I’ve talked about variable video and personalized video a little in the past. Now let’s look at some more examples and break down some of their components.

Here are some examples:

• Inspiring Escapes
• Dexter
• Haunted house
• Walts wisdom
• Carmen has a crush on you
• News3Online

There are 4 main effects that can be achieved in a variable video:

• Variable text - example: holding up a card with the persons name
• Variable image - example: holding up a picture of the person
• Variable audio - example: saying the persons name with actors face covered
• Variable video scenes - example: saying the persons name without actors face covered

If you wanted to create a variable video campaign, there are multiple ways to go about it. All of the above effects can be recreated using Adobe Flash. If you only plan on doing variable text and/or imaging in the video you may not need 3rd party software. If you do wish to integrate your variable video campaign with other software, XMPie recently announced video integration capabilities with their system.

Another important aspect of variable video is the story. To properly recreate any of the videos shown in this post you would need actors, sets, equipment, scripts, etc. But, one great thing about variable video is it’s surprise factor. You could get away with crappy quality video as long as the personalization tied in seamlessly.

The most important part of any variable video campaign is it’s final conversion screen. This is where you encourage personalizing the video for someone else. Someone the user believes will find the video entertaining. People love seeing their name in lights and now everyone can be part of the internet video phenomenon.

Contact Magicomm to learn more about variable video.

I talked awhile back about personalized video and how it could be (is) the next big marketing medium. The benefits of personalized video are obvious, you’ll get better quality personal information and it is very viral.

The key here is personalization and interactivity. The internet took a turn a few years back with the rise of social and interactive networks. From that point on, the user was given control, and thats the way it going to be from now on. I showed in my previous post how successful personalized video is and now, I want to show you how easy it is to pull off.

Here are two videos i made when first experimenting with how flash could be used to manipulate video:

The best part is that i made each of those videos in under 15 minutes.

All you need to do it upload your video in flash:

1) File -> Import -> Import Video

(Note: I had to rerecord my video as a wmv because i could not get avi to work properly)

2) Then choose:

“Embed video in SWF and play in timeline” is what allows you to manipulate movieclips on top of your video. Now what you could do with this is map certain items to sync with the video and possibly even change those items at run time. You could insert personalized images, text, etc.