Scadge TV

UK Web Video is Scadge’s new website dedicated to online sales presentation videos. Having a high quality video on your home page is proven to keep website visitors engaged for up to 7 times longer that just text and image based sites. It can also improve conversion rates by up to 80% by giving clear information about products and services.

Recent surveys have shown that website visitors are 3 times more likely to replay an online video than click on a static image advert. And, 64% of website visitors take some action after viewing an online video. Also, the impression of people’s brand identity is improved dramatically by having video – the survey showed that 32% of respondents stated that online video helped make a brand appear more innovative, another 32% said that brands appeared more creative and 30% thought the brand was more fun.

A simple internet search will reveal many more benefits of having web video, including creating more engaging social network interactions, and providing interesting content for smartphone apps. Just take a look for yourself.

Virtual race against the fastest man on earth

Ironbridge Sports, Science, Life festival on Saturday 23rd July 2011 were treated to lots of great sporting activities including archery, fencing, cricket, climbing wall, and various tests of agility.

We decided to put our green screen expertise to the test and created a virtual “Beat the Bolt” race where people could challenge the fastest man on earth in a virtual race over 100 metres. Usain Bolt’s current record is 9.58 seconds so people’s legs had to be quick to catch him.

The equipment was set up in the covered bays area near Enqinuity and we also marked out Usain’s huge 2.44 metre stride length and the distance he can cover in just 1 second (4.28 steps x 2.44m = 10.44m). For those who wanted to know, Usain is 6ft 5in tall (1.96m), hence the rather large stride length.

Thanks to all of those who challenged the Bolt!

Want a flashy moving avatar on Twitter? It makes your tweets stand out and gives you a chance to show something other than a flat boring image of you or your business.

So, how’s it done?

Well, the obvious way is to use an animated GIF file (an image file that supports individual frames, like a movie), but, Twitter doesn’t allow them! But there is a workaround – if you create an animated GIF and rename it as .PNG Twitter uploads it no problem. However, you still need to keep it less than 700k in size (or whatever the current Twitter image size limit is) and some very flashy images (not exactly sure why) just won’t upload.

So technically, how did we create ours?

Firstly, create the basic movie sequence. we started with a video motion graphics package (Adobe After Effects) because we wanted to create something a bit different and After Effects makes anything possible. You could use any software that can generate sequences of frames or movie files. Just bear in mind that Twitter avatars are square, so you need to either create a square movie, or allow for it to be cropped at the edges. Our sequence was initially created at 788 x 788 frame size. Also consider that file size will be smaller if the animation duration is short – we used 2 seconds @ 25 frames per second, so 50 frames in total.

Secondly, render it out as a movie. Once we’d developed our basic sequence (we made the sequence have a common start/end point so that it can be looped without “jumping”), we rendered the movie out of After Effects as a movie file (any format will do – we chose Quicktime .MOV). We could have rendered it out directly as an animated GIF but After Effects is usually aimed at rendering Hollywood quality movies so isn’t good at producing low resolution files that would be smaller than 700k. The actual .MOV file we created was over 23mb…

Convert the movie and reduce the file size. In order to produce a good quality animated GIF which is small enough to satisfy Twitter we used Photoshop CS5 extended. This has some advanced tools for handling movie files and rendering out for the web. In Photoshop, you can open up a movie file, so we just did File -> Open and browsed to our .MOV file. Photoshop recognised that it is a movie file and treats it differently to a standard flat image.

Within Photoshop CS5 there is an option File -> Save for web & devices. If you don’t see this option you may not have the full Photoshop extended version. You can use other graphics software if it is capable of handling media files. After selecting File -> Save for web & devices there are 3 things you need to do:- a) change the output format to GIF, b) change the “looping options” to “forever”, c) change the Image Size down until the file size shows less than 700k (Photoshop estimates the file size based on the settings in the “Save for web & devices” screen. When changing the image size, keep the Width and Height locked so they both change in sync. If the file size won’t get within 700k without being unreasonably small you may need to change the number of colours in the image – Photoshop provides a “Colors” dropdown box to change the colour resolution – typically you may find your movie file is at 256 colours but you can reduce it down to say 64 without losing much detail. This will hugely reduce the file size. There are plenty of other parameters that Photoshop gives you to tweak your image if needed. You can also step through each frame of the animation or play it completely from the timeline playback buttons within the “Save for web & devices” screen to see how it looks.

When you’re happy, and the filesize is within 700k, click “save” to render out the finished GIF file. Once it is created you can test it in a browser by right clicking (in Windows) and choosing “open with…” and selecting your preferred browser. The GIF file should play back as an animation within the browser.

Rename the .GIF as .PNG then edit your Twitter profile and upload it as the image. It may take a minute or two depending on your internet connection speed. If Twitter is happy it will change your profile avatar, otherwise it will show a “broken image” graphic as your avatar. In this case you’ll need to tweak your GIF file in Photoshop, repeating the steps above, to try to get Twitter to be happy. In our experience, image sequences which are too long (ours is 50 frames, i.e. 2 seconds at 25fps), or contain lots of changing colours can cause problems.

So, in summary:-

1. Create a movie file of your avatar

2. convert the movie to .GIF and reduce the file size

3. rename .GIF as .PNG

4. Upload to Twitter

NOTE: there are other ways of achieving all of this, e.g. you can render out a PNG sequence directly and you could use Photoshop to create every single frame. We can’t guarantee any of the above works, and we don’t advise doing any of this if it contravenes any Twitter terms of use.

IF THIS BLOWS YOUR MIND OR YOU DON’T HAVE TIME BUT STILL WANT AN ANIMATED TWITTER AVATAR:-

We’ll develop one for you for £50 + vat, or do one free for you if you spend £500 or more on a promo video with us during 2011….