Chances are you are reading this blog because you are thinking about putting together a video. Maybe your company has a product that needs demonstrating or you are looking to increase sales and you heard video could help. Maybe your competitors are using video on their website and you need to stay ahead of the competition.

Whatever the reason, you need to be assured that the Massachusetts video production company you ultimately decide on will be a good fit for you. How do you know which company will be able to translate your ideas into a compelling video that will provide strong ROI?

Obviously Boston Digital Video wants to win your business. But before we start working with a client we ask questions to make sure there is a good fit; and you should too. You might have your own questions but here are the top five questions you need to ask before signing that agreement.

1. “Do you have experience working with companies in our industry and have you produced videos similar to what we are looking to put together?” Let’s say you represent a medical device company and want to put together a clinician training video for one of your devices. You want a video producer that has experience in medical device video production and has actually produced clinical training videos. Have them show you examples. This is your best way of knowing if your end product will come out the way you envisioned.

2. “Paint me a picture of the type of communication style and procedures you go through during the production process?” You want your video producer to be a seamless member of your team. You have a lot on your plate. Most of our clients hire a video production company like ours because we create a balance between keeping them in the loop and not bothering them too much with details that are usually handled during the pre-production and approval process.

3. “Does your company have the time and resources to complete our project on time and on budget?” Ask them how many other projects they are currently working on. Ask them what happens when they get busy. How will they stay on deadline? Do they have a team of people that can handle all the elements that go into completing this type of project?

4. “If we decide to work together, can you provide creative and technical ideas and guide us through the entire production process?” That’s why you are hiring a Boston video production company. You are very good at what you do, though video production is not your expertise. You want the production company you hire to provide creative ideas such as content organization, motion graphics and distribution that will give you the best product for your budget.

5. “How much is this video going to cost?” There is never one way to put together a video and there are a series of factors that are involved in coming up with that final number. Always to be prepared with a number you can’t go over. The video budget is like buying a car. A no-frills Ford Fiesta is a basic car. It will get you from point A to point B but it won’t have a lot of style and it might not last very long. The Honda Accord is reliable, provides a comfortable ride and has some style. It also has more bells and whistles than the Ford Fiesta. A fully loaded Mercedes E Class will turn heads and have lots of bells and whistles. Your video should correspond to your audience and be a reflection of your company. A good MA video producer should never push a higher price if it won’t provide a solid ROI.

When you create a marketing program there is a balance between risk and control. With content marketing you can loose control via a video production or a podcast that spreads past your sales and marketing contacts but at the same time gain valuable experience. My colleague Manya Chylinski of Alley 424 Communications, a Boston MA writer, recently wrote a blog describing the constant evolution of content marketing.

When DVDs first came onto the video production scene, this Boston, Massachusetts corporate video producer couldn’t have been happier. This meant the end of VHS. Remember those? About 15 years ago, VHS was the standard mass produced video production delivery system. The good thing was they were fairly inexpensive to duplicate. The bad thing was that it transferred my superior digital video camera format and downgraded it to a lower analog format. Thank goodness those days are over.

DVDs became the standard format for distributing high quality video content. Even though the quality is good, you are limited to 4.7 gb. In addition, there are duplication and postage costs to consider.

The popularity and low cost of video production for the web has enabled me to market my industrial video production services and upload any short high definition web video. My clients either post them to their website or take advantage of video channels or social media sites such as YouTube, Face Book and Twitter.

Full service video production companies like ours still produce DVDs for businesses who either want to feel their B2B marketing or training video in their hands or want to mass produce their video production together with a snail mail marketing campaign. DVDs still have their place at this time but more clients are switching to internet based webvideos. With everything going on the cloud, I believe DVDs won’t be spinning much longer.

Man on the street interviews or MOS are a very cost effective market research techniques used to gather information from a specific target market. Let’s say you are company that wants to get a sense of your product’s response to the general public. A Boston, MA corporate video production company will go around with a camera crew and your product and perform random product testing.

These high definition video productions rarely find their way to a company’s website or used in a social media context such as Twitter, Face Book and YouTube. These business video productions are typically limited to corporate executives in a conference room. There is nothing more powerful than presenting fresh product market research to to your product marketing team in order to define the needs of the market place.

A type of corporate video production produced by video production houses are internal industrial web videos, viewed on a company’s intranet and aimed primarily at employees. These videos are a very efficient way for a CEO or other corporate executive to present information quickly and in an interesting manner.

