From the course: Multi-Platform Video Producing

Content acquisition

From the course: Multi-Platform Video Producing

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Content acquisition

- Okay, let's talk about planning. Big picture goals are what it's all about when you start with your planning. So, think about everything you are acquiring as a pool of assets. Everything that you could make with them is a group of outputs. There are a variety of important assets that you can acquire when building a story. These include things like interviews, background footage that we sometimes call b-roll, live content, stock imagery or other pre-existing content like graphics and logos, and of course behind-the-scenes photos and footage which can also include in-the-moment social posts from your shoot. The outputs can include livestream content, short packaged content that goes into the livestream and then lives on the web afterwards, long-form videos, social platform advertisements, teasers, promos, you name it. In order to cut up and repurpose all these assets in different ways, it's important to remember that generally speaking, the more pixels you can acquire up front for video and the better quality of audio, the greater your flexibility on the backend. So, let's take a moment to talk about 4K and 4K UHD and how they relate to previous digital video acquisition formats. We're gonna come back to this when we talk about making technical decisions before you shoot. On this chart, I've shown you the relative pixel sizes of formats that we video professionals know in short hand as 720, 1080, 2K, 2K UHD, 4K, and 4K UHD. So, you can see from my chart the relationships and the sizes differ dramatically. Obviously, 2K is half as many pixels as 4K. So, here's the bottom line. When you are acquiring your footage, acquiring your audio, try to get the maximum pixels you can for your budget and also the best possible audio quality you can. So, really right now I would say that 4K or 4K UHD for video and 48 kilohertz for audio. We'll do a deeper dive into both audio and video specs in those segments of the course. So, when somebody sends me their 24 kilobyte Facebook photos and wants them incorporated into a 4K video that we're gonna be projecting on a large screen, you can see why I have to tell them it's just not gonna work. They would just look like blurry blobs compared to all the other content around them. So, this is why when acquiring photographic assets for video and social media projects, you might wanna shoot high resolutions so that you have the flexibility to make smaller versions for social, but can still use the high res versions in your video. And you can change those settings on your phone. Conversely, if you wanna make screen grabs from your video and let's say use them in a print campaign, you're gonna be disappointed in how poor they look unless you're shooting in 4K. So, if you take only one thing from this course, it is acquire the most pixels you can for your budget and the best audio you can at the outset of your project. You can't go back and add missing audio range or pixels that aren't there in the first place. We're gonna dive deeply into this in our audio and video segments of the course.

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