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Inspiration Videos – 5 Ways to Use Video for Real Estate

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Obviously the last couple of years have been tough for most Realtors and Estate Agents across the globe. In some markets things are picking up slightly, while in others (like Ireland), the market has remained challenging. To help their clients sell properties and to sign up new clients, realtors are looking at new ways of using technology, in particular video. Below, we have listed 5 easy, but innovative ways you can use video to enhance your Real Estate business.

1. Create a Video Tour of your Properties.

Creating a video tour of the property is much easier than you may have imagined. Looking at the video above, they have kept things simple – nice shots of the property with a recorded voiceover. The voiceover means you can write a detailed script and don’t have to worry about your presence front of camera. Be sure you have a tripod (shaky video will just look unprofessional) and that each room is well lit and turned out.

What you’ll need:

• A Microphone to record your voiceover.
• A tripod – see here for a selection of affordable tripods
• A Camcorder - Flip Camcorders and Kodak Zi8 camcorders are available from $120
• trakAxPC – Buy now for $24.95

2. Create a Slideshow Tour of the Property

This option is even quicker – if you are commissioning professional photos of your property, why not make a video slideshow to bring the photos to life. Quickly add some text to highlight some important points of the property and you’re done. To achieve a similar effect to the video above, add some “Zoom” effects and keep your font choice crisp and simple (see here for more ideas on fonts). What makes this video so successful is the actual photos themselves – the lighting is immaculate, so push your photographer to make the most of lighting available on the property.

What you’ll need:

• trakAxPC – Buy now for $24.95
• Photos

3. Give Sellers / Buyers Useful Advice

Pamela Liebman , CEO of the Corcoran Group is one of the most famous faces on the New York Real Estate scene. On the Corcoran Group Real Estate YouTube Channel, Ms. Liebman gives practical advice to sellers and buyers in bite-sized videos. Often less than 1 minute long, Liebman covers questions such as “How do I make an offer on an Apartment I Like?” or “How do I determine my price range for Buying a Home?” as well as questions that are very particular to New York.

As a real-estate agent, you know your city or neighbourhood probably better than anyone else – what questions do new buyers always ask? Create short videos that you can share on YouTube and your website that answer these common queries and highlight the positive aspects of the neighbourhoods where you sell – not only should it help traffic by covering keywords that buyers may be searching for, but also build your reputation as a “Trust Agent”.

What you’ll need:

• A Microphone
• A tripod – see here for a selection of affordable tripods
• A Camcorder - Flip Camcorders and Kodak Zi8 camcorders are available from $120 (note, the Flip does not support an external mic)
• trakAxPC – Buy now for $24.95

4. Explain Complicated Technical Information

Buying, renting and leasing are often complicated processes and buyers/ sellers can be intimidated by legal requirements and the complicated form-filling that accompanies any property transaction. Why not create short videos (they can be 1 minute or less) clearly explaining some of the legal jargon that is part of the rental / lease / buying process in your jurisdiction.

I recently read that more new businesses were started in Ireland this year than in any previous year and I am sure this trend is reflected in many countries. The international down turn, has meant more and more people have become entrepreneurs and are starting their own businesses. If you are running a Commercial Property business, these potential clients may be completely new to their commercial renting and leasing market. Videos explaining important information that these users need to know could be a valuable tool to small businesses and portray your Real Estate business as the “human face” of commercial property.

What you’ll need:

• A Microphone
• A tripod – see here for a selection of affordable tripods
• A Camcorder - Flip Camcorders and Kodak Zi8 camcorders are available from $120 (note, the Flip does not support an external mic)
• trakAxPC – Buy now for $24.95

5. Market your Real Estate Business

Obviously to maintain a healthy real estate business, you need a combination of new and satisfied clients who are buyers and sellers. Often estate agents can get a bad rep, so reverse this preconception with a video showing your offices, your staff and maybe even some happy customers.

