NewsDVD Authoring7/20/2004 There are many changes in technology hitting the media production industry. Currently, the biggest change in business services that we are offering is DVD “Authoring”. What is authoring, and how can it help your business or organization? If you’ve rented a DVD movie lately, you’ve probably noticed that instead of popping in the disc and pushing “play”, you have a myriad of choices that you can make. You can use the arrow or menu key functions on your remote to skip to “special features” offered on the DVD, such as “deleted scenes”, “Director’s Commentary”, “Actor’s Commentary”, or “diagramming a scene”, to name a few. Of course, you can also simply play the movie. All of these choices make up a menu, and the menu is what authoring is all about. Now switch gears from the motion picture industry to your industry. Training. Marketing. Sales. Customer Communication. Corporate Communication. Advertising. No matter the focus, I’m sure your company or organization has produced a video or videos to support your effort. Think about those video programs, about the linear nature of those programs. They go from start to middle to finish. And if done properly, they have a compelling set of messages in each part, and most likely some kind of theme throughout that ties many or all of the sub-themes together. Think about how a viewer or presenter might use this linear video. Do they always want to start at the beginning, or are there times (many times?) that they want to skip to certain parts of the presentation? Perhaps this is the second visit to a client for a sales meeting and they are only interested in seeing the middle of the presentation. Or, this is a training video and the employee doesn’t need to see the orientation to the building layout, but instead wants to skip to a specific training area. Or, it’s an instruction video, and your customer wants to review certain sections of the video because they are in the middle of the process. How do all of these viewers of your material easily skip to the wanted sections? Authoring is the key to allowing a presenter or a viewer to pick and choose the relevant or important sections of a video, saving time, saving hassle and creating review or play options that make watching the video even more meaningful to the viewer. Authoring can and should be a part of your overall media creation strategy, as nearly every video used for business has a potential for utilizing a menu. Also, the video doesn’t have to be new to be authored. One of the best uses for authoring is to put multiple existing video programs in a menu for your sales team or customers, creating alternate opportunities for sales and ease of use. One disk versus 4 VHS tapes. You decide! And videos can be in a menu that also includes slide shows, graphic presentations, or just about any other type of media currently in use. If the DVD is to be used on a computer system, you can even provide website links on the disk. The really good news is that professional authoring doesn’t have to be expensive or overly time consuming. Simple menu creation and authoring can be done for a fraction of the cost of producing the original video. Of course, there are lots of options and many things to think about when creating an authored DVD, so your video professional should be able to suggest the best course of action and a reasonable budget for your project. For more information on how you can utilize authoring capability to increase the effectiveness of your new or existing media, don’t hesitate to call MVP Video Productions at 360-693-3887. We’d be glad to provide a complete explanation of this wonderful technology. |