News & Insights
How long should my video be?
One of the questions I hear a lot from clients is, "How long should my video be?" Here's an interesting stat: The average length of a video on Facebook is 55.3 seconds, but the average view duration is 18.2 seconds. It's no secret that attention spans have gotten...
6 secrets to a successful live webcast
Doing a live webcast is a lot like doing live tv. It requires careful advance preparation and the coordination of numerous moving parts. Get it right and you can dazzle a worldwide audience. Get it wrong and ... well, you don't want to get it wrong. Here are six key...
Is your website ADA compliant?
Website construction in our early days involved taking a company print brochure and translating it into some basic HTML with JPGs and Gifs. Everyone remembers the animated construction worker used to denote 'content not ready yet'. Yup, we were guilty of using that a...
Is there something missing in your marketing video?
Have you noticed there's something missing in most of the marketing messages you see? In a word, it's ... ... authenticity. We live in a world of carefully crafted and highly polished commercial messages that extol the virtues of a brand, a product, a company or a...
Better interviews, better b-roll
I wanted to share a few tips to for setting up better video content. This article is designed to give our clients a better understanding of how to utilize time with a film crew and get the best out of the time allotted for a shoot. These principles can be applied in...
What were you doing 22 years ago?
This month Allied Pixel celebrates our 22nd year in business. Which got me to thinking about the early days. Do you remember what you were doing in the summer of 1993? I do. I was shooting a tv commercial for a radio station in Baltimore. Back in those days, we shot...
Halt and Catch Fire
Who else has been watching this series? Halt and Catch Fire is in its second season on AMC, winding down to the season finale this past Sunday night. The show centers around a group of characters that are all chasing their entrepreneurial tech dreams during the late...
Why does it look like that?
It's not uncommon to hear clients, directors, producers and others on set ask me, “Why does it look like that?” when referring to the camera monitor. Why does the footage look unsaturated, washed out, almost gray? We like to take a cinematic approach to shooting all...
WordPress Security – Are you paying attention?
Earlier this year one of our client WordPress sites became infected with malware. What was particularly alarming about this was that visibly it was not apparent to someone visiting the site. However crawling the site made it apparent that something was amiss with...
4K in an HD World
In a previous article I expressed my concern for the push into the 4k revolution. Here I would like to explain how 4k can benefit and work for your organization. Let's briefly talk about what 4K even means. For the longest time the standard has been full HD (1920x1080...
Are you seeing the big picture?
Sometimes we get so caught up in the small stuff, we forget to look at the big picture. If you're involved in marketing (and if you're reading this, you're probably involved in some aspect of marketing,) I'll bet you spend your day juggling a lot of different balls,...
Is Your Website Healthy?
Google Webmaster Tools is a free service offered by Google to monitor the health of your website as seen by the (spider) eyes of Google. How often do you check the health of your website? There are some important stats Webmaster Tools provides that will help you tune...