vocab Archives | Miceli Productions

Aug

2013

The New Rules of Google SEO

Posted On August 5, 2013 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

In the past, SEO (search engine optimization) was all about flooding the back end of your web site with as many keywords as possible. Search engines, like Google, would crawl sites and log the top keywords in order for web sites to be ranked. But Google has changed the rules these days. A lot of the definitions of Google’s SEO have to do with explaining their new algorithms. Here are the new rules in real people terms instead.

If you want to be ranked on Google, here are the major things you need to do with your web site.

1) Create High-Quality, Dynamic Content. Many web sites are full of images, stock photos, flash, or a few sentences that really do not reflect the web site’s purpose. More than ever, high-quality content is the most important factor in increasing your SEO performance. Because Google has changed the value placed on certain online signals–such as authorship, natural links, and social media–content marketing has become the linchpin of SEO success.

2) Continually Update Web Site Content. Web sites should continually be changed and updated to send a signal to Google and other search engines that something is different. This tells Google to reindex your web site, helping your page ranking status. When something changes on your web site or on your blog, submit the new URL to Google to re-search your page.

3) Leverage and intertwine social media platforms. Dynamic content mixed with social media platforms increases page ranking and traffic. The more shareable your content, the more relevant your web site will be to Google and other search engines. Consider using Google +, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn to leverage interconnectedness on search engines.

4) Link Building – But Only Use Respectable Links! In the past, many people hired link building services to add links to their web sites. These link building services are still available, but Google and other search engines are recognizing them as red flags. The best way to utilize links on your web site is to link to YOUR OWN dynamic content on other sites or other pages of your web site. External links should be highly reputable. Outbound links should go to your social media sites, blogs, articles you’ve written, and industry respected web sites.

5) Meta Data Still Counts. Your web site should not be a blank template. Highly specific keywords and accurate page titles and descriptions are still necessary for Google and other search engines to identify you. Make sure all of your images have descriptions and tags too! Many people forget to add accurate descriptions and tags to their images and videos. This meta data will cross-reference with your content too. While high quality content is the driving force in SEO today, meta data still counts A LOT.

To help consumers with SEO, Google put together a great SEO Starter Kit that can be downloaded for free. It is extensive, but very helpful in understanding the ins and outs of Google’s SEO policies and how to best optimize your site. Just in case you want a super quick version, they have a one pager to download too. Good luck and start optimizing!

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Jul

2013

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Five

Posted On July 18, 2013 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

As we diligently work to stay abreast of social media trends, we found some great sources that define social media terms that are particularly beneficial for businesses. The information below are a combination of two sources that are at the cornerstone of social media: The Salty Waffle and Social Media Today.

View Part One: #- D

View Part Two: E- K

View Part Three: L- R

View Part Four: S – T

View Part Five: U-Z

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Five (U-Z)

User-Generated-Content (UGC): UGC is anything published online by the Average Joe.

Vlog: A vlog is simply a video blog. The word blog comes from weblog so with video, we smashed it all together to form vlog.

Waze: Waze is simple, it’s a social approach to traffic. By using crowd sourced information from people driving with their mobile devices in the vehicle, the app should alert drivers quickly of slowing, detours, and accidents.

Web 2.0: Web 2.0 in its simplest definition is a description of the movement online toward collaboration, information sharing, social media, and the applications that support that.

Widget: These are stand-alone applications that you can embed on other applications or web pages. Functions of widgets are diverse and can do pretty much anything a programmer can build it to do. Universal widgets are especially helpful for non-technical people that can embed them in their own sites with ease and gain increased functionality.

Wiki: A wiki is a web page, or group of pages that can be edited collaboratively. Wikipedia is the most well-known example of this and they have a more complex definition of a wiki if you want to delve in.

Woot: Woot may have been the first group buying site out there even though Groupon tends to get the credit for making it mainstream. Woot was founded in 2004 and sells one item every 24 hours or until they sell out. They typically offer gadgets and tech related goods.

WordPress: WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS) most often used for publishing blogs. It provides a simple user interface that non-technical people can use with relative ease and it works well with most web applications and widgets. It is the most popular CMS in the world.

Xanga: Xanga is a blog network that is said to have about 40 million members worldwide. The site hosts social profiles, weblogs, audio blogs, video blogs, and photo blogs.

