Streaming Video Tips

You’ve seen the results of streaming video that is poorly prepared for the Web: starting and stopping, jerky motion, bad resolution, etc. Though your video may look great when you watch it on your own computer, that won’t necessarily translate well when you deliver it to other over the Internet. So no matter what you plan to use your video for, if you expect people to watch it online, you need to follow certain guidelines. Below are a number of hints to help.

1) Make Your Video Short

Seems simple, doesn’t it? But this may well be the most vital tip of all, for a number of reasons. First, most people won’t stick around for a long video. And it doesn’t matter how great it is if your viewer’s “bug out” half way through. Second, the longer your clip, the more encoding, streaming, and bandwidth problems you’ll run into along the way. If you feel like you really have to run a longer clip in order to get your point across, consider breaking it up into several shorter clips.

2) Avoid Excessive Camera Movement

If possible, use a tripod to hold the camera. If you must move the camera while shooting, keep that movement slow and even. Not only will your video look better in general, but it will also compress more effectively for the Web. Why? Every portion of your clip that does NOT change frame-to-frame eases the strain on your compression program, and results in a smoother looking video.

3) Keep the Background Simple

A corollary to #2, this means that the plainer and less complex your background is, the smoother the final product will be. Complicated backgrounds, especially those that involve patterns like stripes or other geometric imagery, cause problems for full-sized video; this is exaggerated when compressed and reduced to a small size for streaming video on the Web. So avoid blinds, wall paper, art, and other unnecessary graphics in your background. A simple flat wall, or photo backdrop — accentuated with a color gel, if needed — will highlight your main image, and keep the “interference” to a minimum.

4) Stay Close

Remember that your video will be shown at a relatively small size on someone’s monitor. Fill the frame with the image that needs to be there, and “crop out” anything unnecessary surrounding it. For instance, if what’s important is to see someone speaking, then capture their head and shoulders, and make them as large as possible in the frame. To make your main image even clearer, pull back with the camera, but use the zoom feature to increase your main subject’s size. This will throw the background out of focus, which makes the foreground stand out more, as well has helping in the compression process.

5) Watch the Lighting

There’s a reason why lighting directors are so critical to films and TV shows. Good lighting can make or break the look of video. While you may not be able to have a high-priced pro lighting director on your shoot, the one thing you should do is to keep your lighting on the “bright” side. Bright lighting will lower the grain of your video, and make the final compressed version a lot clearer. You may have to experiment a bit to find the right balance: lighting bright enough to make your image clear, but not so bright that everything looks “blown out.”