Mohamed Ibrahim’s Blog

Youtube changed the internet. News segments, ads, and homes for sale are not being posted as videos on youtube. Increasingly, I’m noticing home videos being added. Since I did a video for my listing, I’ll describe my experience and things that I learned - which might be helpful to others.

When I looked on youtube, I noticed that most videos are being shot using a video camera held by hand. My advice is to use a tripod. Carrying the camera by hand makes it wobble and it becomes harder on the viewer to focus on details.

The second advice is to rotate the camera slowly by hand. If you can record the video non-interlaced, it will be better.

The third advice is to shoot the video in segments. Do not try to shoot one big piece of video. Visit every room or ares in the house by itself. If you have a wide angle lens it will produce a much better video than normal lenses. Also, for sunrooms or large basements shoot from a lower hieght.

A simple video maker is enough to put your real estate compilation together. I used Microsoft Video Maker, the one that shipped on my home windows XP on the DELL laptop. There are many more professional video editors, including GPLed / open-source ones like kdenlive or Cinelerra .

When composing the video give introductions for a couple of seconds, who you are & what’s your phone number. Before every video segment, write a caption screen describing what is the next segment is about. You can use a creative commons licensed piece of music for your background, while your video is playing.

At the very end, make sure to place a summary and information about you and your company - as well as equal housing opportunity (may be even you want to place the icon all the way on the video).

Finally, upload your video to as much video sites. Insert the video to your weblog, and make sure to write well about the listing. The process is not hard, but time consuming. Every time you’ll update the video you’ll want to see the preview at minimum. Sometimes after composing the final version, other factors will show and you’ll modify the timeline again.

Remember to generate a low bandwidth version of the video - not all the people have DSL and FiOS.

Today I posted the Boland Farm listing in Germantown maryland video on you tube.