Web Video Expert

For years, the conventional wisdom for those of us who design web pages is that we should be designing web pages for 800x600 screens — that is, screens that are 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high.  That means a web page should be 720 pixels wide, give or take, to allow for scroll bars on an 800-wide screen.  Under this assumption, the precious “above the fold” space — that is, the part of the web page that’s visible without scrolling down on the page — is around 400 pixels.

A 710-pixel-wide website gets lost on today’s new 1920x1080 screensA recent dive into Google Analytics for diginovations.com suggests that 800x600 design point is just plain bunk these days.  Big, high-resolution screens have taken over the world, and those who are designing 710-pixel-wide sites are leaving precious real estate “on the table.”  (See inset to the right, illustrating how a 710-wide website gets lost on today’s most modern 1920x1080 displays.)

So dramatic were the data that I took the Labor Day Weekend to re-design diginovations.com to a new design standard of 920 pixels wide — a 30% increase in width.  Our visitors are now enjoying a world of larger video windows and photographs, text lines that are less choppy, and more information above the fold.

Discovering Your Visitors’ Screen Widths

Google Analytics offers a treasure-trove of raw data about visitors to your website, their traffic patterns, and conversion rates.  But buried inside the “Visitors” tab under “Browser Capabilities” is a button labeled “Screen Resolutions”, and this is where I found the news that, frankly, shocked me.  Here are the top 10 screen resolutions for visitors to diginovations.com over the last few weeks:

As you can see, the first time we see a screen narrower than 1024 pixels is down at #10 (800x600, 1.2% of visitors).  Further down the list, the next instance is at #22 (320x396, 0.33% of visitors) and then #32 (800x800, .07% of visitors).

Since we had designed our site for the nearly non-existent 800-pixel-wide visitor, it was clear that a re-design was in order.  I was delivering an inefficient and sub-par experience to 98.5% of my visitors in order to accommodate 1.5% of them.  We redesigned our site to the 98.5% case (1024 wide), widening both our navigation and main columns.

Your Mileage May Vary

Of course, it may be argued that since visitors to diginovations.com tend to be more sophisticated users (i.e. video and marketing types), we may be catering to an atypically big-screen audience.  Indeed, looking at the same statistics for a more consumer-oriented site we manage (www.memoryworks.com), the percentage of sub-1024-pixel screens was just over 4% rather than 1.5%.  We would still recommend the widening of this site, though, because of the clearly superior user experience delivered by the wider columns and larger video and image windows.

The Small-Screen Experience

Over the next few years, we’ll also need to be doing more to accommodate mobile browsers such as iPhones and Blackberries as well.  These visitors are now less than .5% of our traffic, but other classes of website such as news sites are seeing much more activity from mobile browsers.  When the need comes, the way to handle these visitors is not to keep the website small, but instead to design special versions of the site for mobile users as they become more important in the visitor mix.

I loved this piece by National Public Radio’s Scott Simon on storytelling…and how to do it well in video:

At DigiNovations, we think a lot about storytelling.  After all, we represent ourselves as “New England’s Video Storytellers.”  But we don’t often get to articulate what storytelling is all about in our medium.

To Scott’s excellent summary, I would add:

• Great stories are memorable, and they do something to impress themselves on the consciousness.  They might surprise.  They might demonstrate something in an unusual way.  They might do something that exceeds expectations.
• Great stories not only start strongly (Scott’s point), but end strongly.  They leave an image or point that reverberates and fills the room when it’s over.
• Great stories create a certain amount of suspense about the outcome.  The curiosity about the end, planted at the beginning, pulls a viewer through to the conclusion.
• Great stories don’t let the technology or the execution get in the way.  The audio is crisp, the graphics non-intrusive (unless they’re part of the story), and the effects are tasteful.
• Finally, great stories start a conversation — if only the viewers with themselves — about what it means for them.  About what they should do next.

Today, there are a lot of people picking up video cameras and shooting “stories”.  But as the volume of video stories explodes, the percentage of them that tell great stories seems to diminish.  (Consider this lament by a newspaper-reporter-turned-video-reporter.)

The next time you see a TV news story or TV newsmagazine piece that strikes you as particularly good, take a moment to break it down.  Chances are, you’ll see that it’s these techniques of video storytelling that make the difference.

Despite the fact that vast majority of the projects we produce are destined for the world wide web, a number of them still need to go to DVD.  And the DVD option is getting even more interesting now that we’re starting to produce Blu-Ray discs with stunning-quality high-definition video.

Our friends over at Discmakers, the folks who make the DVD duplicating equipment we use at DigiNovations, have put out a valuable tip sheet containing a lot of the things you’ll want to think about as you’re preparing to bring your project to a creative shop like ours to turn into an engaging, spectacular DVD.  As they point out:

From the time your independent film is in the can, your post-production efforts are likely to include thoughts of DVD, whether your output is a feature film, documentary, training course, marketing infomercial, or animated short. Though you may have mastered the intricacies and challenges of set lighting, lenses, audio capture, and non-linear editing, getting your work onto DVD requires attention to some technical considerations that may be unfamiliar to you.

So if your project is destined for DVD — and especially if you want a creatively-authored DVD that looks like a Hollywood hit — then click on “From DV to DVD: Tips for Getting Outstanding Results”.  And feel free to ask us about any questions you might have.

Here’s a link to a presentation given today (March 8, 2008) at the Pro Video 2008 show in Easton, Massachusetts.  It pretty much captures my current thinking and advice to video professionals about preparing video for the web and building internet TV channels:

Download the PDF file (Requires Adobe Reader)

I can’t begin to tell you how many times we’re asked in a year by prospective interview subjects, “How should I dress?”  And I also can’t tell you how many times we wish someone had asked us that question.  Over many years and thousands of interviews, our team has collected many valuable and important tips that are useful to anyone who is preparing for a television, video, or film interview.  And DigiNovations’ Senior Producer Paul Dewey, aided by Director of Photography Bill Charette, have put those tips into this convenient list:

It's hard to believe there's been such a gap since our last entry. But that's the result of a huge bulge in production demand that always comes this time of year. This article discusses the natural seasons of production during the course of the year, and how clients can take advantage of those seasons as they're planning a video project.

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When you hire a video production firm, do you know who owns the rights to the original video? A tragic oversight by a New York bureaucrat -- and a disgusting willingness of a video producer to exploit that oversight -- offers a cautionary tale to all video production clients.

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Among the many choices a communications professional must make when planning a video program, one of the most often overlooked is whether the film should be produced in widescreen or standard format. In the hands of an experienced videographer, the widescreen format can bring a more natural, cinematic quality to almost any film. In this article, Michael Kolowich tells why he's now recommending that almost every new video project be completed in widescreen format, and describes the exceptions to that rule.

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Many people have asked us why their DVD's won't play in Windows Media 10, even though they play on set-top DVD players and even on some other computers. We've researched the answer, which is typically a missing piece of software that's easy to find and install.

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A common method for requesting bids for video production projects has some glaring flaws, actually reducing choice and creating suboptimal results. In this article, producer and marketing strategist Michael Kolowich proposes a different approach to commissioning video projects that will inevitably create more useful and insightful video production bids.

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Updated on Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 10:03PM by Michael Kolowich

Many organizations know how to hire graphic artists, writers, advertising agencies, and web designers. They’ve had practice. But few have hired video production firms. As the world’s appetite for video messaging grows, many professionals will have to hire a whole new type of communications partner. If you’ve never worked with a video firm, what do you ask prospective firms? This article contains Video AdVisory's suggestions. Get smart - before you hire.

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