Design Principles

Video and clip duration / 4 Design rules

Let’s look at our first set of design principles.

That is the design principles revolved around timing.

What we’re looking at here is how long should your videos be and how long should the subsections of

your videos be.

Also to start off by looking at the analysis and the recommended time for the total length of your videos.

I have split up my videos into my earlier videos and my more recent videos have analyzed those quite

carefully.

And what I found is that the average length of my videos tends to be four and three quarter minutes

long.

The earlier videos after having looked at YouTube audience retention numbers were being watched through

for about a third of their entire length on average.

So that is looking at what time do people start stop looking at the videos and go off and do Facebook

after I’ve improved my entire flying process and editing process using all of the techniques taught

through this course.

I have had a significant jump in the total length of time that people look at the videos and now people

are looking at about half of the length of the videos.

This analysis does leave me with a bit of a problem as my videos are four and three quarter minutes

long.

I am actually wasting a significant part of the footage that I’ve been collecting.

There are two problems with this.

It’s a waste of my production time and the footage I’ve collected I could probably have got two videos

out of the same set of footage that I’m putting into the first one.

Also I’m not leaving the audience exactly wanting more which is exactly what we should be doing.

If you’re wanting to them to come back and eagerly look at the follow up videos that you’re going to

be creating.

And so four point seventy five minute is definitely too long.

The right length that I am proposing is three minutes.

So design principle number one is try to make the total length of your video three minutes long.

Once you start to look at some of the other people out there that are producing aerial videos that are

getting significant number of hits and very popular say teen blacksheep stuff for instance comes to

mind.

That is actually about the length of their core footage and their videos will be a lot longer than that.

But some of the rest of the footage is things such as marketing information around their Web sites and

so on.

So three minutes is what we all should be going for in the length of the videos that we produce my latest

videos are sticking to this rule and they are proving much more popular.

People are studying to watch them for about two and a half minutes.

So a much more significant percentage of the overall footage there.

Analyzing the timing in these videos can lead us to a couple more design principles.

Let’s look next at the actual subcomponents of the videos the individual clips.

So in this example for a recent video I’ve made.

Here are some of the clips at the beginning of the video.

As you can see they’re short and sharp.

Each one of these clips is under three seconds long.

This is the middle section.

Clearly they’re getting quite a lot longer at this point.

And then you go right towards the end and they’re increasing there as well.

So I have done some analysis on my individual videos and what I found is that for a video that is of

an average now of about three minutes long.

So these are the videos that are soaring to be very popular.

The average clip length is between five to six seconds.

However if you look at the average clip length for the first half of the video is between three to four

seconds whereas for the second half it’s between nine to 10 seconds.

So we come up with our first design principle as a result of that.

Remember these are the videos that are working well.

So the design principle is is that your short clips should go towards the beginning.

These are the videos clips that you are using to entice in the audience to tease them to make them stay

around to want to watch more.

Once that’s happened they have got comfortable.

And at that point you can start to increase the length because you’ve been promising you’re going to

show them more and now you can.

So the third design principle is that we will videos for towards the second half of their production

should be about three times the length of those in the first half effectively as an extension of the

second design principle which has put your shorter clips up front.

Additionally from looking at this in a three minute video the maximum clip length that you really want

to be going for is going to be about 20 seconds.

Now this is definitely a rule that you’re going to break now then particularly if you’ve got some astounding

long running flying clip that you really really should be putting in there that’s going away.

The audience that 20 seconds is probably the maximum it’s going to be unless the content is truly stunning.

And if you look at some of the other great videos that are out there on the Internet they very very

rarely have clips that are longer than 20 seconds long.

So in looking at timing overall we come up with four design principles your target length of your video

overall should be three minutes long.

But your short clips up front the clips and the second half of your video should be about three times

as long as a clip in the first half of your video.

And finally don’t have a clip that’s longer than 20 seconds long.