The HostBaby Blog

Videos.  Are.  Cool.

One of the best ways to promote yourself as a performer/artist online is by sharing videos of your music performances.  These days there are thousands of video tools and sharing sites that make posting videos easier and more affordable than ever before.   With so many options out there, we’ve decided to highlight some of the methods and techniques that make the most sense to us.

Where do I start?

The first obvious place to start is to have a good video file available.  The type and size of your video will be important in determining where you want to upload your show/event.  Sometimes your raw video file will need some adjustments to make it ready for the web.  You may need to convert the file to a type (.wmv, .mov, .mpg, etc. ) and/or the resolution of a video to make it compatible for web use.  Although internet connections are getting fast, you can’t stream movie-theater quality videos to your computer yet.  Furthermore, you should consider the potential web visitors who don’t have the fastest connections when encoding your video.

Here are some file size examples to give you an idea of how big these movie files are:

DVD’s are typically several gigs in size (4.6 GB per 1 sided disk).  2 hours of film on a highdefinition camera can often take up more space than this.  A 4-5 minute video on Youtube is about 7-10 MB on average, depending on the format of the video.  However, the file size limit for YouTube videos has slowly been increasing.   Because of this, that average has shot up closer to 50 MB.  Either way, there’s a huge size difference between DVD quality film and online videos.

So you can see, you’ll often need to shrink down your videos before posting them online.  Fortunately there’s a really cool tool we suggest using for fixing up your video.  Check out HandBrake, a FREE video encoding tool HERE.  Don’t worry, it works on Macs, PC’s, and even Linux computers.  It’s pretty simple to use and FREE!

Why post videos elsewhere?

Although you can simply upload your video file directly to your website, the benefits of posting your video to a video sharing site, like YouTube or Metacafe are many. First of all, videos posted to sharing sites like those below are accessible to a wider variety of web surfers. For example, if you upload a .mov file to your site, some people may not be able to see your video on your website if they do not have the proper plug-in installed on their browser. However, people who view videos at YouTube and the other video sharing sites usually can see everything posted regardless of their computer and browser because the videos are rendered in Flash.

Another compelling reason to post videos onto video sharing sites is that you can easily embed them onto your own website.  Doing this will also increase your score on web search engines. Embedding links onto your website for popular sites (like YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, etc.) will increase the likelihood your site will appear higher up on search engine results lists.

Cool places to post your video

There are so many options out there for posting videos and it would take a book to describe them all.  Here are some of the more popular ones that people have used. And unless you wish to post really long videos or HD videos, these services are pretty much FREE!

YouTube

YouTube is an obvious choice, of course.  It’s the most popular video site in the world!  This is a great place to find new and potential fans and be exposed to as large of an audience as possible.  Having your videos on this site is a great start, and easy to do.  They have some pretty clear guidelines on what video type/size is alright to upload to their site.

Facebook

This is another great place to upload video as well, since many, many users around the country and the world have Facebook accounts.  Not only can you post videos here, but you can also tag friends and band members on your videos as well, much like tagging in images.  Facebook also claims to accept just about any video type out there, but they have some suggestions on what works best with their site.

MetaCafe

This is yet another really popular website for user-submitted videos.  The neat thing about this site is the integration with Facebook.  You log into your Facebook account from here, and you can share your videos as updates on your own profile, or your friend’s profile pages.  They do have a few more restrictions on their videos, particularly the length (they encourage 8 minute videos).  You can read more about their submission rules HERE.

Now how do I get the videos on MY site?!?

No problem!  These video sites will typically provide you with “embed code” or at least a way to link to your video from your own website.  Usually this code can be easily copied from a button or box located within or next to the video player itself.   For example, YouTube makes linking to your site really easy.

And, there you have it!  There’s nothing stopping you from getting your video content online for the world to see, so get uploading!