How to Develop In-House Video Competency, Part 3: Cloud-Based Video Content Management
In this segment of our 5-part series on best practices for in-house video operations, we'll focus on cloud-based technologies for multi-point content creation and distribution.
Editing Software
You’re also going to need a nonlinear editing application, such as Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, or Sony Vegas Pro. You’ll want to standardize that application across your organization so that your editors can work collaboratively.
All of those applications provide professional feature sets, but chances are if you’re hiring millennials just out of school, they’ll be working in Final Cut Pro.
Adobe After Effects is another application your organization should have competency in. At the very least, you’ll need After Effects to work with AE templates that you download from Videoblocks. There are also some great whiteboard illustration video applications that you can buy now quite inexpensively.
Depending on how good your team is and what capability they have, all of these components you can help you to start publishing some really cool videos very quickly.
Content Capture, Creation, and Management
As we discussed in Part 2 on staffing, if you’re going to develop an in-house video competency, you want employees who can create video. And this isn’t necessarily confined to the four walls of your office; you want a setup that will accommodate multi-point capture. You might want to do employee testimonials, for example. You might want to do a survey where respondents record a video, and then you plug that into a bigger video. You might want to have your employees creating video blogs, aka vlogging.
By building a UGC component into your video program, you can push this competency out to your end-users; it could even be your customers. Although OVPs feature cloud-based components, cloud-based content management that facilitates smooth multi-point capture and collaborative content creation is almost a totally different thing from what OVPs offer, which is generally confined to video publishing, distribution, hosting, and streaming. This is how I break it down in Figure 1 (below).
Figure 1. Delineating the capture/creation and hosting/streaming/distribution components of video production and publishing. Click the image to see it at full size.
You also want to make sure you’re set up to handle inbound video capture. Let’s say you want to do a contest, and I want to get thousands of you customers out there to record a video. Do you have the technology to handle that? At videoBIO, one of our applications is video biographies and video resumes for video employment brands and talent attraction. To make this possible, we need technology to allow us to accept video bios onto our career site.
Online video is participatory, not just unidirectional production and consumption, and a comprehensive corporate video program needs to be prepared to facilitate that when required. Developing an in-house competency for contemporary corporate video is not just about you creating video and pushing it out; it's also about ingesting video and having the ability and the tools to be able to bring video in.
You also need video media management and central cloud storage. You need to equip yourself to handle video moderation and approvals. These are capabilities that you should have through your OVP: the ability to moderate, review, delete, and publish video, plus metrics an analytics.
You can have on-premise technology as well, depending on how deep into it you're going, but you should start with cloud-based technology. You may have global teams. You may have people in multiple countries around the world. The beauty of the cloud is there's no software installation. Figure 2 (below) shows a couple of interfaces from our platform, which illustrate that you can actually house, archive, and manage your video assets, and then also have multi-point distribution. This is the kind of custom interface sits over the top of an OVP such as Kaltura. These interfaces offer all the features you need to share and promote video, including send by email, share, copy and paste a link, even generate a QR code associated with that video to put into print media, share directly to social, download, or generate an embed code with a brandable player.
Figure 2. Cloud-based media creation and management interfaces. Click the image to see it at full size.
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