I recently ran across Animoto, a new ultra hip slide show creation site which was reviewed at  Sellsius the Real Estate Blog Lab and GeekeStateBlog.  After seeing some of Sellsius's and Dave's creations I set out to mix one myself.  Here's what I came up with:

This is an ultrafast and upbeat style tour which I would say would be the perfect tempo for homebuyers who are always on the go. The best places to showcase these tours would be in Facebook or Myspace. I have had a lot of experience with video editing tools such as Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, and Final Cut and I could put together these slideshows myself from scratch, but it would take me hours instead of minutes. This is where Animoto rocks! It took me only 10 minutes to get a slideshow produced and online. I even put it on our Single Property Website demo here. The production flow is simple and the rendering time is decent. Another neat feature is it allows you to upload your own soundtrack for further customization.

Pricing is not that bad either:

This was produced using the 30-sec version, but you can get longer shows for $30/yr.

Since this is so easy to create, you might want to make it anyways even if you already have another virtual tour created for your primary sites. This allows you to segment your market by showing different tours to different customer groups.

Start a tour now and enjoy!

Popularity: 40% [?]

All of Realivent's Single Property Sites are now video enabled. This means you can embed videos that you've uploaded to YouTube or you can upload directly from within your own website admin panel. You can see a sample video enabled site here.

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In my quest to make perfect homemade videos, I ran across a very cool tool to remove your shaky hands when walking. The great part is that it’s completely free, works well, and fairly easy to use. It’s called Deshaker, and it’s a filter used in Virtual Dub (Free Video Editor)

Going back to the beginning of my quest for the perfect homemade video, (TPHV) from now on, I have a sony DCR-SR40. It’s nice but of course when I was buying it, I had these great ideas about making videos for youtube, DVD’s, and movies, but this camera will just not do the kind of quality that I was hoping for. It has a 30 gig hard drive which is nice, and a large viewing/touchscreen to configure the camera…of course most of the time I’m using “Easy mode”. One of the first posts on this blog was a video post of my talking about how I was going to make more video posts. Well, this is my second post about videos. I’m trying to do more, but I’ve been having trouble with my lighting, and I just don’t look good on camera, even though I’ve dressed up and tried make-up…:)

The biggest problem I have is lighting. It seems that inside my house there just is not enough lighting and all the videos look bad. I have tried bringing in lights, but then you get shadows, anyhow, I’m working on it, and hopefully I will figure it out and start making some video casts soon.

Back to this cool Deshaker tool. Deshaker is a filter that you run in Virtual Dub that removes the shakes out of your video. The process is simple, load you AVI video, run the first pass to build a log file on the frame locations, and then run the second pass to smooth out the video. The first pass take a while to complete, but the second pass is much quicker, and you can run the second pass over and over until you get the desired effects without have to run pass one again.

here is a sample, 2 videos before and after of me walking around my car.

With the Shakes

Shake Free after Deshaker

First let’s get Deshaker…
Download both of these
Homepage for Deshaker: http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm
Download Virtual Dub: http://www.VirtualDub.org/download

Unzip all the files for VDub into a folder. There is no install for Vdub, when you want to use it just click on VirtualDub.exe in your VDub folder. Inside the Vdub folder you will see a plugins folder. unzip the Deshaker file into the plugin folder.

Now you are ready to dehake.
Open Vdub, and load a video. (must be AVI). Then in the top menu go to video->filters click add, and load the deshaker filter. Once the filter is loaded, select it and click on configure. This will open a screen like this (click to enlarge)

The setting in this image are the setting that I used for the sample videos. Go ahead and use the same setting when deshaking your videos. You can go the dehaker homepage for more information about all the setting. I also hit more info below.

When configuring the filter, you start with the input video.
You will most likely use this as an Source pixel aspect: Standard NTSC (0.912)
For Video Type: Interlaced, Lower field first
You can put the log file anywhere on your computer, I just leave it on C:/

Now for the 1st Pass
click on pass 1, if not selected so you can edit Pass 1 fields.
Most of this will stay default.
Change Scale to Full, and change Use Pixels to All

Now for 2nd Pass.
Click the big pass 2 button.
Make the Destination Pixel Aspect the same as your input (Standard NTSC (0.912))
Make Destination Video Size = to input, or in Most cases 720×480
Change Edge Compensation = None (Large Borders)
Check the box for Use previous and future frames to fill in borders, and leave the previous and future frames at 30
Motion Smoothness…This is what removes the shakes. Setting all to 0 will make the output look exactly like the input video. You should change these in increments of 3000. I leave zoom at 0 and set all the other to 3000…The highest you want to go is 18,000 for smoothness.
Set all Max Correction limits to 99

Again, look at the image for all these configuration numbers.

Important** Click on Pass 1 button, then click on OK…you need to run your first pass.

close the filter window, and make sure the video is at the beginning, and play for output…Make sure you press the play button with the ‘0′ on it, third button from left

it will take a while for the first pass to complete. Once it is done, open the filter window and go to the configuration of the deshaker filter again. click on the Pass 2 button. You should already have this configured so you are ready to run your second pass. Click OK, and close the filter window.

Make sure you are at the beginning of the video again. Choose your codec, by clicking on video->compression. I choose Cinepak Codec because it makes the video byte size small.

Then Click on file->Save as AVI

The second pass is much faster and, you can run it over and over without changing your first pass to fine tune your video. I was suprised to see Sony Vegas didn’t have this filter, but this works great, it’s free.

Source Articles: http://premiere.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=28849

Popularity: 8% [?]