In August at Step Two Designs, we published an article on using rich media - video and audio - on the intranet. It's not a new idea but it's becoming ever easier.
One of September's articles, on videos at the Forest Products Commission (FPC) in Western Australia, goes one further. Michael Harris describes how his team uses a commercial quality HD camera and production suite to create some stunning looking videos that cover exec presentations to short news stories, some screenshots of which can be seen here:
The FPC videos get excellent feedback, and have gone from strength to strength in the last 15 months.
Michael also goes on to say that while they have some fantastic equipment to use, you can achieve some great results with consumer grade equipment. This was a point I made in the August article and is one also made by Alex Dalidakis at CPA Australia, in a post earlier this week.
You might recall Alex and his colleagues - they're the ones who co-hosted their annual conference in Second Life. In his post, Alex describes how they use video, and how their camera and Final Cut-equipped MacBook is, 'letting our organisation go large in ways we've never been able to before.'
"Using a consumer level HD video camera we're now able to record messages from staff and members, stream events live to members in remote regions, and generally be on-call to record important moments in our organisation that otherwise might have been consigned to history.
Here's just a snapshot of what we've been able to achieve in four months:
- Senior managers recorded a short bio of themselves for members
- The organisation president recorded a welcome message for members as he was not able to attend an event
- The CEO and senior managers recorded a warm-up video for a staff event happening overseas
- A conference session was live-streamed from Perth into Second-Life"
Alex says there's much more to come too, and it's clear that it's not just these two organisations (FPC and CPA), who are using and producing intranet videos without massive budgets or agencies involved.
In fact, high quality intranet videos, once the realm of the few corporates with big budgets and 'internal TV channels', are now easily within the reach of, well, all of us.
How are you using them?
