Managing video content

1Copyright © 2015 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

Managing video content in DAM:

How digital asset management software can improve your brand’s use of video assets

2



Copyright © 2015 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.



Video has been around for a long time. What’s changed?Why does video get so much attention today? It’s a hot topic, especially in business marketing circles. It’s funny because, while the term “social media” is less than 10 years old, video has been around for over 50 years. If you are a child of the ‘80s, you’ll remember the big issue being whether to go with betamax or VHS. So, what has changed?

DIGITAL! Digital acquisition, editing, distribution and consumption!

Digital brought down the cost and physical barriers to creating and consuming video. Think about what you had to go through to share something with friends prior to social media. You had to buy an actual video camcorder. You didn’t need to take out a second mortgage to buy a video camera, but they were not super cheap either. There was no easy way to edit what you shot. Simple trimming of start and end points wasn’t an option unless you had an edit station.

Delivery of video was also a challenge. You had to make copies of it on some form of medium for everyone you wanted to share it with. Of course, you had to ship it to them too. When you wanted to watch a video, you needed a TV and VCR with the right tape format or a DVD player. Unless headphones were around, you had to be alone.

Today, you can pull out your phone, record HD video, trim it on your phone and instantly share it or post it to YouTube. You can watch the video from anywhere on your portable device or computer, which you are near almost 24/7.

Because of advances in internet technology, the improved access and delivery options for video has made it arguably the most powerful tool in a marketer’s arsenal. Video is not new, but its use case is. The ability to properly manage these assets has become more important than ever. This whitepaper will provide guidelines, tips, tools and best practices for managing video content so that it provides the greatest possible positive impact on your company’s performance.

Increasing role for online videoVideo is playing an increasingly important role in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business- to-business (B2B) marketing. We are watching more online video than we ever have before. Somewhere along the line, marketers realized that videos increase viewers’ understanding of their products and services by over 70%. Also, after watching a video, viewers are 64% more likely to take action. Those are powerful and staggering numbers that illustrate why video has been a booming business asset.

Why is video so effective in the business world? There are four main reasons: explaining, emotion, truth and time.

ExplainingWe’ve all heard this phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Since video is actually 30 frames, or pictures, per second, a minute’s worth of video is worth 1,800,000 words. Since you can’t read 1.8 million words per minute, video has the ability to explain complex subjects in less time than words. It also helps with the retention of the information. It engages multiple senses, which has been shown to increase brand and message recall.

EmotionVideo has the ability to evoke emotion in viewers. Conversion is the goal of a marketing video. Video involves more human senses, including both sight and sound, which allows the content to engage its viewers at a deeper level than just text or images. Tapping into a human on an




emotional level is very advantageous to businesses, especially on a brand level. It’s difficult to even begin to put a value on it.

TruthSomething becomes the truth, which we all seek, when you see it for yourself. For a product or service, video is the closest way for a consumer to experience your product without actually having it in hand. The video becomes a source of truth for whatever it is you’re selling.

TimeIf we wrap explaining, emotion and truth up into one powerful package, there is no other way to deliver it all in less time - which has value - than video. A two-minute video can explain a complex subject, cause an emotional change in the viewer and give that person a feeling of confidence that what they’re watching is actually true in less time than any other medium.

As videos play a larger and larger role in marketing campaigns, many brands are facing increasing challenges in managing, distributing and repurposing videos. Video is bigger and more complex than almost all other media types.

Enter DAMA crucial first step in the management of video assets is the use of a digital asset management (DAM) system to provide a central repository for storing, managing, repurposing, distributing, archiving and analyzing video content (as well as other types of digital assets).

Videos are available in the system for use by those who are authorized (e.g., members of your organization, external partners, the press). Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) DAM systems make it possible to serve up online videos to large numbers of users without bogging down in-house servers. True DAM systems can also automatically convert videos to the different formats required.