What you’ll need:

• A Microphone
• A tripod – see here for a selection of affordable tripods
• A Camcorder - Flip Camcorders and Kodak Zi8 camcorders are available from $120 (note, the Flip does not support an external mic)
• trakAxPC – Buy now for $24.95

Some other videos you may find useful –

• Embedding your Video into your Website / Blog
• Cheap Lighting Tips for your Business Video
• Sprucing Up your Credits - Some Quick Ideas

Remember trakAxPC can be used for all your video editing needs. Take advantage of our special price - buy trakAxPC today for just $24.95.

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Posted by SysAdmin in Tips for Small Business   |  1 comment

Lighting your Video - Tips for Small Businesses

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

When you are creating a video for your small business (or any video for that matter), a key element of the recording will be you or a staff member speaking to the camera explaining your products and services. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to help your video look professional is the lighting. You don’t have to spend any money, just use what is available to you - overhead lights, natural light from windows, lamps etc. What’s more, once you get the set up you are happy with, you can use it over and over again for video blogs, product announcements etc.

Professionals often talk about “Three-Point Lighting” - which is a pretty simple theory. It involves a key light, a fill and a rim or back light. They often add a fourth point, which is a background light. As the name would suggest the Key Light is usually the most important source of light - in your video, you could try and use a large window or a strong lamp.

Play around with some lamps for the Back Light until you get the look you want - if the back light is too strong, your face may go into the shadows, so change the position (or lamp) until you get an even light. The Fill light is normally softer than the key and back light, so you could try a lamp with a lower wattage bulb or even some foam board from a Art and Hobby shop. Lastly you may want to turn on the overhead lights as a background light to brighten up the whole picture.

You’ll be surprised what a difference a little bit of time spent on the lighting will do for your video - as always, the more professional you look, the more trustworthy your business will appear.

The video below from Videomaker also gives some great tips of improving your lighting (especially if you decide to record outdoors):

Remember trakAxPC can be used for all your video editing needs. Take advantage of our special price - buy trakAxPC today for just $24.95.

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Posted by Catriona in Tips & Tricks  Tips for Small Business   |  Leave a comment

Video Basics – J and L Cuts

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

With trakAxPC Pro, we want users to be able to have fun editing and creating videos without getting bogged down in complicated software or convoluted technical terms. However, learning some very basic editing tricks can immensely improve your final cuts. In this short blog, I want to show how powerful, yet subtle transitions called J and L cuts can be used.

J and L cuts can also be called “audio advance” (J Cut) or “video advance” (L Cut) – this is actually a much easier way of thinking of it. An audio advance cut is where you can hear the audio before you see the accompanying video and a video advance cut is the opposite.

The name comes from how the edits can appear in modern video editing applications, like the letters L and a J - think it would be fair to say you may need to use some imagination.

Although you may not be aware of the technical terms, you see these transitions every day.  They are used almost constantly on news reports – standing in front of the camera, the reporter gives an overview of the situation, for example an erupting volcano. The video then cuts to show footage of the erupting volcano, while we continue to hear the reporter’s audio report. The opposite is probably even more common – we see footage of the erupting volcano while we hear the reporter’s audio report. We then cut to the video of the reporter in front of the camera who then finishes the piece. (Simply watching some news reports from BBC News, CNN, Sky News etc. on YouTube will give you an idea of how common this form of editing is).

Rather than getting too bogged down in technical details – watch the video below and keep an eye out for various L and J Cuts:

Here’s another really great example of these cuts in action:

I think you would agree that they are a very subtle but powerful way to tell a story.

There are tons of ways you can use L and J cuts to improve your videos (they are really important for interviews and dialogue scenes and we will cover this in another post). In trakAxPC, creating J and L cuts couldn’t be easier and there are various ways you can implement them. You can simply adjust the start point of your video using your cursor and the “adjust length indicator” until you reach the point which will make for a natural transition. You can even just drop the second video clip on top of the original video clip (although be careful if they have different frame dimensions that you can’t see any overlap). Another quick way is to use the split segment tool, so you can remove the video you want to replace. One handy tip is to use the group tool, so that as you edit, your original audio and video remains synced.

