Yes, you can videotape your own properties. Or, if you choose, you can have a relative, child, niece or nephew, friend, assistant, or professional do the video.

Videotaping a home or condo for sale is actually quite simple.

There are a few very important rules to follow:

Try not to have people present or in the video unless they are competent narrators.

Get the owners, kids, friends, relatives, associates, out of the way.

1. Plan ahead. Once you plan your video, it will be a lot simpler to complete and each successive property will become easier.

2. Good planning will eliminate the need for Editing and make the job easier and faster.

3. Walk through the property, planning your scenes and take notes on your sketch of the property.

4. Think and think ahead about what you are doing, your motions, foot steps, how you are holding the video camera, etc. This will help you make a better video.

5. As much as possible avoid walking while video taping. You are likely to stumble and jiggle the camera. If you do walk, try to walk like a ballet dancer and glide your feet close to the surface without stumbling.

6. Instead of walking, try to rotate and zoom your entire body while holding the camera. You can easily do 180 degrees and more rotation.

7. You can carefully plant your feet on the surface with one shoulder at the beginning of the rotation or panorama and the other foot at the end of the rotation and you can easily complete a 180 degree panorama.

8. You can also do a 360 degree panorama this way by being very careful to glide your feet around the surface as you complete the 360 from the 180. Try not to jiggle the camera.

9. Asmuch as possible, use the LCD screen to view the scene and guide you. This will be more stable than using the view finder close to your eye.

10. If you wish to get more professional, you can use tripod like stabilizers, shoulder resting stabilizers or an inexpensive handheld homemade steadycam.

11. Plan your scenes ahead of time. Draw a sketch of the home or condo and decide where you will begin and which scene comes next.

12. Recommended sequence:

A. The front street scene. Do a 180 or preferably a 360 of the neighborhood in front of the house or condo from across the street or in the middle of the street. Be careful and watch for traffic. If shooting from the middle of the street, have an assistant watch out for traffic and direct traffic around you.

B. So, do the panorama beginning with the front of the house or building and end up on the front door of the subject property.

C. Then stop taping. Remember to stop taping at the right moment so you don't have wild, unexpected videos.

D. You can then slowly zoom in on the front door. Try not to zoom too fast as that can be disturbing to the viewr.

E. After zooming in on the front door, stop taping.

F. You can then go up to the front door and open it and begin video taping from the exterior entry into the hall, entry, etc. and zoom to a logical stopping point.

G. Then go to the point at which you stopped and begin video taping from there, doing a 180 or 360 rotation at that point, ending at the entrance to the next room you want to videotape and do the same thing in that room.

H. Do this for each of the rooms you wish to videotape throughout the house or condo.

I. Remember small rooms, such as bathrooms, are not easy to videotape and you may want to skip some of smaller unimportant ones.

J. You do not need to videotape every room, but only the important rooms that give a viewr a good sense of the property.

K. When you are finished with the Interior, you may want to tape some of the views from inside the house or condo or from a balcony or deck.

L. Again, plan carefully as you do not want to fall or stumble.

M. Then end up in the back yard and do a panorama of the back yard and its features, such as a swimming pool.

N. If you:

1. Plan ahead
2. Watch your step
3. Careful with your motions and the handling of the camera
4. Don’t accidentally video the floor by leaving the Record Button on when you think it is off.
5. End and begin smoothly.

You will not need to edit the video, but can simply upload it to viewr as is.

Not having to edit your videos will save you time, effort, aggravation and possibly money.

Don’t worry, small flaws, mistakes, jiggles are OK and may even add charm and genuineness to your video. Big mistakes, you may want to edit out and you will be able to do this online at viewr.com.

Sound, you don't really want sound as you may pick up unwanted voices and uncensored speech. You will be able to add your choice of music at viewr.com when you upload your video.

Remember only purchase Digital Video Cameras for easy uploading.

You will find some viewr user practice videos here.

After exhausive testing of many options, we have decided to utilize the www.VideoEgg.com encoder/uploader for our videos. VideoEgg is very stable, fast and can be highly customized for our application. More info is here.

For those of you that are really ambitious, we will be HD, High Definition Video capable. Take a look at these HD Videos from Quicktime or these in Hawaii!




viewr Corporation
4903 Pacific Highway
San Diego, CA 92110
877-88viewr (888-4397) Toll Free U.S.
support@viewr.com