Yammer: Yammer is an enterprise social network designed to be sort of an internal version of Twitter aimed at companies. It began as an enterprise microblogging platform but has developed into more a full social network. Approximately 80,000 companies and over 1 million users use Yammer as an enterprise social network.

Zo0omr: Zooomr, with yes, three o’s was started to help people share photos online. It is similar to Flickr with an additional focus on publishing your images under different Creative Commons licenses.

Zoho: Online suite of applications aimed making collaboration easier and therefore increasing productivity within businesses. Zoho features many social elements to help employees work together such as chat, discussions, wikis, and share applications.

Jul

2013

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Four

Posted On July 11, 2013 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

View Part One: #- D

View Part Two: E- K

View Part Three: L- R

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Four (S thru T)

Second Life: Second Life is a complete virtual world where people can interact, form groups, play games, and even shop, yes, with real money. There are 18 million ‘residents’ of the Second Life world.

SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine‘s “natural” or un-paid (“organic“) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.

SEM: Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.

SMO: Stands for Social Media Optimization and is an insanely broad term that applies to basically anything you do in the social media world to attract people to content. The focus is on networking and word of mouth and works for organic growth vs. pay-per-click or other paid advertising methods.

Social Bookmarking: A centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents.Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms “social bookmarking” and “tagging“. Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies. The top social bookmarking sites are Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and Pinterest.

Social Media Advertising: Paying for people to post articles, tweet, etc. on your behalf; paying for static advertisements on social sites, including message boards, Facebook and forums.

Social Media Anxiety: A fear of communication social media sites. Severely cripples one’s ability to communicate through social media channels and is driven by a fear of being judged poorly by peers.

Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science. An alternate name for the process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet is web indexing. Popular engines focus on the full-text indexing of online, natural language documents. Media types such as video and audio ^]and graphics are also searchable. Meta search engines reuse the indices of other services and do not store a local index, whereas cache-based search engines permanently store the index along with the corpus. Unlike full-text indices, partial-text services restrict the depth indexed to reduce index size. Larger services typically perform indexing at a predetermined time interval due to the required time and processing costs, while agent-based search engines index in real time.

Social Media Marketing: Initiating and participating in relevant conversation online in order to divert traffic to your site.

Social Network Exclusion Anxiety: A fear of being left out on a social network. Missing a conversation or not being invited to an exclusive social media driven event may create or compound this anxiety.

Splog: is short for spam blog. These are blogs that use automated systems to create fake blogs full of links and ripped off content. The idea is to garner higher search ranking, but publishers of these blogs are seen as bad guys and these sites never last long before people, or Google figure it out.

Synergy: Dare we simply say teamwork between companies online?

Tag: Indicates or labels what web content is about.

Tag Cloud: A tag cloud is a visual representation of the popularity of different tags being used on a site. A tag is a word, term, or description that helps people find relevant content by sorting it. In a tag cloud the biggest words are the most popular and vice versa.

Troll: There are some pretty rough definitions for so-called trolls out there, but basically a troll is a person that just really hates what you have to say on your site or blog and dedicates an unusual amount of time to arguing against your points, posting inflammatory comments, or writing ill of you or your website. You can’t really win if you pick up a troll unless you manage to turn them, but be careful, they can be powerful, scare off other readers, and poke holes in your credibility. (Justly or not).

Tumblr: It may sound like it, but this isn’t the name of an awesome new sled. T umblr is a site that allows users to share all kinds of content in blog, or ‘tumbling’ form. You can post links, pictures, writing, video, and even music. The service is gaining rapid popularity as of late because it so simple to use and offered for free.

Tweep: One of your twitter people. Twitter + people = Tweep! This could be a follower or a person you follow, anyone that is part of your Twitter network.

Tweet: A 140 character or less status update. A form of micro-blogging, but in the Twitter world its called a tweet. Just a short blurb about anything and everything from social media to ice cream.

TweetIn: Kind of like a Tweetup, TweetIn is a similar idea to a Twitter conference call. A bunch of Twitterers agree to meet on Twitter at a certain time and the conversation begins!

Tweetroll: A widget for your site that allows you to choose a search term, or your own twitter stream, and then display all the tweets related to that term in a scrolling box anywhere you choose to put it. Great for SEO.

Tweetup: A meet up in the Twitter world. A tweetup is a gathering, spontaneous or planned, of people that are all on Twitter. Hashtags typically spread the news about tweetups. The largest tweetup so far was in Northern Ireland with 13,000 tweeps.