You can read a more technical explanation below from Wikipedia -

An L cut, also known as a split edit, is an edit transition from one shot to another in film or video, where the picture and sound are synchronised but the transitions in each are not coincident. This is often done to enhance the aesthetics or flow of the film as L cuts allow the audience to see context (either before or after) of speaking rather than simply the speaking itself. Without L cuts, a conversation between two people can feel like a tennis match.

L cuts are also used to hide transitions between scenes. They can be very effective in editing dialog scenes shot with a single camera using multiple takes. The ability to cut the picture/video separately from the sound/audio allows the sound from the various takes to flow smoothly, even though the picture cuts are at different places. In longer shots, this allows the editor to use the picture from one take with the sound from another take if the dialog reading is better.

The name of the cut refers to the shape of the cut pieces of the film - the audio track is cut somewhat after (or before) the last frame of video, resulting in roughly L-shaped film ends, as the video and audio parts of film are in tracks, one below, one above, on the film itself.

If you have any questions on this post or any aspects of trakAxPC, please leave a comment.

Thanks!

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Posted by Catriona in Tips & Tricks  Tips for Small Business   |  Leave a comment

Rework Book Review & Ideas for Small Businesses

Thursday, May 06, 2010

After reading tons of reviews and online chatter about the book “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, two of the founders of the company 37 Signals, I finally got around to buying it last week. We have used their product Basecamp as our project management tool for many years and I have been fascinated for a long time at their ability to garner great publicity and an almost fanatical fan base, by basically taking a very no-nonsense, common sense approach to business and the products they produce.

Before I had purchased the book, I was really impressed with the promotional videos they created with Coudal Partners to promote the book:

You can see some further videos here and here.

Other than a little bit of fancy editing at the very end of the video and some nice lighting, this video couldn’t be simpler. The amazingly annoying, but pitch-perfect management speak (“I think that’s a good jumping off point to talk about goals that we want to accomplish today”) on the conference call is enough to make the required impact.

I have to admit I came to Rework slightly wanting to dislike it. I thought it was just going to be a rehash of previous blog posts that have appeared on the 37 Signals blog and a cynical money making scheme, with some infuriatingly simple, but true lessons from the 37 Signals book of how to do business. Although this is actually partially true – I had read decent chunks of the books in different forms on their blog – throughout reading the book I found myself reinvigorated about our business, enthusiastic to try new ideas and generally more upbeat about moving forward. You can read Rework in one or two sittings. Each chapter is generally 2 pages long – making it perfect for dipping into. There are no ground-breaking ideas in this book and most of the advice is actually basic common sense, but Jason and David’s general belief that “anyone can make it work” is contagious and actually quite inspiring.

The reason for this blog post is a chapter entitled “Tone is in your fingers”, that rang especially true for me and what we are trying to achieve with trakAxPC.

“It’s tempting for people to obsess over tools instead of what they’re going to do with these tools. You know the type:[…] Amateur photographers who want to debate film versus digital endlessly instead of focusing on what actually makes a photograph great.

You also see it in people who want to blog, podcast or shoot videos for their business but get hung up on which tools to use. The content is what matters. You can spend tons on fancy equipment, but if you’ve got nothing to say…well, you’ve got nothing to say.

Use whatever you’ve got or can afford cheaply. Then go. It’s not the gear that matters. It’s playing with what you’ve got as well as you can.”

We believe that with trakAxPC, any small business can start creating great videos to promote and showcase their products and services with little or no experience. Whether you’re an independent real estate agent wanting to create video tours of your properties, a retailer showcasing this season’s new stock or a service provider wanting to create a short promo video to introduce yourself and your services, for $24.95 trakAxPC has all the features you’ll need to put your video together. So forget having to spend hundreds of dollars on fancy software or hours and hours trying to get your head around complicated editing features. Give trakAxPC a try today and remember – it’s not the gear that matters!