Let’s say your company just acquired another company and you need to get your employees up to speed quickly on the merger. Especially employees who are outside the general Boston, Massachusetts area. An internal corporate web video production will give your current employees an insight into the acquired company quickly and with detailed streaming video demonstrations on the new company’s capabilities.

Other examples of employee video productions for the web include sexual harassment in the workplace, codes of conduct, internal website video press releases and safety information webvideos. These online business videos can also be utilized on YouTube, Twitter and Face Book.

Most companies who understand the power of video production services realize that online web videos serve basically two functions. Either it directly or indirectly brings in more business or intercepts missed opportunities.

Product demonstration video productions are an extremely useful medium for showing products in action. Do you or your sales team have difficulty describing one or more of your products? Are you usually only able to close a deal by bringing a prospect to your location to demonstrate your product? It’s not always possible to fly a prospect out to your location. Are those missed opportunities? Corporate video production services seems to work best when a product is either too large to take on a sales call or to a trade show or it’s functionality needs further demonstration than what is described in a white paper. Boston, Massachusetts area companies that usually benefit from a streaming website video production include the medical device and life science / biotech industries, electronic and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), software companies and green tech / alternative energy and power companies.

Business training videos can save a company money through repetitive education. Imagine your sales team is attending a national sales meeting. They are fired up with all this new product knowledge. As you probably know, this energy doesn’t last long. In a few weeks your sales reps have forgotten much of what they have learned and refuse to read the manuals. Now imagine one of your sales reps is ready to go on a sales call and needs to recall a lot of product knowledge prior to this call. What if they were in their car, sitting in the parking lot of their prospect and could review an updated industrial online training video describing step by step how to close this specific type of deal? Could this type of intensive internet video production help your sales team review necessary information and close more deals? Are these missed opportunities?

A corporate video production for the web can serve other purposes such as marketing, education, mass communications and information distribution. But when a company is looking at their marketing and training budget for the new fiscal year, it still comes down to making more money and avoiding missed opportunities.

PowerPoint has always been the standard software for presentation professionals. Preparing for a PowerPoint presentation takes time and practice. You also have to physically be in front of your audience to give your presentation. In this web based, online virtual world we live in, wouldn’t it be great to allow anyone to see your presentation on the internet at anytime? In the past, the choices to sync a video presenter and a PowerPoint presentation have been limited. One option has been to have an industrial web video producer or corporate video production services company video tape the presenter and physically pan the camera over to the PP slides when appropriate then create an online streaming video file. The problem with this method is the audience watching this presentation can get a bit dizzy watching the camera pan so often. Another method is to extract the PowerPoint slides and edit them into the appropriate place of the video presentation. This method is time consuming and expensive and PP slides slightly degrade when embedded into a video presentation, especially when there is a lot of detail in the slide. Another drawback to both of these methods is that jumping from slide to slide in real time is both time consuming and tedious.

Boston Digital Video, a MA video production company has teamed up with a company that has completely revolutionized the way we sync video and PowerPoint together.

When the user logs into their presentation, a window similar to the image above comes up. On the top left is the video presentation, the top right is the PowerPoint, the bottom left is a table of contents of the slides and the bottom right are thumbnails of each slide.

When the user plays the video, the PowerPoint will automatically sync up with the video production content. If the user wants to navigate to a different slide in the presentation, they simply click the appropriate slide in the table of contents or thumbnail section.

This  software also allows for logos and branding of your company. A nice feature is the slider on the top right which allows the user to make the PowerPoint slide larger and the video image smaller or vice versa. The size of the windows can be adjusted ahead of time by your corporate video production services company.

This type of B2B webvideo presentation is excellent for an internet video production, video marketing strategies, mobile video productions or professional customer service training videos. Imagine if you could enable your entire sales team to brush up on sales techniques prior to a sales meeting. This means updated and continuous sales training even months after a national sales meeting.

These presentation can also be embedded into a website, a Twitter page or Face Book page.

Boston Digital Video and videographer Jerold Gelfand, a Massachusetts web video producer created a customer service training video for North Atlantic Corporation and Cooper Stairworks. This demonstration webvideo provides a detailed step by step process on putting together a pre-fabricated spiral staircase. Contractors use this YouTube video to assist in creating the staircase out in the field. They watch it on their iPhones and iPads and trouble shoot on-location which helps overall customer satisfaction of the product.

