It’s certainly a unique time for those of us in the professional audiovisual industry. For designers, integrators, re-sellers and technology managers, the niche industry that usually consumes us with the deeply technical side of things has now shifted into mainstream conversations.
Why? As most of us have noticed, the news media, local municipalities, counties, schools and businesses have been working feverishly to convey critical information to the public about the recent outbreak of COVID-19, known commonly as coronavirus. While many may disagree about the severity of the virus, two things are certain. The virus is spreading, and businesses are cancelling conferences, meetings and other events to prevent their employees' exposure.
According to The Lancet, “the national security strategy for COVID-19 within China has shifted to so-called wartime control measures,” with cities on lock down.
At Conference Room Systems (CRS) and our Phila.-area integration company, Haverford Systems, our technology experts have been focused all month long on getting back to school. With the December holiday season behind us, and most college students beginning their spring semesters, we thought it was the perfect time to showcase a variety of audio visual solutions that are helping the higher education market.
Every year ConferenceRoomSystems.com releases their predictions for the video conferencing industry along with the results from the previous year. We didn't see everything we predicted for 2016 but we did see some amazing advances in video conferencing, live streaming and wireless presentation.
Howdy friends and followers! I’ve been meaning to sit down and write a “how to” article about setting up free webinars for a while now. We stopped using services GoToMeeting, WebEX and Zoom Webinar for a long time now, because they charge way too much money and reduce our overall ability to reach new audiences. In this blog post, I will review ourtried and true method for hosting free webinars on the YouTube Live or Facebook Live platforms with the video conference software of your choice.
I'm going to get right down to the amazing webinar enhancements we added to our latest live webinar hosted with Zoom!
1. Green Screen / Chroma Keying - The use of an "external webcam" used with our video conferencing software (Zoom) with a green screen.
2. Virtual Sets - Virtual sets combine virtual background and foreground elements to your chroma key video to make a virtual broadcast set.
3. Branding - Recorded webinars can be watching thousands of times over so it's important for our marketing team to brand the video. We used live production branding during the show and we used additional branding using Adobe After Effects.
Why Branding is important?
Webinars are one of the most important tools in today's modern marketers tool bag. No matter how many live viewers you get during your live event you will ALWAYS get more views on-demand on YouTube/Vimeo. A video that receives 7,500 views/day is equal to 46 hyper efficient sales people talking to clients about your product (from Salesforce.com). That makes the value of your on-demand videos sky rocket (depending on the effectiveness of your video. So branding these videos is incredibly important and we have some tips on how you can do it!
Live Webinar Effects
The live effects that you see above are extremely easy to use and they add much need interactivity and life to the webinar. The Virtual Set capabilities can take your webinar anywhere in the world! So we create (16) virtual sets for banking/finance, house of worship, education and sales/marketing (See them here). We use a green screen to transport our "talent" to a suitable location vs our messy boardroom.
The benefit of live webinar effects is that you don't have to spend any time in post-production. You can also live stream the entire branded event to YouTube Live and you don't even have to store the files on your computer!
Post Production (Adobe After Effects, SONY Vegas, MovieMaker)
Anything you didn't catch live can always be added in post production. In the video above we added our logo's in the black bars from the Zoom recording. You can do almost anything you want with this technology so the sky is the limit. If you don't have a video editing person on staff, I would suggest using simple lower thirds, a virtual set with the LCD showing your content and/or using a interactive device like a iPad or Windows table to add interactivity to your webinar!
Free Ebook
Check out our free eBook below and tune in weekly for our Friday Webinars! This week we are interviewing PhD Christopher Jaynes from Mersive Solstice! Also, see "how we stream" at http://live.huddlecamhd.com!
Every year ConferenceRoomSystems.com releases their predictions for the video conferencing industry along with the results from the previous year. We didn't see everything we predicted for 2015 but we did see some amazing advances in video conferencing, live streaming and wireless presentation.
"Take your conference room to the cloud" is a webinar hosted by Zoom.US's Head of Product Marketing Nick Chong. Nick has invited industry though leaders: David Maldow from Let's Do Video and yours truly, Paul Richards, from CRS. This webinar will discuss 3 questions concerning web video conferencing and conference room technology.
