Denver Video Production

another great article

link

Video resumes have long tickled imaginations in Hollywood (can a blond legally apply to Harvard via VHS?) without making much of a dent in the real world. Enter Aleksey Vayner. The Yale student submitted his video resumes, titled Impossible Is Nothing, to investment bank UBS last fall. It became a YouTube classic, while its karate-chopping, tennis-acing, deep-thought-having star became the joke of Wall Street. But another funny thing happened: Vayner’s vanity creation awakened recruiters and job seekers to the possibilities of marrying the video CV to the Internet–and that may just revolutionize the job-search process as we know it.

So who will be the YouTube of video resumes? Jobster, an online job board, is teaming up with social-networking site Facebook to launch a career site featuring video résumés in March. Vault.com another job board, concluded its first video-resume contest last week, its prize a shot at (what else?) an investment-banking job. Smaller players 62ndview, HireVue and Resumevideo are all launching widely this spring. Workplace bloggers speculate that YouTube plans to start its own video-resume channel, although the company is noncommittal. Says Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster: “I can see a day when video as part of the résumé is the norm.”

Job seekers aren’t waiting. On YouTube, there are already 1,590 entries listed under resume. Not all are what you would call serious (“After losing his powers at the end of X-Men 3, Magneto is forced to apply for a job at the local Starbucks”). The best ones, though, are smart, colorful and effective. Benjamin Hampton, a recent graduate of Washington State University in Pullman, posted a 5 1/2-min. video on YouTube last fall, thinking it would be something different to send to employers. (To view Hampton’s video résumé, go to TIME.com. With his brother at the camera, the resume “took me 45 minutes to film and 30 minutes to edit,” says Hampton, 23. But that was enough to impress Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. The public relations firm interviewed him–in person–a short time ago.

Not many employers are trolling YouTube for candidates, which is where the new online services come in. Resumevideo sends online “postcards” of job candidates to a network of mostly not-for-profit employers. 62ndview wants its site to be a portal for job seekers, who would view videos of potential workplaces, and for employers, who could check out potential hires. HireVue sends webcams to job candidates, who use them to answer real-time interview questions. Employers can view the clips immediately online, saving time and money by eliminating the first round of in-person interviews.

The thing is, not all people are cut out for their three minutes of online-video fame. A Vault.com post features a blue-shirted manager with a knee jiggle and a boring spiel. A job-seeking techie on YouTube admits charmingly that he has no experience editing videos–and then packs his with gimmicky cutaways. One software engineer scores his with gangsta rap. And did I just fast-forward through that video on HireVue because of the guy’s bad teeth?

The paper resume is egalitarian, more or less, and that’s why human-resources people are wringing their collective hands over visually enhanced job applications. Many recruiters won’t even accept CVs with photos attached for fear of lawsuits. Some companies even block out the candidate’s name, citing studies that showed bias toward the white-sounding ones. They’re worried that video resume will invite lawsuits by candidates who could claim bias based on race, gender or age–indiscernible on paper but not on video.

No one has yet filed a major lawsuit for discrimination by video resume. But George Lenard, a St. Louis, Mo., employment lawyer, can envision a case centered on “disparate impact.” If an employer requires applications by video, then those without video cameras and broadband-equipped computers might argue they lacked access. Of course, he adds, the live interview process is hardly infallible. He cites a 2000 Princeton study that examined orchestras’ penchant for hiring male musicians as an example of “disparate treatment.” When screens were put up–now a common practice in auditions–the gender skewing disappeared.

Once the rest of the YouTube generation enters the workplace, “video resumes are going to be as ubiquitous as PDAs or iPods,” says Mark Oldman, a co-president of Vault.com. Just leave out the gangsta rap. For your sake and ours.

this is the new thing… here are a few interesting articles

fox news

NEW YORK — Fallon Rechnitz set her video-capable digital camera on a stack of books. She then hit the record button and spoke for about 30 seconds, instantly producing a video resume she plans to send to potential employers.

Rechnitz is at the forefront in the hunt for employment. Video-resume services are only starting to emerge on the Internet, and the 22-year-old Arizona State senior believes the visuals can give her a leg up after graduating this month.

“I feel like my personality is what really seals the deal and if they can see my personality I’d get a better chance of getting the job,” said Rechnitz, who is applying for news positions with television stations in Arizona.

The job search has come a long way since the days of printing resumes on high-quality, linen paper and stuffing them in matching envelopes. Employers typically accept electronic versions of traditional resumes these days — many now require them — while incorporating their own research of applicants’ social-networking personal profiles.

“You lose a little bit of formality. You as a candidate lose some of the distinction you might have had from a resume that looked good and matched well,” said Brad Karsh, author of “Confessions of a Recruiting Director.”

