Video podcasting: from start to finish

I’ve posted a fair amount about the video content that we’ve been creating for prospective students from the Admissions office at Hope.  Along with creation, I’ve been trying to promote and syndicate like crazy.  In the process I inadvertently learned how to develop and submit a video podcast to iTunes.  Here’s my stress-free process for doing so:

1.  You’ll need to put together some content. Depending on your setup, this can be fairly easy to do.  I’ve outlined our process for putting together our monthly updates in a previous post.  What we end up with is a high quality (1280×720 resolution) video for submission to Facebook, YouTube, and the like.

2. Since the files tend to be fairly large (upwards of 400-500 MB), you have to down-convert to a lower resolution. I can’t think of a better application for this than Handbrake.  It’s available for both Mac and Windows.  There are resolution presets, and I used “iPod High-Rez” for our podcast.  It diminished the size of these files to about 40-50 MB; still a bit hefty, but manageable from a hosting standpoint.

3.  You have to create a feed for the podcast. Podcasts are driven by feeds, and since I know absolutely no code for putting together an XML file, I’ve turned to Feeder to do this for me.  Unfortunately this software is only for Mac, but there are a variety of options out there (both Mac and Windows).  Feeder allows you to create and publish the feed via FTP.

4.  You’ll need a place to host the podcast feed and assets (videos). I have access to hope.edu/admissions, so I’ve posted our videos there.  If you’re looking to host outside your college or university, I would consider JungleDisk.  It’s powered by Amazon S3, a relative cheap storage solution.

5.  Submit your podcast to iTunes. Apple has excellent information about submitting your podcast.  Really straightforward — if you’ve gotten this far in the process, you should be good to go.

6.  Publicize! Link to the podcast on iTunes on your website, and set up your feed with FeedBurner for advanced analytics.

Note also that you could use the same process for syndicating audio podcast content!

Are you already doing this?  Looking to get something like this started?  Leave a comment and let’s start a conversation about your successes!