a paid service like Wista, then store those URL's in their database and use PHP to generate the appropriate Embed code for a given page. So for something like YouTube, your code will be the standard video code from the "Embed" tab on a random video, but with the URL embedded in PHP:

If you don't want to spend a lot of money you can try out this kind of DIY lighting kit: http://wistia.com/blog/your-first-lighting-kit

Or if you don't want to make your own since you are under a time crunch you could buy one of those sets you mentioned. I am personally waiting until I can save up enough money for Alien Bee's flash units (http://www.paulcbuff.com/alienbees.php)

I think you can do a lot with continuous lighting and it is less expensive/easier to learn by just using a key and a fill light to fill in shadows. Flash is kind of intimidating at first so if you are in a rush, I wouldn't try that just yet.

I've done some acceptable product photography with white seamless paper, natural light from a large window and reflectors.

If I may offer one last thought before heading to sleep (it's pretty late here), it would be to think of everyone who comes to your website as a potential audience member, not just a potential customer. Your audience, regardless of whether they pay you in money, will pay you in referrals if you produce interesting, informative content. Your audience will build upon itself over time, and every time you produce more content, your distribution potential will be larger than it was before.

TL;DR: Write more blog posts (and maybe make some videos!) that people will want to share.

What is Reddit's opinion of Wistia?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

➔ Wistia website

By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:

42 reviews of this app found across Reddit:

The best video length for your purposes

What is Reddit's opinion of Wistia? From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

➔ Wistia website

By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:

42 reviews of this app found across Reddit:

The best video length for your purposes

What is Reddit's opinion of Wistia?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments