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Aside from all the technology, it's crucial to get a solid, professional voice-over that tells a clear story about your product. My personal experience has been

by martian 18y ago

Aside from all the technology, it's crucial to get a solid, professional voice-over that tells a clear story about your product. My personal experience has been that even the best video production can be quickly tarnished by a voice-over that is casual, meandering, or inconsistent. For our demo video, we first sketched out what points we wanted to make in the video, wrote a draft script, then recorded nearly an hour of screen footage. My colleague then spent a couple of days locked in a room with iMovie and a microphone. We ended up with a five minute video that I think really captured what we were trying to do with our product. We used ffmpeg for conversion to mp4+h264 (and a fallback to flv), and the very respectable JW flash video player. I think Snapz Pro X was used for video capture.

rrival 18y ago
We worked with MostlyLisa.com on PriceAdvance.com's video demo (http://www.priceadvance.com/demo_video http://www.priceadvance.com/demo_video) - she did a great job and is up for more work like this I'm sure.
sh1mmer 18y ago
Do you have a link?
- huhtenberg 18y ago
  I'd guess it's http://www.uuorld.com http://www.uuorld.com
DarkShikari 18y ago
Seconding this. Use x264 (or an application that uses it, like ffmpeg) and make yourself an mp4 video that plays in Flash. Having low quality for a product demonstration video simply isn't tolerable--and yet it's amazing how much people tolerate awful quality internet video despite the fact that one doesn't actually need a lot of bandwidth to achieve reasonable quality. JW Player is of course a great tool, and takes literally 30 seconds to set up. My standard toolchain is ( x264 -> rawvideo + faac or NeroAACEnc -> aac audio ) -> mp4box -> mp4 file. For those who are commandline-phobic, there are many GUIs to streamline the process; for example, MeGUI can produce Flash-compatible H.264 video files with x264. Make sure you're using the latest versions of the encoders as well, especially if you're trying to get away with a much more fancy video than the one in the parent--it's better quality and compression for free. Also remember that Flash supports H.264 all the way up to High Profile, so there's no reason not to use all the features. (aside: above video uses a ~2007 version of the encoder, according to my detection tool)
- tomsaffell 18y ago
  See my comments on using .f4v instead of .mp4 here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443542 NB: This comment was made after this thread went dormant. This cross-post is for the benefit of anyone browsing the archives..

by martian 18y ago

rrival 18y ago

We worked with MostlyLisa.com on PriceAdvance.com's video demo (http://www.priceadvance.com/demo_video http://www.priceadvance.com/demo_video) - she did a great job and is up for more work like this I'm sure.

sh1mmer 18y ago

Do you have a link?

huhtenberg 18y ago
I'd guess it's http://www.uuorld.com http://www.uuorld.com

DarkShikari 18y ago

Seconding this. Use x264 (or an application that uses it, like ffmpeg) and make yourself an mp4 video that plays in Flash. Having low quality for a product demonstration video simply isn't tolerable--and yet it's amazing how much people tolerate awful quality internet video despite the fact that one doesn't actually need a lot of bandwidth to achieve reasonable quality. JW Player is of course a great tool, and takes literally 30 seconds to set up. My standard toolchain is ( x264 -> rawvideo + faac or NeroAACEnc -> aac audio ) -> mp4box -> mp4 file. For those who are commandline-phobic, there are many GUIs to streamline the process; for example, MeGUI can produce Flash-compatible H.264 video files with x264. Make sure you're using the latest versions of the encoders as well, especially if you're trying to get away with a much more fancy video than the one in the parent--it's better quality and compression for free. Also remember that Flash supports H.264 all the way up to High Profile, so there's no reason not to use all the features. (aside: above video uses a ~2007 version of the encoder, according to my detection tool)

tomsaffell 18y ago
See my comments on using .f4v instead of .mp4 here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443542 NB: This comment was made after this thread went dormant. This cross-post is for the benefit of anyone browsing the archives..