Try Video Clips on http://staging.tourbuzz.net

Hi Everyone,

You can now try our new video clips feature on the Demo server.

http://staging.tourbuzz.net

Username is the same as your current username

Password: everyones password is 1234

The tours you create are for demo purposes only and will only be available for a few days! Each video clip is limited to 10M.


To learn more about video file sizes please use these Vimeo resources: http://vimeo.com/help/compression


 We will launch video clips on TourBuzz as soon as we have thoroughly tested the feature on the Demo server. 

Thanks for your help.

Paul

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Permalink Reply by TourBuzz Support on December 28, 2011 at 9:53am

I'll add a little bit more information about the new Video Clips feature...

First of all, we understand that video tours have been trendy for a few years now and that a well-produced video tour basically looks like an HGTV show. However, producing a tour that looks that great is outside of the budget of 99% of listings. Even Fred Light's video tours, which are widely respected, start at $249 without any still photos at all. And his technique, while it is profitable for him, took him a bit of time to develop and get efficient at.

So while we do think video tours have their place and we will be adding support for longer-format video tours in the future, we think a more practical reality for the use of video in tours exists, and we call it "Tactical Video."

Tactical video includes shooting maybe 5 clips of 5-10 seconds each. This might be things like the front door swinging open, an outdoor slide shot, the pool with the water moving around, a faucet with the water running, video pans (it's very easy to do a partial pan via video as opposed to actual panoramas), etc. These clips can be processed in our system like existing panos and stills; just upload them and they can be sorted anywhere in the tour. Then you can continue to use stills and panos to show off high-definition and well-exposed shots of the rest of the listing.

  • Video Clips will be re-encoded in 720p (HD) and a 480x320 format for mobile devices.
  • Video Clip uploads must be < 10MB in size; we recommend encoding in H.264 after you edit the clip for best results.
  • Video Clips are intended to be short (5-30 seconds) segments to help add a new level of professionalism and polish to your tours.
  • Video Clips allow you to use video for what it's best at while using stills and panos where they are more appropriate.
  • Video Clips are great for:  agent intro to the listing as a pre-roll on the tour, door-opening shots, simple "slide" shots, pools, lakes, oceans, sunsets, video partial panoramas, etc.
  • Video Clips can be placed anywhere in the tour. They appear in the editing area and the client panel just like photos and stills. They work in offline tours.
  • After you add a Video Clip to the tour, you can edit the thumbnail and mark the video as "including branding" if you need it to be left out of the unbranded tour.
  • There is a new preference for "Allow Video Download" which is off by default.

We have tried to make the new video clips feature as seamlessly integrated into the tour as all of our other features. We think that this new feature will allow you to improve your service, increase your revenues, defend against competition, and delight your customers.

We look forward to your feedback and we hope to have it launched to the live site shortly!

Alan

Permalink Reply by Virtual Tours Ottawa on December 28, 2011 at 12:38pm

I was looking forward to having the capability of providing a Fred Light type walkthrough tour with a new Tourbuzz interface. Not happy with the limitations identified above.  I have a lot of knowledge with respect to video for real estate and I am a little surprised that this is the product you have decided to develop.  Is there really demand for short video clips like this?  

Why not just offer the following; one of your slick new skins with a 'video icon' that opens up a youtube/vimeo/iplayerhd window inside of the tourbuzz skin....this way we would have everything in one place...stills and video. Or better yet make video the focus and have an icon for 'still' images. Seems so simple...but I must be missing something.

Permalink Reply by TourBuzz Support on December 28, 2011 at 12:57pm

That is coming next, and shortly. 

We talked to a lot of photographers about video and very few of them were interested in full video tours. Most photographers have been of the opinion that full video tours are harder to shoot and more expensive to produce, making them a more limited market than traditional photo tours with a "video clips" upsell option.

Of course as I mentioned in the original post, we know that some photographers want the option for full video tours as well, and they will be out shortly. We have to find a reasonable way to integrate them into the tour interface.

Are you doing video tours already? What are the key features you would like to see TourBuzz have in our video hosting system?

Permalink Reply by Virtual Tours Ottawa on December 28, 2011 at 3:07pm

Hi Paul,

Yes, we are doing video tours.  The key features that I would like to see are as follows;

1) An interface(skin) that integrates video and still's. Something simple that allows the user to choose to view the stills or video. I can send you a sample of a design...but basically there are tabs where the used can switch between stills, video, maps.  I think with the focus/trend on video's, it would be nice to have the option to have video open vs the still's slideshow...or atleast the option.

2) If Tourbuzz is hosting the video the following features would be nice;auto detect devices, smartphone detections, unlimitied video length, url access to all video's, video embedding up to 1080p, export to youtube, analytics,etc.

3) If Tourbuzz is not hosting, allow us to embed a video into the skin/interface from youtube/vimeo/iplayerhd. 

