If you are using video for your real estate business, please understand something about YouTube… When you embed your YouTube video on your blog (or anywhere else for that matter), all a user has to do is double click on your video to open it up on YouTube. This means they can view ALL your other videos too.

Just recently, I saw a video from a Realtor, and when I went to see if he had other virtual video tours, I got a window view into his personal life and let me tell you, as a consumer, I would not choose to work with him.

Even worse, I also saw a female real estate agent who (it appears) had a male friend host her real estate video tour on his account. His other videos, … you guessed it….. women in bikinis, and other videos that might not play well with a female audience. Bottom line – pretty unprofessional.

So, if you want to host video tours of your homes, AND, other personal videos, it might serve you well to have 2 YouTube accounts – a work account and a fun account. Don’t let all that hard video work go to waste by interweaving it with anything that your audience might deem as inappropriate.
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Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.

We love the real estate agents we work with. We respect how hard they work – selling, negotiating, and closing deals. Inspections, repair requests and negotiations, loans, appraisals, surveys – we understand it. The stress they endure on a day to day basis is beyond that of most jobs. So, no one said they had to be great photographers on top of all that.

Photography is an art. One that is only learned with tons of practice. For real estate, you SHOULD shoot in manual mode. That means no point and shoot cameras allowed! One needs to be well versed in such things as aperture, shutter speed, and their relationship to one another. Furthermore, it is important to understand composition, white balance, ISO, and other photography aspects to get the best shots. All this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what can be done in post production.

Sure, you can go to a home and pull out an instant camera but you need to remember one thing. When it comes to real estate photography, you are marketing the single most expensive thing someone owns. Isn’t their investment worth more than the camera that happened to come with your cell phone?

Having said that, we at AVT would like to show you some of the photos we took at some recent listings:

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Now let’s see some examples of where we were able to help the agent improve on the photos they took of the house.

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So you can see the importance of understanding how to use light to your advantage when shooting real estate photography. All too often the sensor in the camera gets confused by the light coming in from outside resulting in what we jokingly refer to as “nuclear summer” photos.

It is so important to show the beauty of not only the room, but of the view outside with so many expensive water front, golf front, and other homes with beautiful views. Plus, it just makes for better photos.

Remember that the market has changed. The MLS is flooded with listings and you need to make your listings stand out. Take the time to learn how to take great photos, or hire a professional real estate photographer to do it for you.

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©2008 – AmazingVideoTours.com – All Rights Reserved. Any use of photos, including reproduction, modification, distribution or republication, without the prior written consent of Amazing Video Tours, is strictly prohibited. Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.

Has anyone noticed that with un-employment going up and people getting more desperate for a paycheck, the late night infomercial “get rich quick” selling is in overdrive?

You know the ones ….. The commercials where they tell you they made $5000 in one day ….. Please! What they don’t tell you is they grossed $5000 in one day. They never give you net numbers. In other words, they don’t tell you that the thing they sold for $5000 cost them $4900 a month ago, and they had to work their butts off to offload the piece of junk. Mainly because there are 1000 other people online trying to sell the exact same widget.

You may be, by nature, a risk taker and may fall prey to these late night pirates. Please don’t fall victim to this nonsense. You should run, not walk, RUN away from ANYONE who offers you get rich quick schemes. None of them work. They are just vehicles for the product peddlers to get rich, $49.99 at a time. 10 minutes of research on any of them will prove my theory. Just Google the product they are selling and do 10 minutes of research.

There are better ways to make money online. The best way is to offer a unique product or service. Fill a niche in the marketplace that is not being filled. Figure out what you are good at. Better yet, combine two trades that most people can’t replicate and master them both as one.

Five years ago, I took my 12 years of technology experience and learned how to sell real estate. Now people pay me to help them use technology to sell their real estate. This is just an example. You can combine many trades and parlay them into a weekly paycheck.

Good luck, have fun, …. And don’t be a victim!

