Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development tool (http://www.xsitepro.com). Paul has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software development, and maximizing the potential of on-line businesses.
Using a Sound Effects CD to Enhance Your Productions
Whether you are looking to enhance your production, add some reality to your amateur film or include a little zing to your website, using sound effects from a sound effects CD is a common way to do it. A sound effects CD is used in a variety of applications, but mostly you’ll find they are used to create realistic atmospheres for a motion picture, podcasting or some kind of film production.
While there are a variety of sound effects CD producers, there are three or four sound effects CD considered to be the professional sound effects CD producers in the industry for applications such as podcasting, film production and radio production; Sound Ideas, The Hollywood Edge, Sound Vision, and the BBC. An important item when choosing a professional sound effects CD is that it comes with MetaData. MetaData is essentially a description of the sound effect. When it comes to indexing and searching for sound effects, the MetaData is there to make sure you can find the sound effect you are looking for!
Further, if you want true feature film quality production, it’s also important that your sound effect CD comes in Red Book Audio format. Red Book Audio Format is the standard format a normal CD player will play. Sound effects CDs in Red Book Audio Format will produce their files in WAV format, with WAV sound effects being of much higher quality sound then MP3 sound effects. Why do so many people still look to sound effects? The main reason is “Foley”! OK, you ask, what is Foley? Foley is the process of adding background sound effects and noises to a film so that the film sounds everyday realistic. The many background sounds you hear (sounds other than the dialogue) during a feature film is what makes it so realistic! It’s a critical part of what deciphers an amateur production from a production film.
Productions are increasingly being produced by amateur producers without big feature film budgets. This has caused a spike in Foley being increasingly done by using digital libraries of stored sound effects which can be added to the film without having to painstakingly record the sounds oneself. Having the ability to comb through thousands of libraries of sound effects in a sound effects CD or a library of CDs, producers (both amateur and professional) are able to make fairly realistic productions without having to rent actors to re-enact certain aspects of a film in order to record realistic sounds (typical of only of big budget films).
Without Foley, films usually end up sounding unrealistic. That is because during our day to day conversations, you will hear hundreds of sounds in the background. Without these background sounds in a film, the film sounds more like a high school play where you’ll hear the dialogue, but that’s it. While getting the dialogue correctly captured is the first part, there are plenty of little sounds in the background like a lawnmower mowing, a car driving past, kids laughing and playing, dogs barking, all that make a film feel like we are really there. In the end, sound effects libraries and sound effects CD make the production come to life and give us all the additional sounds that you didn’t know you needed.
The Sound Effects Shop is one of the largest Sound Effects Libraries which have a collection of professional sound effects and royalty free music for post production, broadcast and motion picture industries. Here you can select various types of Sound Effects CD for personal and commercial use.
Getting the Best From Your Video Productions
Copyright (c) 2008 Paul Smithson
If you are producing videos for the purpose of getting traffic and conversions to your website, you’re not alone. Thousands of people are doing the same thing, so it’s very easy to get lost in the millions and millions of videos that are available on the various video sharing websites.
Often it’s hard to get lots of views to your videos, because it’s the videos with the most views and comments that typically show up at the top in the search results on the video sharing sites, and those are also the videos that get promoted in the related results when someone watches a video. So how do they get those views in the first place?
The most common way videos get a large number of views is through word of mouth. Viral marketing is alive and well in the video sharing world. When people see a video they like, they tend to tell their friends about it. If the video is really good, it gets passed around and around and it goes viral.
Unfortunately this viral feeding frenzy usually only happens to videos that are really off-the-wall. A celebrity doing something shocking, someone being humiliated in public, or a really stupid criminal could have their videos go viral pretty easily. A video about trout fishing or about making money online has less chance of going viral.
In this case, you have to find a way to inflate the views yourself. No, I’m not saying you should use some kind of bot to artificially inflate your views! That’s a great way to get banned. Luckily, there are loads of ways to get views to your videos without being dishonest.
First of all, you should get everyone you know to visit your videos. Post a link to every video that you create on your own blog. Send a link to your email list. Put a link in your forum signature. Use social bookmarking to drive traffic.
On most networks, like YouTube, you can post responses to video’s. If you find a video in your niche that is already popular, you can post your video as a response to their video. This will mean you get a link from their video’s page. Keep in mind that some networks require these responses to be approved by the original poster.
In the description of every video you post, you should ask viewers to subscribe to your channel if they enjoyed your video. Most video sharing sites have a way for people to subscribe to see more of your videos so don’t forget to ask people to sign up. The more people you have subscribed to your channel, the more people you’ll potentially have visit every video you make later.
Comments are also a vital element to popularity on many sites. Comments are especially important on YouTube, for example. Always ask people to comment in your description, and at the end of the video itself, if it is possible.
The wonderful thing is that the effort you put in will be rewarded many times over. As the number of views of your video increases the more likely it will be to appear in the search results and other listings, which in turn means yet more people will stumble upon it, and that will give another boost to the number of views and who knows, before you know it, your trout fishing video might just end up going viral.