Twitpic: A service that allows you to share pictures on Twitter, check it out!

Twitter Rage: Any anger stemming from a Twitter experience. Ignored tweets, slow connections, or fail whale could be the source.

Twitterati: The so-called Twitter elite. Those Twitter celebrities whose tweets go out to the hundreds of thousands and regularly make the evening news for their 140 character thoughts.

Twitterisms: all words Twitter! So any of these words and many, many more. With more to be invented I’m sure!

Twittersphere: The huge floating cloud in the sky (well, cloud somewhere in a Silicon Valley server farm) that holds everything Twitter. The Twittersphere is made up of tweeps, tweets, and tweeters.

Twoosh: A tweet that uses exactly all 140 characters! Swoosh!

Jun

2013

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Three

Posted On June 26, 2013 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

View Part One: # thru D

View Part Two: E thru K

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Three (L thru R)

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. Founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of January 2013, LinkedIn reports more than 200 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.

Linkbait: Linkbait is anything the author of a blog may put into a post in terms of content to try and promote and encourage other sites to link back to it. This could be an infographic, list, video, poll, or anything that is readily shareable and intriguing. Usually the content is meant to be controversial, sensational, or otherwise attention grabbing. Links drive SEO so linkbait is a popular practice and isn’t necessarily a negative practice, though some abuse it and leave it with a bit of a negative connotation.

LivingSocial: Recently acquired by Amazon, LivingSocial seems to be a lock on second place in the group buying space behind Groupon. They offer deals by cities and also have deals on vacations and have a section catering to families and kids.

Lurkers: are people who read but don’t contribute or add comments to social networks. The one per cent rule-of-thumb suggests about one per cent of people contribute new content to an online community, another nine percent comment occasionally, and the rest lurk.

Microblogging: Short message postings from a social media account. Facebook statuses and Twitter posts are two examples.

Mistweet: One of those tweets you may regret. A tweet that was probably ill-advised or potentially embarrassing.

Moblog: Short for mobile blog, this is a blog done via a mobile device. Typically content is shorter, includes pictures or other captured media, geotags, and is more along the lines of micro-blogging than standard blogs. Moblogs are generally updated very often.

Obsessive Compulsive Refresh Disorder: A potentially time consuming problem that leaves you constantly refreshing the page checking for new content.

Pandora: A social online radio station based on the Music Genome Project. Music is played based on your likes and dislikes and the artists you enjoy listening to.

Permalink: Looking outside I keep thinking permafrost, but a permalink is link to a particular post within a blog or site. That means no matter how far down that post gets over time, the permalink will take you right to that post’s specific page.

Photosharing: Photo sharing is the publishing or transfer of a user’s digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share them with others (publicly or privately). Sites include SmugMug, Photobucket, Flickr, and Shutterfly.

Ping: A computer network administration utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer.

Pinterest: A content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard.

Platform: A system that manages content. For instance, WordPress is a platform that manages a community of blogs.

Podcast: Podcasts have been around a long time now and it is actually exactly the same as a non-streamed webcast. Quite simply, a podcast is an audio file, usually mp3, that you can download, listen to online, or put on a media device for later playback. Radio shows often offer podcasts of their shows and many people ‘blog’ via podcast. (The term podcast took over webcast because iPods became so popular.)

Post-posting Traumatic Stress Disorder: Stress after posting something to a network. This could be a blog post, status update, or even a tweet. The pressure to make sure it is just right can be immense, thus the Post-posting stress.

RT or ReTweet: When someone re-posts your tweet. This could be because they really like it and want to share it with their own tweeps. Generally, getting ReTweeted is a very good thing, especially when that tweet has a link you want people to see in it.

Jun

2013

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Two

Posted On June 21, 2013 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

View Part One: # thru D

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Two, E thru K

External Social Communication: Any conversations that happens on public social networks; companies would be wise to organize an External Social Communication plan, because it’s happening even if you don’t yet know what they are saying.

Eye Rest: Well, these numbers and bold type are an example of eye rest. Eye rest is a technique used in blogs to make the post easily readable and/or offer more to the reader. Other examples are hyperlinks, bullets, images, and lists.

Facebook: Facebook is an online social networking service, whose name stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as “People From Work” or “Close Friends.” As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users.

