How to Make Cheap Videos That Are Actually Good – And Don’t Tell Anyone I Told You

June 6, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: Video

Video is one of those rare fields that has had a total reboot. It has not been supplanted, replaced, superseded, obsoleted, or died. It flailed for a bit, while the doctors tried to find what about the web made its parents think it was going to die.

But then Dr. House entered, and declared, “Ah-ah! It isn’t dying. It is being reborn!”

And it was reborn, in short pants. Younger, leaner, easier to maintain (not as fussy about it’s baby food) and requiring far fewer oil changes.

Have I mixed enough metaphors?

The new video was born of a demand caused by the Internet, and it wasn’t always called video. Sometimes it was “Powerpoints,” or “Decks”, or “Flash shows”, or “Streaming” video. But those were just designer labels.

Wrangler or Dior, it just doesn’t cost as much to make a video, if you do it right.

You will always pay for brains. The theme. The premise. The strategy. the script.

But when you can get a high-def camera for 250 bucks, and a a damn good editing program for 100 bucks, and a powerhouse computer off-lease at some corporate slag-heap for practically free—- well now all that matters is that you know what to do with all this firepower.

My advice is go to the best video writer / director in town and yell him you know the secret handshake and get him to work on the cheap. He may just be glad to have the business.

But barring that, and assuming your ego wants to be a part of the wonderful world of video, here’s a few ways to produce a perfectly acceptable video on the cheap.

Start by making a slide show. A good slide show has compelling still images, the occasional graphic sequence, and a great soundtrack. The secret sauce is the soundtrack. There are terrific slide show programs available that create incredible moving still image shows that sync precisely to pre-existing soundtracks that output to video and thus create, well, video. They can be uploaded to YouTube, your own hosted site, to a DVD, flash drive, etc.

If you’d like to be working with full motion (more precisely, if you NEED to work with full motion– to show a motion process, to use interviews that MUST be on-camera) there are terrific low-rent video editing programs on both the MAC and PC sides.

For Windows, you can’t go wrong with any of the Sony Vegas Family. These allow you to mix stills, motion, graphics, and create a fully sophisticated soundtrack all within one program.

On the MAC side, Try combining the iLife and iWork products to create a hell of an arsenal. iMovie 9 allows for simple, intuitive editing. By using the presentation program Keynote for graphics and effects and outputting to Quicktime for inclusion in your video edit, you’ve just upped the quality quotient by 10. (Please, please, do not tell any professionals I told this to you.)

The difference between your video and the millions of others put on the web every day is your quality of storytelling and the quality of your execution. Start with simple, good photography and a strong soundtrack, and you’ll be on your way to earning greater respect– and greater response.