I’ve spent thousands of words on video strategy covering everything from production to social sharing to types of videos.

Enough! No more strategy today. It’s time to get tactical about online presentations.

It’s time to just document exactly what I do to put an online presentation together. Let’s pull back that curtain, so to speak, and go behind the scenes. Yes, I know, it’s a cliche.

View The Presentation Here.

It all starts with an idea.

Sometimes it’s something I see in industry news, related to the video presentation or production industry, or social media, or marketing, or sales.

It could be an event that happens, or something big in the news, like company A buying company B and ‘what does it mean?’ for the rest of us.

It could be a thought that’s been bugging me for awhile. Those are the best, because they’re already internalized and don’t have to be cobbled together from new research.

Then the work begins.

Say I, like most people, hate when I open a granola or chocolate bar and get those annoying little tags to throw away. So I google it and find out there’s a better way. And it also makes it easier to avoid all those crumbs.

See what I did there? Real research. So the next thing I do is try to support it by finding other sources of research. Then I’ll pick the two or three I trust the most or are the most relevant to the discussion, and use them as supporting links.

Writing is a craft.

And like anything you can do well, it requires technique. Some of that is the technique we all learned in high school, like paragraphs must flow from one to the next in a predictable manner.

The way to open a granola bar is to pull the wrapper apart at one end and push it through. If you try to tear the crimped, you usually get this annoying tag and the granola won’t come out.

See? That made no sense.

It’s important to discuss the point, support the point, then reiterate the point. It’s that old sales chestnut: “Tell people what you’re going to say, say it, then remind them what you said.”

See what I did there? Humor is not necessary, which is probably what you’re thinking right now.

Once I’ve got an article written, I’ll turn it into a blog post, an email, a set of social updates, a chapter for a paper, and a script. It’s the script I want to show you now. This is the script for this video you’re watching right now.

Let’s Make A Video!

Now, I use a mobile device to import the script into an app called Prompter Plus. There are other teleprompter type applications. The app lets you switch the way the text scrolls and even ties to an iPhone (using Bluetooth) to control how fast it goes.

Then I go to my studio where I’ve got all kinds of equipment. This is the DV and HDV camera, but I’m not using the tapes anymore. If I go remote, like to the parking lot, maybe. But in the studio it’s Firewire.

Straight to the Mac. Why is it always Mac? Because they’re hip and sleek and cool and we all want to be hip and sleek and cool, right?

I run Adobe Premiere Pro, which I’d love to go into more detail on but that’s a whole new topic. Once your settings match the output of the camera, all you have to do is turn the camera on, plug in the microphone through the camera or a separate preamp.

And then you go into Capture mode. Press record and go.

I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, yeah, Teleprompter:

“When designing for mobile devices, the most critical component is intuition. There’s not a lot of room on a tablet, and people need to know intuitively what buttons they are supposed to press to make things happen.”

After the gig is done, the captured video becomes a clip you can edit, while the talent goes on to bigger and better things.

It’s time to edit. Usually, I just clip out the junk at the beginning while I set up. Then I clip the end. If there are any issues with the video, I’ll make some adjustments, save and export the video file. By the way, I make my videos h.264 mp4 in 720 x 540 resolution.

Now it’s time for PowerPoint.

Do you really want to see how I create a PowerPoint?

And that’s kind of it. From there, you can do anything. The sky is the limit. All you need is a camera, presentation software, video editing tools, and an idea.

Oh, and a few granola bars.

Thanks for watching!

Originally published on The KnowledgeVision Fresh Ideas Blog.