If you use a “walk-on” video, your audience will be more likely to opt-in on your sales page. They will be less likely to “bounce” from your site, because they will be attracted by what you have to say.
People like to watch short, to the point videos. Statistics prove that using video on your site helps greatly.
Here is an example of a walk-on video, in this video.
This is a transparent video lives in a dynamic html layer. As you can see, you can scroll up and down and the transparent video stays in its position.
Making transparent videos is becoming easier to do. The tools you will use to accomplish this task are becoming more user-friendly.
As a quick overview of how you make this type of video:
First, you need to record the video against a green background. Next, you need to key out the background which makes it transparent, or invisible. This keying process is covered in another one of my videos. The Keylight Keyer(1,2) is simple to use and very effective.
In this screen capture video, I will show you the settings to use when your render your video. Your intent should be to make the file size of the video very small so that it will load quickly.
Most beginners don’t know the secret about how to make the correct settings. They render their video at a high resolution with stereo sound. Consequently their video is bloated and it won’t load quickly. More importantly, when it does load, it is likely to stop and go. It will need to buffer repeatedly to transfer all those bytes.
Let’s look at the settings in the popular video editing software. It uses the a special codec. What is a codec? It is a compression/decompression type software. In non-technical language, it removes the unessential information from the video file. In a sense, it compresses the video by taking out information that doesn’t show in the video — it isn’t unusual to see a reduction ratio in the range of 100 to 1.
As an example, the walk-on video shown in this video was saved as uncompressed AVI file. It was 251,081 kilobytes in size. After this was run through the On2 codec, it was compressed down to 1,567 kilobytes. That reduction was in the range of 160 to 1…quite incredible.
Here is a review of what it takes to make a transparent walk-on video:
- We encode the alpha channel that includes the actor but doesn’t include the background. Remember, we don’t want the background.
- The frame rate can be reduced to one-half the source’s frames per second without much reduction in quality. By the way, a screen capture video can be shown at 8 or 10 frames per second without noticeable change in quality. The source’s fps was 29.97, which is typical. If we divide that in half, we get 14.987, not 15. If you use 15, you will lose lip synch if the video is long enough.
- Ignore the quality setting and choose the maximum data rate to be 220 kilobits per second.
- Next, look at the audio settings. We don’t need stereo and we don’t need any more than 32 kilobits per second. If you add the video’s kbps to the audio’s kbps, we get only 252 kbps.
- Eighty five percent of the internet users can handle 256 k without getting the start and stopping and buffering problem.
Making these type videos is fun and rewarding. Everybody should be able to make a walk-on video with a little study and work.