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Posted by Catriona in Tips for Small Business   |  Leave a comment

Create a Video from your Powerpoint Presentation

Friday, March 26, 2010

For our latest Tips for Small Businesses, I will show you how to create a video from your Powerpoint Presentation using trakAxPC. It really couldn’t be easier and also gives you greater flexibility to introduce multimedia elements into your presentation, whether that be videos, narrations or a soundtrack.

The video above shows a very simple implementation of this, but you could take this further - record in a video and using the collage functionality / picture in picture, you could present your Powerpoint in person in your video.

Just to note, Powerpoint 2007 definitely renders your text and graphics better and the exported JPEG / PNG files are crisper. If you are using Powerpoint 2003 or earlier, you may want to play around with your fonts to find a font that exports to PNG / JPEG clearly.

Obviously the first step to creating a great Powerpoint / video combo is to have a decent Powerpoint in the first place. I tested out Powerpoint 2007 recently and I was really impressed with the improvements in the templates, default diagrams and image handling. However, if you are like me and have Powerpoint 2003 or earlier, you are going to have to put in some work to make it look professional.

I have put together some ideas for you on how you can improve your Powerpoint presentations - this is just my thoughts, you may disagree with them, so let me know!

Tip 1 - Keep it Simple

My first tip is to remember that you are presenting the Powerpoint - not the other way around. It is always tempting to add more and more information to your slides. However, your audience will be too busy reading your slide to listen to your presentation. I suggest keeping each slide to one main point and make an impact. I don’t think you necessarily need a title, date and logo etc. for each slide. You can cover all these elements on the intro slide. Remember you can always add Notes to your slides and if you are preparing handouts, you can add headers / footers in the Print Layout.

Tip 2 - Banish Tacky Clipart

I am pretty sure that I have never seen tacky clipart done well. It almost always looks cheap and unprofessional. When using graphics in your presentation, try and keep them clean and sophisticated. If you can, try and use a transparent PNG so they sit seamlessly on your background - otherwise think about changing your background to suit the image. There are tons of places online to purchase great graphics very cheaply - try iStockphoto, BigStockPhoto, Graphic River or Fotolia.

Tip 3 - Keep Gradients Subtle

If you have just discovered how to add a gradient to your background / diagrams etc. it can be tempting to go all out choosing a rainbow of gradients. Resist this temptation! Subtle gradients always look better. After you set your first colour in your gradient, choose the same colour again for your second colour (it should appear automatically in the menu) and then use the custom colour picker in Powerpoint to choose a shade just a tiny bit lighter than the original colour.

Tip 4 - Get Inspiration

This may sound like an obvious one, but look at great presentations and get inspiration. One of the best places to see some of the greatest presentations in the world is TED.com. I recently watched Stefan Sagmeister’s presentation on “The Power of Time Off” and Jamie Oliver’s “Teach every child about food” and what struck me was the simplicity of the slides, but the power of the presentation. Another great place for inspiration is Apple’s Keynote speeches - the slides are always completely and utterly beautiful (if you can ignore the sometimes nauseating whoops and cheers from the audience).

If you really struggle with graphics, you may want to consider purchasing a Powerpoint template. The quality of templates varies hugely. Here are a few links to template providers which by and large are pretty ok - Slideshop, Presentation Load and Microsoft Office Online.

I hope that some of these tips may be useful for your next presentation. Have some tips you want to share? Please drop me a comment below and let me know your tips to creating a great presentation.

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Posted by Catriona in Tips for Small Business   |  Leave a comment

Embedding your YouTube Video into Wordpress / Dreamweaver

Sunday, February 21, 2010

We are currently putting together some Tips & Tricks to help Small Businesses take advantage of using Video for marketing and Web promotions. The first topic we are going to cover is embedding your Video into Blog or Website. This is an extremely simple process and once your video is on YouTube (you can directly upload from trakAxPC), embedding your video takes less than 1 minute.

Please watch the video below for some detailed instructions.

If you have any questions on this, please leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you asap.

Remember - all the premium features of trakAxPC Pro are currently available at the very special launch price of $24.95 - buy today!

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Posted by Catriona in Tips & Tricks  Tips for Small Business   |  Leave a comment