So to stand out, some job seekers are now turning to online services such as WorkBlast.com and ResumeBook.tv, or posting their clips on a video-sharing site like Google Inc.’s YouTube. No longer limited to mailing video on tape or a CD, they are e-mailing links to employers directly or adding them to traditional resumes.

Kevin Epps, 49, said he was getting interviews for more senior positions after posting his video resume late last year. (None turned into job offers, but in a twist the Las Vegas company that produced the video, Harrington Reed Inc., wound up hiring him.)

Some video resumes, like Rechnitz’s, show a candidate speaking directly to a camera, while others are mock interviews. Some blend in visuals of related work or extracurriculars such as playing the piano.

Many employers welcome the chance to see a candidate before committing to an interview. Laurine Sargent said she wished she had video clips accompany the roughly 60 applications she received for a recent opening at her Phoenix-based real-estate firm.

“After a while (resumes) would become hypnotic,” she said. “Everybody today knows to say the right things they know employers are looking for.”

She said she invited a dozen candidates for interviews and might have cut that in half had she seen their presentation skills ahead of them.

Others, however, remain skeptical, worried about the time it would take to view all the video and the potential for discrimination based on race, age and other factors that wouldn’t be apparent strictly from a traditional resume.

“Employers have told me for years that they will throw a resume in the trash if it has a picture attached or included,” said Shirley Rasberry, the career-services director at Texas Christian University’s business school. “They want to be sure there is no chance of being accused of any kind of discrimination. So a video resume would have the same effect.”

Job seekers also open themselves to looking stupid, and not just by choosing weird or inappropriate e-mail addresses.

“It’s almost like handing a job candidate a loaded gun,” said Scott Erker, a senior vice president at the human-resources consulting firm Development Dimensions International. “You can be quite casual when in fact you want to make sure you’re tops in professionalism.”

He said many video resumes come across as auditions for “American Idol.” Because the concept is relatively new, he said, applicants don’t have good role models and turn to what they see on television for inspiration.

Job seeker Aleksey Vayner was widely mocked last year when his seven-minute video resume was widely circulated online. It shows footage in which he claims to lift 495 pounds in weights, serve a tennis ball at 140 mph, ski as a national qualifier and break a stack of seven bricks with his hands. He was seeking a job in investment banking.

Patricia O’Keefe, assistant career director at the University of Denver, said neither employers nor students have brought up video resumes, and the university hasn’t been pushing them. She favors waiting until employers resolve any issues related to discrimination.

Tyler Redford, chief executive of ResumeBook, acknowledged that employers and career centers have been skeptical, and fewer than a third of its users have posted a video resume, even though it is a core feature.

But Redford and other supporters believe discrimination could occur at the interview stage even without video resumes, so that alone should not deter job seekers.

As for concerns about the time it takes to view all the video, “it’s a matter of where you work it into the process,” Redford said. Employers could save time overall, he said, by reviewing video before asking the finalists to travel for interviews.

Even if an employer never sees it, producing a video resume could help a job candidate prepare for the interview and boost self-confidence, said Tim Apolito, a University of Dayton instructor who has been helping criminal justice students prepare video resumes long before YouTube and the online services came around.

Some advocates believe video resumes may make sense in certain fields like broadcasting, marketing and theater — the ones where job seekers are already asked to send in portfolios of past work. Unlike a portfolio, though, a video resume merely shows how one performs in front of a camera.

“A resume is really a marketing piece but not necessarily showing the scope of your work,” said Julia Overton-Healy, director of Mansfield University’s career center.

Nick Murphy, operations manager with WorkBlast LLC, said video resumes aren’t meant to replace other job-search tools, nor are they limited to professions in which employers deal directly with the public.

“Even people who are hiring software coders, (they) are going to sit in a cubicle somewhere,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to learn a great deal about people and their personality and their potential with the company.”

the process of digitizing doesn’t require the highest skill set, but it does require high end equipment to do it correctly.
Unleaded offers the highest end video suite for digitizing all forms of media.
Analog Video formats that we can digitize:
beta
vhs
svhs
minidv
dvcpro
dvcpro50

output video formats of media once digitized:
G3
image sequence
Apple formats (TV, Ipod, Iphone)
AVI
Quicktime (.mov)
Windows Media (.wmv)
BMP
DivX
FLC
MPEG-4
Flash ((flv.)

analog images (still photos) that need to be digitized will be done through our Epson Pro scanner at a minimum of 300dpi for archival purposes.
images files can be saved in the following major file formats:

JPEG
TIFF
RAW
PNG
GIF
BMP
PDF

Archiving:
we backup all video projects on 2 separate external drives for archival purposes.