New Media Expo

I learned about this expo from a friend and after watching the following video decided it would be a good idea to head up to Vegas…..

If you’re not familiar with that player, it’s Viddler.

The expo was actually a great experience. I got to meet a lot of great great people from a lot of great companies. The ones that really stood out were TubeMogul and Wizzard Media.

Tubemogul is fantastic because for podcasters, content creators, producers, etc. they are a great resource. They have a created a site that acts as an intermediary between users and 20 major video hosting sites. In other words, you upload your video to their site, and they submit it to youtube, Revver, myspace, viddler, break, blip, and many more. They then aggregate all your stats, comments, etc on their site, allowing you to see the full picture of your videos’ success.

Wizzard Media is similar to Veoh. They are a hosting site that has a proprietary player with lots of great functionality. They also work to bring advertisers and content creators together, with specific ads targeted at the right demographic. Since they actually have staffers whose job is specifically to bring producers and advertisers together, the advertising campaigns are much stronger. Recently, they worked with major companies such as Puma.

All in all it was a great experience.

Oh…and I met this girl

By Mike Kirsch, Director of DotLot, The Buddy Group

We don’t need to talk about the future of mobile video; it’s here already and we deal with it every day. Regardless of how much we use the feature, almost everybody’s phone is capable of shooting or displaying video. For a fee, most cell providers now have TV and other content available on demand via cell phones. The debate over what content is most popular for handset viewing is not yet settled, but it is clear at this point that we must be ready to produce video for this platform, regardless of what that video might turn out to be.

The first big challenge when designing video for the mobile platform is to identify what aspect ratio to shoot for. Television is relatively easy; we shot exclusively for 4:3 through the 20th century and then, with the dawn of HD TV we started to choose between 4:3 and 16:9. Web complicated things a bit, but we still tended to create videos in the aspect ratios dictated by our cameras, which means that many web videos are also either 4:3 or 16:9.

With mobile, we get a chance to find new aspect ratios. Two very popular screen resolutions for mobile devices are 240×320 (.75:1) and 176×220 (.8:1). The Apple iPhone has a 480×320 screen (1.5:1) and as other such “many-media” devices hit the market, we’ll see mobile screen sizes increase.[i] In the 2008 market, though, mobile screens tend to have aspect ratios of between .6:1 and .85:1.

Of course, we can take any 4:3 or wider video, slap on some thick letterbox bars and display it on a mobile device, but it would be far more engaging to release content that is formatted to fill mobile screens. This means we need to change some of the more traditional video rules. A .75:1 aspect ratio is taller than it is wide. This aspect ratio lends itself well to medium talking head shots and vertical motion graphic applications. Traditional new-style talking-head-with-graphic-box-over-the-shoulder doesn’t play well in this layout. Look to other options such as lower-thirds or lower-halves for supplementary info. VO also becomes a very useful tool to help back up textual graphics that might be difficult to read on a small screen.

Where the actual content is concerned, many of the same rules that apply to web video hold true here. Close-ups rule on small screens. It’s hard to identify details in big, wide expansive shots. Staying close allows us to draw focus to certain elements that might otherwise go unnoticed. Also, shorter videos play better. People often look for video content on our mobile devices when we’re between other events- on a train for two stops, waiting to board a plane, while walking between classes or even while in the bathroom. It is unlikely that you’re going to hold anyone’s attention for 10-15 minutes on a mobile device. Work on creative that can be absorbed in smaller chunks of no more than 2 minutes.

The next few months and years are going to help define the specifics of mobile video. There seems to be a trend towards bigger phones with more streaming capabilities. Helping us along the way is Adobe’s Device Central. This useful tool, included with CS3, allows an editor to preview videos as they would appear on any of the included device templates. The program allows for the adjustment of many parameters so that you can closely simulate the final output of a video intended for distribution on mobile devices. Keeping the end in mind as we plan projects for mobile platforms will allow us to stay on the forefront of mobile video.
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[i] http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html