Feed: Feed isn’t just a term that applies to social media, but in the social media world it applies to areas where information from your social network gathers and is presented. For example, your Facebook feed shows you updates from friends regarding anything from events to new pictures. Feed may also refer to an RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication) which makes it easy to publish, collect, and keep track of multiple sources of many types of content.

Flash Mob: Flash mob is a sudden gathering of people in a public place. Usually they perform something and then quickly move on. The term is typically applied to mobs that gather because of social media networking, viral emails, or for promotions put on by guerrilla marketing firms for clients. The idea here is to be viral and share the video of the flash mob performance.

Forum: Also known as a message board, a forum is a site dedicated to discussion. Generally forums are themed and moderated by someone from the site. Many forums are run by large companies as another form of customer service. Users can help each other solve problems and moderators or company professionals can also easily get into the conversation and provide assistance.

Foursquare: We have talked about Foursquare a bunch in the past, but it just fit in too well here and we haven’t made it a part of our social media vocabulary section yet, so here goes. Foursquare is a location-based social network that allows users to check-in to venues and see others and get special offers. It is one of the leaders amongst geo-location based social networks.

Geotagging: is on the rise. Geotags are location-based tags attached to status updates, media, or other posts that gives GPS information on the person posting or the media. Check-ins on Foursquare and other location-based social networks are a form of geotagging.

Google Latitude: Latitude is simple, it allows those you choose to see your current location. It uses GPS technology in your phone to broadcast where you are in real-time. You can limit its accuracy and it is easy to manage who can see your location. There is also feature called Location History that allows you to see where you have been recently in addition to your current location.

Gowalla: is a location-based social network. Much like Foursquare, Gowalla allows people to share their location in real time as well as check into places and earn prizes and discounts.

Groupon: The group buying start-up that just happens to be the fastest growing company ever. Group + coupon = deals for you. They offer deals daily and as interest from businesses all around has grown, have come to offer many deals in each city.

HTML: Stands for Hyper Text Markup language. HTML is the language that is considered the building blocks of the web. HTML describes web pages through tags and a browser reads those in to display what you see as the web page.

Internal Social Communication: A company hosted social platform upon which all employees of an organization can engage; this can be a powerful change to increase efficiency in an organization.

Joomla: Joomla is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) that allows people to build websites and web applications.

Kyte: Kyte is an application for streaming and hosting live video through its online and mobile platform. They help people produce video, distribute it, engage audiences, analyze traffic, and monetize their work.

Jun

2013

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part One

Posted On June 19, 2013 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part One, # thru D

# – What is the hashtag? The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.

#FF or #followfriday: The idea behind ‘Follow Friday’ is to recommend users you believe others should follow. By tagging their username and then the hashtag #FF or #followfriday, you are signaling to your followers that you endorse these people and they are worth being followed.

#musicmonday: Can be used to talk about anything music related including artists, songs, new releases, labels, concerts, you name it. It was intended to help people find new music for the week based on the recommendations of others.

#np: This was actually the top hashtag in 2010 and it stands for ‘Now Playing’. Twitterers use the hashtag to talk about music and tweet what they are listening to at the moment.

#seo: A hashtag for SEO or Search Engine Optimization related topics. A technology focused crowd follows this tag and it is a useful way to keep track of the latest in SEO straight from the experts.

#socialmedia: Simply, social media. Any tweet that has something to say on the topic of social media would be fair game for a #socialmedia tag. Being such a broad topic, it is a loud hashtag, but many follow it for the latest news.

Algorithm: An “algo” is a system that suggests pages to search engines in response to a search query.

API, Application Programming Interface: an interface that allows two software applications to interact more easily. By making an API available it makes it easier for developers to build associated applications. Twitter opened their API giving rise to applications like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, and others.

AstroTurfing: In honor of a great weekend of football, I had to put this one up. AstroTurfing, at least in the social media world is a tactic used by some to create a fake grassroots movement or buzz, hence the turf reference. Usually the authors are paid or otherwise incentivised to write positive reviews or content that mention whatever product marketers are trying to get buzz for. The key is that it is not organic. Astroturf might be great for football, but fake grass has no roots!

Authenticity: Is the sense that something or someone is “real”. Blogs enable people to publish content and engage in conversations that show their interests and values, and so help them develop an authentic voice online.

Avatar: An avatar is a name or image that represents a person on forums, social networks, and other websites. Usually a small picture or unique username.

B2B: Business to Business.

B2C: Business to Consumer.