Why is video complex, and how does DAM helpDigital videos can take up enormous amounts of storage space and network bandwidth. Each second of uncompressed, high-definition video is made up of approximately 30 images, each 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels in size. Codecs (a term derived from “code/decode”) shrink the size of video files by filtering and compressing the video and audio. The same codec used on your end to code or compress a video file for storage and transmission must be used by the viewer’s system to decode or decompress the video when it is viewed.

There are hundreds of different codecs with different advantages and disadvantages for different applications. Video systems must normally offer video coded with several different codecs in order to ensure that as much of the potential audience as possible can view the video.

Another element of video that can be very confusing revolves around common video file extensions, like MOV and AVI. They are containers that can include files encoded with many different codecs. An MOV file might be encoded with an MPEG1 codec, while another might be encoded with a DV25 codec. So to say a video is a QuickTime movie is not enough. What kind of QuickTime movie is it?

4






One of the important features of a codec is its bitrate. Bitrate refers to the number of bits that must be transmitted every second to play the video. The higher the bitrate, the higher the bandwidth requirement. Codecs are designed to strike a balance between higher visual quality while maintaining lower bitrates. The bitrate is equal to the file size of the encoded video divided by the playing time. For example, an 80 megabyte (MB) file with a playing time of 10 seconds requires a bandwidth of eight megabytes per second (MBps). One byte is equal to eight bits, so this video has a bitrate of 64 megabits per second (Mbps).

To help visualize this, think of the video as water in a sink. The size of the drain determines the bitrate of the video. The bigger the opening, the better the quality of video, and the faster your internet connection needs to be.

All of this boils down to it being incredibly frustrating for the video creator and consumer when a viewer cannot open a video sent to them. DAM systems automate the process and include much of the behind-the-scenes technology needed to make videos “just work” for all viewers.

Storing videos for online viewingThe most common question asked of a video DAM vendor is, “What format should I upload to the DAM system?” Of course, the answer to this question is everyone’s most hated answer: it depends. But this whitepaper aims to explain different workflows and how that affects the answer in “your” case.

Cloud-based DAM systems store one high-resolution version of the video and convert to other versions on the fly as they are needed, eliminating the need for additional storage. It can take some time to convert a video, so it may not be available instantly, but the Media Collective saves converted formats for a number of days. If a video asset is an in-demand asset, the next person who needs a low-res WMV version will not have to wait for it to convert.

One issue to consider is whether the DAM system will be servicing users, like sales and marketing, who only need access to finished and edited videos, or video editors who will need access to raw footage. If video editors will be storing files in the DAM system, they should be prepared to receive footage directly from the camera as well as the B-roll. B-roll is the supplemental, or alternate, footage intercut with the main shot in an interview, documentary or other video, often used to add meaning to a sequence or disguise the elimination of unwanted content.The quality level of video uploaded to a DAM system also needs to be considered. Uncompressed, high-resolution HD video is extremely large in size and difficult to play back on the average computer, laptop or mobile device. As video use and storage grows, storage space adds up very quickly. One way to combat this is to store mezzanine files in the DAM system. Those are compressed videos that take up less space than the full-res




files, but are still high enough in quality to be used to create highly compressed videos typically used on the web. To the naked eye, they look amazingly clear, but take up significantly less space.

The Media Collective is preconfigured to provide users with a series of download and sharing options. Users can also set their own conversion format options. For example, Knaack, a manufacturer of jobsite storage equipment, uses a seven-inch LCD monitor for point-of-purchase video presentations. This monitor uses a special video format: an AVI container with DivX codec in 720x480 widescreen. Widen easily configured their DAM system to produce a new format for playback on that device.

Publishing videosA DAM system becomes your marketing command center, allowing you to publish videos using embed codes, which give you central control and analytic data for those videos no matter what website, blog or social site they are published on.

Use of embed codes simplifies the management of video assets. When the video is updated, you only need to upload the updated version to your DAM system. The updated video will then be reflected anywhere your video is embedded.