The beginning of the media production consisted of the entire staircase build up in time-laps mode. The professional video script was written and story-boarded prior to the custom video production. Instead of shooting in a video production studio, we shot right in their warehouse. A black backdrop was used to isolate the product and enhance the overall MA video production. Post production music was used in the beginning of the piece to enhance the overall marketing of the product and add a promotional element.

This program also works as an online marketing video showing the ease of construction.

This post is part of a series on putting together a business video production. Your online video marketing script has finally been signed off. All decision makers have given their input and before any post production or editing services begin, the time has come to professionally voice your web video script.

Some clients, when trying to trim a budget think that not using a professional VO media production talent can save them money. The reality is that using someone in your office with just a “good voice” will end up costing you more to produce your high definition online video. In fact I only use pros when recording a B2B video production script.  The money you save in doing the voice yourself will go back into the project in the form of longer voice over sessions, amateurish mistakes, word mispronunciations, low sound quality and longer editing. When quality is important, voice over is never the place to make budget cuts.

Many creative video production voice talents work out of their home. They convert a closet into a recording studio, use state of the art recording equipment and provide a live phone tap so multiple decision makers can hear the recording session during a conference call.

It doesn’t matter what industry you work in, either life science, medical device, software, or original equipment manufacturing. Whether the final is a webvideo or DVD video production, finding the right voice to compliment your promotional video script comes with experience. A good rule of thumb in corporate digital video production for the web is to have the voice blend with all the other multimedia elements in your final video or DVD. The voice shouldn’t be over powering or under performing. Think about why you are marketing with video, who is your audience and why are they watching this mobile video production. The voice quality in customer service training videos will be much different than a marketing strategy piece, viral video or even a direct response television video. Sometimes a female voice will work best and other times a male voice will add just the right touch. Think about who your target is. Will this internet video marketing piece be shown in Boston Massachusetts,  nationally or have a global interest? Creating multiple versions of your internet video with different languages might be cost effective in reaching your target audience. Even other English speaking countries have different dialects. A North American voice over talent might not be effective in Britain.

What ever voice style you decide on, ask for choices. Have your professional corporate Massachusetts video production company hold auditions. Let your videographer or web video producer filter out the weak applicants and then choose from the best of the best.

A lot goes on behind the scenes during the big video production shoot day. In past blogs I have talked about different aspects of the corporate video pre-production process. That is a general term that corresponds to preparations before any video production and editing. I have talked about location and production scouting, interview prep, finalizing on-camera streaming video presentations and coordinating on-camera experts. You also want to make sure to conference with internal staff and prepare them with on-camera information.

The day before the web video shoot, your Boston videographer and online video producer are busy making sure video camera equipment is in tip-top shape. They are re-formatting digital media and making room on their hard drives for original footage and backups. They are double-checking with their videography crew and talent to make sure everything is ready to go with all aspects of the streaming video shoot. These might include packing up video production equipment, picking up any rental gear if necessary, and confirming date, location and meeting times. Your video production co might also be doing some last minute script and storyboard markups and inputting teleprompter scripts.

At the same time, the client is making sure the conference room is reserved, scripts have been approved and props for the corporate video shoot are available for the actual shoot day. They might also need to have a member of the compliance team on hand to make sure the proper language and procedures are being adhered to. All this preparation is done by you and your web video services so your shoot runs smoothly. The video production shoot(s) are a significant part of your budget so you want to get it right the first time. If time is spent during pre-production, the webvideo shoot will most likely run smoothly.

The morning of the shoot has arrived. Call time is set and everything is in place. Typically the videographer and crew are setting up equipment and your MA video producer is working with the client on last minute details. This is the time to go over the storyboard one more time to catch last minute snags and consolidate the shot list. This is also the time to finalize your video production schedule for the day. Don’t forget lunch. Pizza delivery is a wonderful thing.

Someone on the crew will be acting as the “bull whip” to make sure everyone stays on schedule. A good internet video producer is always aware of the clock and is responsible for keeping things moving. If a snag happens, the web video producer will work with the corporate video production team and avoid downtime at all costs. All attention now needs to be placed on making sure visuals and sound are perfect.

At the end of the day, you shot your last scene, the talent did an award winning performance and the products actually worked as they were supposed to.  You even ended ahead of schedule. At that point you realized that you hired the right online video production company.