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Unit 4, 5 and 62 Assignment 1

Task 1 – Proposal

I have been asked to produce a promotional video for a department within my college. The first

work that I’ve been asked to do is to produce a proposal on how digital video technology could be

used to help promote and advertise the college promotional video required for me to produce.

Advertising

Video advertisement has been tremendously growing over the past couple of years; studies have

continued to show how people consume more and more contents such as videos and other forms of

media when online. Therefore, it would make sense to birth into the online video promotion scene

more and use the internet as a promotional tool. Video advertising is not only more effective and

one of the easiest methods to market, but may also end up costing you less money in the long run.

Just like any other sort of advertising methods, you will need to reach your target audience with

online video advertisement. In this case, it is students/parents looking for colleges and education

related searches/websites. This brings us to the next topic at hand, which are professional

advertising agencies that advertise online for you, Such as Google or Microsoft. The amazing feature

about using professional services is that they’ll know where to advertise your video in order to reach

your target audience by advertising on the right websites. The costs for video advertising using

advertising agencies depends on how long your videos is, what type of websites it is used on, and

how often you want it to be used.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing in brief is a marketing technique that encourages people to pass along and share a

marketing message, in order to actually make the product/advertisement go viral across the internet

(have a large amount of views). Viral marketing revolves around the concept that an idea can go viral

just by a number of people sharing it at first, and then if that idea has a high pass-along from person

to person then that idea can go viral. Viral marketing works kind of like a snowball effect and if the

pass-along rate slows down then the overall growth will quickly die down. There are two different

types of viral marketing; viral memes and viral platforms. Viral memes are advertisements that get

spread across the internet because they capture the viewer’s interest; they have something unique

to them that make them stand out, something that makes the viewer smile. Viral platforms on the

other hand are unique as in the marketing is the product; they have their own individual platforms,

think websites like Hotmail, PayPal, YouTube, Facebook. Viral platforms work in a way that if more

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people use them, the more people see them. A major difference between viral memes and viral

platforms is that when viral platforms get more and more popular, the functionality of the website

increases as well. Therefore, since the utility of the website increases as more people join in on the

website, the growth leads to staying power. This growth effect creates a perfect viral approach and

provides long term utility and fast adoption.

Examples for viral memes:

Microsoft unveils new look (2, 443,501 Million views on YouTube) –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkZWvAJUr0&feature=player_embedded

M&M super bowl commercial (22,112,288 Million views on YouTube) –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q33drZUXSzY

Examples for viral platforms:

http://www.hotmail.com

http://paypal.com

Short Films

When film production was originally starting up, all films were short. The audience was not

particularly really bothered or aware of this as they were stunned at man’s latest technological

achievement. The early motion pictures of technology used to be usually 40 minutes or less.

However, in today’s age and time short films still have a purpose and a category of their own. For

instance, Pixar has screened a short along each of its feature films during its initial theatrical run

since 1995. Disney has also produced animated shorts since 2007 with a series of live action ones

featuring The Muppets for viewing on YouTube as viral videos to promote the 2011 movie of the

same name. Short films are ideal to be used for advertising campaigns and are perfect for viral

marketing due to the clip being short so therefore grabbing the short attention span of internet

viewers but at the same time long enough to tell a story and produce a gimmick that could catch

along and make the video go viral.

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Technology:

Digital Video Capture

Video’s captured that is done by a video camera or a DVD Player and the signal of the video

produced by these devices have an analog video signal. Digital video capture is the process of

converting that analog video signal into a digital video. The resulting digital data are computer files

referred to as a digital video stream, or more often, simply video stream. This is different from

screencasting, in which previously digitized video is captured while displayed on a digital monitor.

Lossy and Loseless compression

Lossless compression, as the name implies, means that after compressing the video, and then

decompressing it, you wind up with the exact same data as you put in. This is comparable to

something like ZIP or RAR. Lossless has the advantage that no matter how many times you compress

it, you still haven't lost any video data. The bad part is that most often you don't save nearly as much

space as you would with other lossy compression algorithms. There are many different lossless

codecs these days.

Lossy compression is the form of video compression most people are familiar with. 95% of all video

codecs out there are lossy, meaning that when you compress the video and then decompress it, you

do not get back what you put it. Now, this isn't as bad as it may sound. Obviously if you're

compressing something like a text document, you don't want to lose any of the data, but with

something like a picture, even if a few bits and pieces aren't quite right, you can still make out the

generally gist of the image.

Different video file formatsFile extensions- Videos are designed, created and finally stored by using many different file

types and extensions. A few common video file types with their extensions are:

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File

Extension

File type Description

.avi audio video

interleave

The AVI format stores data that can be encoded in a number of different

codec’s and can contain both audio and video data. The AVI format usually

uses less compression than some similar formats and is a very popular

format amongst internet users.

.swf SWF An Adobe Flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and Action

Script. It originates from FutureWave Software, and then transferred to

Macromedia. SWF files contain animations or applets of varying degrees of

interactivity and function.

.mov Movie The QuickTime format was developed by Apple and is a very common one.

It is often used on the internet, and for saving movie and video files.

.mp4 MPEG-4 This format is mostly used to store audio and visual streams online, most

commonly those defined by MPEG. It Expands MPEG-1 to support

video/audio "objects", 3D content, low bit rate encoding and support for

Digital Rights Management.

.wmv Windows

Media File

Format

It was originally designed for internet streaming applications, and can now

cater to more specialized content. Windows Media is a common format on

the Internet, but Windows Media movies cannot be played on non-

Windows computer without an extra (free) component installed.

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Media Players

Flash: The Adobe Flash Player is made by Macromedia, it is

essential to run any sort of .swf files in a web browser. It is

basically a flash player that plays the files that are created by

flash. The Adobe flash player is free of charge and is a cross-

platform browser plug-in.

QuickTime: QuickTime can play a different variety of formats

such as; digital video, media clips, animation, text, music and etc.

It is available for Mac and Windows operating systems. Quick

time is produced and distributed by Apple.

Windows Media Player: Produced by Microsoft to originally

support .wmv files but then later was mass produced for

windows and is available for free with every copy of windows.

It is available only for Windows OS but can be used on Mac OS

with free plugins that are available.

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