Realty Showcase TV Blog

Photography is the most important visual element of any home listing whether online, in the press or on TV.  RealtyShowcase.tv specializes in converting your photographs into powerful and high quality videos.  Understanding the process and how to get the most out of your images is the topic of today’s blog.

Photography!
We’ve had some customers calling us and asking us about photographs used in video. Most often these questions relate to resolution and how to make sure your pictures are the right size. So whats the story? In order to convert your pictures into video they need meet a few criteria. The first criteria is the size of a picture and when we talk about size we’re talking about the width in pixels. Our pictures need to be a minimum of 640 pixels wide. In modern terms with even the most basic cellphones equipped with cameras this is considered a very low resolution. If your pictures are too small then the quality of the videos produced as a result might be sub-standard, something we all want to avoid.

How do I resize my photographs?
There are many ways to resize images and software that can make this as easy as a few mouse clicks. Free software like Google’s Picasa is simple and easy to use and is free. If time is an issue and access to the trusty old home computer isn’t an option there are some websites that allow you to resize images through them. Google also produced Picnik which is an easy to use website that will allow you to resize images through a simple upload and it too is completely free.

The second criteria for photographs is the orientation. Our videos are produced exclusively using “landscape” orientation pictures. This means the pictures are wider than they are tall, orientated left-to right like you would if you were taking a picture of a nice landscape. “Portrait” orientation pictures; pictures taller than they are wide are pictures orientated up-and-down. This is an aesthetic typically reserved for portraits or head shots.

So whats the difference? Take a look at the above image and you”ll see. TV screens are always in landscape orientation so in order to get the most out of the picture we need to use images that best fill the screen. Landscape images achieve this because they naturally fill the space and are orientated the right way. If we use portrait orientation images then we have an image that doesn’t quite fit into the screen. In order to make the image fill the screen we have to stretch the width which crops off the top and bottom detail of the image.

You can upload as many pictures as you like for each individual listing but for the pictures you chose for your video you should only chose images that are in landscape orientation.

We’re also constantly on the lookout for improvements to our system. Coming very soon is an improved realtor submission interface thats more simple, more intuitive and will save you time. In addition we’re very close to launching a new and improved search engine for our public website designed to make property finding much more simple.

We’re continuing to offer special prices and promotions for 2010. For information on listing packages and advertising opportunities contact our sales team toll free on 877-843-3218 or email info@realtyshowcase.tv.

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