There’s always something to howl about.

Videoplay: My idea of a halfway decent real estate video

I haven’t talked about video for a while because we haven’t been doing very much with it.

That’s not completely true. We use the Flip digital video camera to share notes with clients fairly frequently.

But as I have discussed at length in the past, I have no use whatever for the typical Lurch-takes-a-home-tour style of real estate video. I see it as being anti-marketing, worse than doing nothing at all.

For video to work, there has to be a story, and I can only think of two stories that make sense in the context of listing a home.

The first is simply an interview with the sellers, and we have done this on other homes. The second is the documentary, an illustrated narrative about some aspect of the home or the neighborhood. An example of this would be a slow drive-by of the structures in the neighborhood with a voice-over narrative telling the tale, whatever it is.

Arguably, you could impose a fictional or farcical story on the home, but this strikes me as being simultaneously too familiar and too stoopid by half.

The population of pundits who don’t actually sell real estate is rife with people who swear that video is the wave of the future. But, even with a plausible and endurable story, video has other drawbacks. It can be a real bear to edit, both labor- and computer-intensive. The down-sampling necessary to make it work on web sites robs images of their detail. Moreover, real estate photography wants very wide-angle lenses — which make people look fat and exaggerate foreground-to-background distances.

The solution I’ve arrived it, for now, is to superimpose still images over the video. Talking heads are boring, but we can use stills to illustrate what they are talking about, lending visual interest to the total package.

Here’s an example, as processed through YouTube:

You can see a better example of that video on the video page for 56 West Willetta Street.

The video scene was shot with the Flip camera. The native AVI file was converted to NTSC video, which is native food for Apple’s Final Cut. The photos were just dragged and dropped from 640×480 images. The finished MOV file was re-rendered as an MP4 to make it small and tight for the web.

My opinion is that this does a better job of selling the home that a Lurch-tour, and the combination of tools made it fairly easy to edit.

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