Blook: This one you might have been able to guess. A blook is a book or ebook that was created mostly from past blog content. Posts are collected and put together in one package and offered in a more traditional format. It usually goes the other way, but there are some popular blooks out there.

Champions: In order to get conversations started in an online community, you need a group of enthusiasts willing and confident to get things moving by posting messages, responding, and helping others. Champions are those folks.

Crowdsourcing: Refers to harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of the crowd outside an organization who are prepared to contribute content and solve problems. Then you choose your favorite solution from the crowd.

Dashboards: Dashboards give you an overview on how your properties are performing by displaying summaries of different reports as widgets on a single page. With a dashboard, you can monitor many metrics at once, so you can quickly check the health of your accounts or see correlations between different reports. Some dashboards that have free plans (and pay to upgrade plans) are Hootsuite, Netvibes, and Fliptu.

Digg: You may have to dig your car out this morning, but Digg with an extra ‘g’ is a social news website that lets members vote for their favorite articles. The most popular articles rise to the top and are seen on the homepage.

Digital PR: Abbreviated press releases that include embedded links, images, and video along with short text.

DM (Direct Message): A ‘DM’ comes from the world of Twitter where the default method of communication is a public tweet. By contrast, a Direct Message is a private message from one person to another that others on Twitter cannot see.

Dynamic SEO: (search engine optimization): The result of ranking higher in organic searches for your key words through producing fresh, relevant content on your website and other social networks.

May

2013

Video Vocab for Business (part 4 of 4)

Posted On May 26, 2013 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

Often it seems like people in the world of professional video speak a totally different language that relies heavily on slang for technical and creative concepts. Guilty as charged! As media professionals we do in fact have a unique vocabulary to what we do. A basic understanding of video terms helps business owners be informed consumers when contracting video services and be informed collaborators on a custom video project.

Part 1 of this series, (A – D) can be viewed HERE
Part 2 of this series, (E – M) can be viewed HERE
Part 3 of this series, (N – S) can be viewed HERE

Take–a single continuously-recorded performance, shot or version of a scene with a particular camera setup; often, multiple takes are made of the same shot during filming, before the director approves the shot; in box-office terms, take also refers to the money a film’s release has made

Talking Head — A clip that shows just the head and shoulders of a person who is talking. This tight focus is often used in interview situations where the background is not as important as the talking subject. It is also convenient in a movie destined for the Web because the small amount of movement in a talking-head shot compresses well for the Internet.

Teleprompter –A magical piece of equipment that lets a person look directly at the camera lens (and thus at the video’s viewers) while they read a script. The advantage of a teleprompter is that it lets you script what you’ll say. If you have several short videos to make, a teleprompter is essential. There are no “ums”, no “ahs”, no losing your thought because you’re nervous. Teleprompters make for very smooth video, especially if the person using it has had a chance to practice so he or she doesn’t appear to be reading.

TV Spot— broadcast time slot set aside to be filled by either a commercial advertisement or a public service message

Transcode— To convert from one compression format to another (that is, from DV video from a camcorder to MPEG-2 for DVD). Preferably done intelligently to minimize loss of quality from repeated compression, and not requiring fully decompressing the input and then recompressing to the output.

Underscore— Music that provides emotional or atmospheric background to the primary dialog or narration onscreen.

Video Blogs are simply what their name states, blogging through the format of video.

Viral Video— “We must stop using “viral” as a noun. Viral is a result. It is what happens when a great video or campaign gets recognized, discussed, and passed around. You don’t make a viral video, you just make a video. And hope it goes viral.We put our ads up on YouTube all the time. Some of them get hundreds of thousands of views — but that doesn’t make them viral. Pretty much every music video from every pop artist today gets around a million views. That doesn’t make them viral, either. Something is viral if it has that special something that makes you want to share it. But we often allow it to be interchangeable with the notion of popular. And we often discount the virability of something because it wasn’t massively viral. A video or website can end up being viral among smaller groups too.” – The Seven Dirty Words of Online Marketing by Josh Rose

VO or Voice Over–Narration or non-synchronous dialog taking place over the action onscreen

Wipe— a transitional technique or optical effect/device in which one shot appears to be “pushed off” or “wiped off” the screen by another shot replacing it and moving across the existing image; also called a push-over; a flip-over (or flip) wipe is when one scene rotates or flips-over to the new scene; wipes were very commonly used in the 30s

Wrap— as in “that’s a wrap,” good work everyone go home.