Most of our videos, after rendering to 720p are around 2-3mins length, 200mb to 400mb in size.  All of my video's will have a custom intro/end designed in AE....so this add's a little size.

Permalink Reply by TourBuzz Support on December 28, 2011 at 4:24pm

Thanks for the details.

  1. Do you think 1080p is really that important? I played with it a bit myself and it's not a hugely noticeable difference, especially considering the additional cost/time/bandwidth required.
  2. We already auto-detect devices and serve appropriate content.
  3. We already allow download of the videos (that would be true for long-format videos, too).
  4. We are about to release automated YouTube integration.
  5. We are working on the skins. That's actually the hard part. We have to find a way to add this into all existing skins, and also we're going to be adding a "Photo Gallery" choice, too, so we will probably integrate all of these together at the same time.

I am also curious about cost; what would you expect to pay if it's hosted on our system? Video hosting is very expensive due to the large bandwidth and storage requirements. Vimeo of course is a for-pay hosting, but YouTube is free. Would you actually consider hosting your actual final video deliverables on YouTube *only* if it were cheaper? You aren't concerned about Google running ads on your tours?


Thanks,

Alan

Permalink Reply by Nathan Strauch on December 28, 2011 at 4:56pm

Just my 2 cents... but will take a dollar if you have it...

  1. I would have to say that 1080p is important, but I don't think that it's necessary for the TourBuzz product.  If a client needs 1080p, the production will almost never be for a web-based purpose.

  2. I don't like the idea of having a player within a player. (i.e. YouTube playing within a Tourbuzz player skin)  This will undoubtedly look patched together, and might undermine some of the syndication methods that many of us may currently use.

  3. Right now, if you have a Video Tour on an outside hosting platform, simply create a custom "Hotspot" Icon for it and link it within the TourBuzz platform.  Be sure to choose the "Open in a new window" option.
Permalink Reply by TourBuzz Support on December 28, 2011 at 5:08pm

The video player wouldn't be *inside* of the tourbuzz player; it would be in our skin but not inside the player. Tricky distinction but it's there. You wouldn't see 2 sets of play buttons or anything. If you were in the "Video" mode the current player would effectively be swapped out for the video player.

Permalink Reply by Virtual Tours Ottawa on December 28, 2011 at 5:10pm

 1080p...At this point, no...I only upload 720p. But with the intergration of smart TV's I think we will eventually want the ability to use 1080p...especially for TV's large than 40 inches.

Personally, I think the old skins are so old/antiquated that I wouldn't care if all old skins disappeared forever and they were replaced by a new, slick default skin....but there may be some people who disagree with this (-;

Based on what competitors charge for video $200-$300 a year. If you allowed us the option to use our own video host that would be perfect. 

As for the youtube ads...there are work around's to reduce or eliminate these.  I wouldn't use youtube as my sole video host.

Permalink Reply by TourBuzz Support on December 28, 2011 at 5:47pm

Great, thanks for the answers!

We've got 3 new skins coming very shortly, too! So hopefully those will provide some needed relief in the aesthetics department.

$200-300 per year is basically what iPlayerHD and Vimeo charge, however that's a *minimum*. Fred Light says he pays about $230 a month and has about 862 tours active. that's $2760 a year for his video hosting bill. 

We will stick with per-tour pricing for our video hosting. I think this model works well because you don't have to worry about overages or deleted old tours or anything; it's all paid for and all integrated, which makes it easy for you to factor it into your pricing to your clients.

Permalink Reply by Nathan Strauch on December 28, 2011 at 12:54pm

WOW!  Although the file size restrictions are somewhat prohibitive, this is a major step in this tech.  I just did a quick intro, and it works seamlessly with the tour.  This is a welcome improvement, and we will be using this feature often and at a premium.

Thanks TB!

Permalink Reply by TourBuzz Support on December 28, 2011 at 1:14pm

Awesome, thanks! The file sizes aren't actually too bad. You can do 20-30s of h.264 video under 10MB. The problem is more on having to encode it on your end.

There are some options we could explore so that you wouldn't have to re-encode just for upload, but then you would have a HUGE file to upload.

For instance, off my camera (Canon T3i), I only have options for 1080p @ 30fps or 720p @ 60fps. I am not sure why the 720p can't do 30fps. But anyway, the videos are huge, like 5.6MB/s! It's a 50,000kbps bitrate. So I cannot imagine people would even want to upload such a large file anyway due to the time, which means people will need to re-encode them anyway.

Modern h.264 encoders operate at near-real-time so it shouldn't be a huge time burden to output them in h.264 if you just know the proper settings. Vimeo has a nice guide on h.264 encoding settings for tons of video....

That said, we'd love feedback on how we can make the process easier. We definitely understand it might be annoying to have to squeeze video files under 10MB. We want to know how we can make this process easier for everyone. Our goal is to save you time and make you look good!

Permalink Reply by Mike Yother on December 28, 2011 at 2:07pm

Paul, this is great news.

 

Thank youse guys very much.

 

Mike

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