When web visitors play the video, it is being served to them from a content delivery network (CDN) that can easily scale bandwidth up to handle spikes in demand. Your site visitors will not suffer any performance issues even when thousands of viewers are accessing the video at the same time. In addition, the video player can detect the viewer’s connection speed and optimize their experience by automatically giving them the best quality video their connection speed can handle.

Any device or browserUnfortunately, there is not a single format of video that will work on all devices or on any browser. There are a large number of technical hurdles that need to be managed in order for a video to be viewable to anyone on any device. Fortunately, the Media Collective does all of this for you and gives you one link or embed code that you can confidently share and know the viewer will see your great video content.

Roles and permissionsDAM software allows you to set up various levels of user access (via roles and permissions, in the case of the Media Collective). For example, you can set up a role for editors and give them access to raw footage, B-roll asset groups and native conversion formats. Set up another role for sales and marketing channels and give them access only to the edited, finished videos asset group and normal conversion format options.

For example, Widen shoots our customer interview videos on a Canon DSLR camera, which records high-resolution MOV files at approximately 30 Mbps (225 MBps per minute of video). When we upload a finished and edited customer interview, we upload a mezzanine-level MPEG4 file at 10 Mbps to our DAM system. To the naked eye, the mezzanine file is equally as good of quality as the original video footage, makes a very-good quality compressed downloaded version when ordered through the DAM system, and is 1/3 the size, which reduces storage capacity and makes it three times as fast to download. These settings may not work for every organization, but it gives you an idea of how we use it.

6






MetadataMetadata is data about data. It refers to tags, descriptions and other information attached to videos (and all assets), and it makes assets easier to find when users are searching for them. Good metadata is the key to avoiding lost time searching for existing assets and recreating them when they aren’t found. Some typical metadata fields for videos include:

• Product name/number/info

• Key people in the video

• Type of video: product demo, customer interview, software tutorial, etc.

• Editor/production company

• Where production files live

• Information about any licensed footage, images, music, talent

• Copyright info

ArchivingFor various reasons, some videos eventually lose their usefulness. While it may be important to retain a copy of the video so it can be found later if needed, it may not be necessary to keep it in an active place. Some DAM systems may charge a storage fee for active assets. You don’t want to be paying for active storage of assets that will be rarely used. Cloud-based DAM systems have speed, redundancy and geo-location in mind when setting up their active storage, making sure that files are delivered to users within milliseconds.

Active storage has a cost. Archive-level storage de-emphasizes the speed and geolocation elements, which allows DAM systems to offer an archive storage at a significantly lower price. Files that need to be kept but are rarely, if ever, used can be put into an archive. They can still be searched for and previewed within the DAM system, but will take several hours to be restored to active storage to download or share. This level of storage is great for old, historical videos or zipped files of video projects from non-linear editing programs, like Final Cut Pro, Avid and Adobe Premiere.

Continued advancementsDAM systems are constantly making updates to video services as technology changes and as the needs of marketers change. Because of our SaaS and Agile development environment, advancements to mobile uploading, detailed analytics, integrations with CMS platforms (WordPress and Drupal), file sharing platforms (Dropbox and Box) and social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook and Twitter), and online clipping and editing are being regularly added to the Media Collective’s feature set.

ConclusionMarketers are devoting more time and effort into producing quality videos, so naturally the management of them is becoming increasingly important. The tips provided in this whitepaper should provide a good head start on making the best use of existing and future digital video assets.




Contact UsWiden Enterprises6911 Mangrove LaneMadison, WI 53713P: 608-222-1296E: [email protected]

About Widen

Widen is a marketing technology company that powers the content that builds your brand. Leveraging cloud-based resources, Widen delivers configurable, scalable software services that help marketing and creative teams easily capture, organize, share, and analyze marketing content. Organizations of all sizes use the Widen Media Collective to streamline their workflows and make their content work harder. Widen is trusted across various industries by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide like LG, Roche, Trek, Cornell University, New Orleans Tourism Marketing, The Atlanta Falcons, Red Gold Tomatoes, Electrolux, and Yankee Candle. To learn more about Widen, go to www.widen.com.