W- White Noise–A signal having an equal amount of energy per hertz.

Wide Angle— a lens that uses a grouping of glass to enable a shorter focal length than the physical body of the lens would normally permit. In doing so, the wide angle lens can capture more of a subject from an equal distance when compared to a normal lens of the same size.

White Balance is the process of capturing the correct colors for the type of available light. Think of it as making sure the color white is always white, and doesn’t have blue or red tints. Many cameras come with a white balance menu, as well as an auto white balance feature.

XLR-– One of several varieties of sound connectors having three or more conductors plus an outer shell which shields the connectors and locks the connectors into place. (Sound)

YouTube: The second most used search engine in the world and most popular video sharing website. Shot to popularity in 2005.

YouTube Video-– Videos, usually under 10 minutes in length. That can be uploaded and displayed on YouTube at no charge.


Zebra Stripes-– These are the vibrating diagonal stripes that are superimposed on the overexposed parts of the image on a view finder or LCD screen to help filmmakers judge exposure.


Zoom— An optical effect in which the image rapidly grows larger or smaller as though the camera is moving closer or away from its subject. Optical zoom relies on the camera’s lens to bring the subject closer in the recorded video. Digital zoom does not use the lens, but rather enlarges a portion of the image digitally. While digital zoom can be more powerful than most optical zoom features, digital zoom may cause grainy images.

Nov

2012

Video Vocab for Business Owners (Part 3 of 4)

Posted On November 18, 2012 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

Part 1 of this series, (A – D) can be viewed HERE
Part 2 of this series, (E – M) can be viewed HERE
Part 4 of this series, (T – Z) can be viewed HERE

Non-linear editing (NLE): In digital video editing, this is a non-destructive form of editing that allows you to edit any frame in a digital video clip regardless of sequence in the clip. You can cut-and-paste any frame in any order. Common NLE software includes iMovie, FinalCut Pro, and Adobe Premiere.

Overscan: The outer edges of a video image that are typically cut off by TV sets in order to ensure that the image fills the entire display. Typically content for TV has a “safe area” around it – see below.

Pan, Panoramic: Refers to the horizontal scan, movement, rotation or turning of the camera in one direction (to the right or left) around a fixed axis while filming.

Producer: Person responsible for all logistical matters of a production, and is there to support the vision of the Director, preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. Involved with scheduling, budgeting, acquires or develops a story, finalizes the script, hires key personnel, and arranges for distribution of the film or video. Generally manages the production from start to finish. The title Producer has many forms (Executive Producer, Line Producer, Film Producer) and many have different responsibilities depending on the project.

Pixels: The individual picture elements, or “dots” of color, that are arranged in a two-dimensional array to define a digital image or video frame. It is the smallest controllable element of a picture represented on the screen. LCD (liquid crystal display) pixels are manufactured in a two-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots or squares.

QuickTime: Apple program that is most commonly used to play movies. Uses the .MOV file extension.

Royalty free music: Any number of music tracks that are stock or ‘library music’ licensed for a single fee, without the need to pay any subsequent royalties.

Rough cut: A quick assembly of raw clips to approximate the desired final program. As a first step in editing, arranging a collection of clips in the desired order as a storyboard of the production.

Safe area: Also known as the safe zone. Margins left around the edge of the image. Used when working with material intended for display on television. Safe margins keep titles from bleeding off the screen. See “overscan” above.

Storyboard: A sequential series of illustrations, stills, rough sketches and/or captions (sometimes resembling a comic or cartoon strip) of events, as seen through the camera lens, that outline the various shots or provide a synopsis for a proposed film story with its action and characters. The storyboards are displayed in sequence for the purpose of visually mapping out and crafting the various shot divisions and camera movements in a video.

Soundtrack: The sound that accompanies a video. Can be composed of dialogue, sound effect and music.

Shot list: A list of all the shots that will be required to create your final video. The shot list is generally created after the script is developed.

Mar

2011

Video Vocab for Business Owners (Part 2 of 4)

Posted On March 7, 2011 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

Part 1 of this series, (A – D) can be viewed HERE

Exposure: The quantity of light reaching the video. Even with a professional quality camera, footage can be underexposed or overexposed by the camera operator. There are limited options to make under- or over- exposed footage better in the editing process. It is crucial for a camera operator to have experience with maintaining optimal exposure in a variety of environments of light (dark theaters, bright daylight, concert lighting, etc.).