This blog post was inspired by one I read recently where the Realtor was frustrated with real estate video because he could not get – and I quote, “professional results” with his Flip Video Camera. He said the video was limiting, the audio was bad, the software was clumsy, and extremely difficult to edit. Well, …… yes.

As a professional full motion video producer, hearing someone wanting to get professional results from a Flip Video camera is frustrating. You get what you pay for. It’s like the difference between a flat fee agent and a full service agent. Full service agents do more, work harder, put in more time, and charge more money.

The Flip was designed for fun spontaneous video capture with not much in the way of audio. Is the Flip a great camera? Absolutely! But it has its time and place. For on the go cute shots of the kids doing something spontaneous, yeah – record away – and email it to Grandma. But if you are trying to market the single most expensive thing someone owns – probably not.

So here’s the truth. You can’t use the words “professional real estate video” and “Flip Video Camera” in the same sentence. Period.

I will probably take a lot of heat for not sharing enthusiasm about the Flip for real estate, as I know there are many Flip Video fans on real estate forums. But I have also read post after post with agents bad mouthing video because it is “often done so poorly and unprofessionally.” Well, if the ones producing this junk are not willing to spend more then a couple hundred bucks for real equipment —– no kidding!

So, should you try to shoot your own video? Yes, absolutely. I go into a ton of detail on how in this blog post. But do yourself a favor and arm yourself with decent equipment, hire a professional full motion video producer, or just say no. Remember, a bad video will do you and your seller more harm then good.

Ok, it’s true – I’m a typical guy and I only use “the directions” as a last result. When I first noticed the “Watch in High Quality” links on YouTube I was excited. Prior to this point, the only reason to upload to YouTube was for SEO, not quality video.

So about a month ago, I tried uploading a high quality “test” video and saw that it did not have the “Watch in High Quality” link. So I thought, “no big deal, maybe it takes a while”. Then I forgot about it for a few hours. When I went back and checked my video. Still no “Watch in High Quality” link. So I got mad and actually went to YouTube’s help files and searched. At that time I found nothing on how to get that magical “Watch in High Quality” link. I probably overlooked it, but none the less, the story continues…..

Recently, I went through the whole drill again. BUT, this time, YouTube (as of mid December) has data on how to get your videos to have that “Watch in High Quality” link.
Here’s the encoding low-down in a super short list taken from HERE:

•· MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
•· Video resolution: 480×360 or higher
•· Frame Rate: 24fps or higher

I dug a little further and found a few newsgroups discussing this very topic and the general consensus was to also be using a bit rate around 1000Kbps.

Where was I missing the boat? I had it all pretty much right, but I render all of my video for widescreen at 480×270, so I was missing the minimum screen resolution for the “Watch in High Quality” link.

A lot has been written about how to Embed High Quality Video hosted on YouTube, (adding &fmt=18, etc) but I hope you found this info on Uploading for High Quality helpful. If “&fmt=18″ is foreign to you, it simply means that you can embed “High Quality” video from YouTube on your website, blog article, etc., and force the “High Quality” by adding the “&fmt=18″ at the end of the “embed code”. This assumes that the person who uploaded the video followed the procedure listed above.

So that’s it. Pretty simple, but as I found out, missing the smallest detail will just get you regular old poor YouTube videos.

I am actually looking forward to uploading videos for my clients to YouTube now. At least I won’t have to hear, “how come it looks so bad on YouTube” anymore!
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Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.

Meade Wilson and Amazing Video Tours are proud to bring you this fantastic home for sale in Lake Wylie SC.

Stunning Saussy Burbank home with 5 Beds & 3.5 Baths on a large corner lot in a gorgeous heavily treed setting. Just seconds from beautiful Lake Wylie and located in the sought after Clover School District — all with lower York County taxes.

Features: Very open floorplan. Large Master suite with sitting area, walk in closet, and large master bath with oversized dual shower and separate whirlpool tub. Large family room with gas fireplace and lots of windows flows into well planned kitchen with massive granite countertops, stainless steel appliances with gas cook top and dual gas/convection ovens. Cherry cabinets and center island. All appliances remain.