Fade: A transitional effect consisting of a gradual change in the intensity of an image or sound, such as from a normally lit scene to darkness (fade out, fade-to-black) or vice versa, from complete black to full exposure (fade in), or from silence to sound or vice versa; a ‘fade in’ is often at the beginning of a sequence, and a ‘fade out’ at the end of a sequence. You might see this term used in storyboarding.

Green Screen: A bright green fabric that is hung behind the action being recorded on camera. The green background allows an editor to insert a particular background or create special effects. Busy business owners who are the voice and face of their business often don’t have time to commit to long video shoots on location; green screen can therefore be a great solution for this, allowing different locations to be put in after the fact.

High Definition or HD: Video footage shot in a high-definition format, which means that the frame size is larger than SD (standard definition), and each frame holds much more digital information. As a result, picture quality and file sizes are much higher than SD video. High def is a general term that can describe different frame sizes, so it’s important to understand that some HD video can be higher-definition than other HD video. Generally, HD video is of excellent quality and looks great no matter where it’s shown – on the web, on a dvd, or projected on a screen. In today’s world, HD video has become a production standard. (Miceli Productions has more than 5 years experience working in HD, we committed to the format as soon as it emerged).

Interactive: The back-and-forth dialog between the user and the computer. Games are always interactive, and most computer applications are interactive. More and more web commercials these days are interactive (commercials on Hulu.com are a great example) and YouTube videos with action overlays can be interactive. Click here to see Lombardi on Broadway example of interactive commercial.

JPEG: A still image file format developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (no joke) that can compress photographic images into much smaller file sizes while sacrificing only a little image quality. A cross platform-friendly file format useful if you are providing images for a custom video project or want image files pulled from a video project to use in email, web applications or print.

Key: In this case key is a verb: to key. To specify a region of an image or video clip to be used as a mask for transparency. When using Green Screen, for example, the green background is “keyed” out to be replaced by something else.

Lav, Lavaliere or Lapel Mic: A small microphone that clips to your lapel or neckline, usually wireless. A lav is an option for recording high quality sound when the shot is too wide for use of a boom mic.

Montage: Refers to a filming technique, editing style, or form of movie collage consisting of a series of successive short shots or images (often disconnected in time or place) that are rapidly juxtaposed into a coherent sequence to suggest meaning or a larger idea; usually a montage is not accompanied with dialogue, but uses music to drive the footage; an accelerated montage is composed of shots of increasingly-shorter lengths.

Jan

2011

Video Vocab for Business Owners (Part 1 of 4)

Posted On January 10, 2011 By Jennifer Blessing Miceli And has No Comment

Burn a DVD? Rip a DVD? Dupe a DVD? What’s the dif? Often it seems like people in the world of video speak a totally different language and have 3 different words for what appears to be the same concept.

As media professionals we do in fact have a unique vocabulary to what we do. Having a basic understanding of video vocab helps business owners be informed consumers when looking to purchase a service or a product.

Your mini video-vocab lesson begins with A, B, C…and D for Donut.

A roll: An old film term meaning the content structure of the piece, voice track and sound bites.

B roll: Supplemental or alternate footage intercut with the main shot in an interview or documentary. Most often B roll footage is what is submitted with a media press release.

Bug: A digital on-screen graphic or logo that many TV broadcasters overlay over a portion of the screen to identify the channel. This term has migrated online and is now commonly used for businesses and organizations who use a bug of their logo or website to brand their online videos.

Burn: To record data on a CD or DVD.

Compositing: Combining visual elements from separate sources into single images creating the effect that all those elements are parts of the same scene. For a strong visual example and concept of compositing from our In The Studio web videos series CLICK HERE

Compress: To change the file size of a video, to reduce the amount of data storage space necessary. Most often used when putting video online.

Donut: Pre-recorded commercial with a blank time span in the center into which a special advertising message may be inserted.

Dupe: To duplicate a DVD that has data written on it. Typically it takes more time to burn a DVD than to duplicate one that is already burned. There is no difference between a duplicate and an original in terms of quality.

Stay tuned for E – Z.
Part 2 of this series, (E – M) can be viewed HERE.

vocab

Video Vocab for Business (part 4 of 4)

Video Vocab for Business Owners (Part 3 of 4)

Video Vocab for Business Owners (Part 2 of 4)

Video Vocab for Business Owners (Part 1 of 4)

Patrick VanHorn from Giant Bicycle says…..

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