The most common form of a real estate video tour isn’t the best one, as it turns out. Too many people fall back on something too simple, which is a walk and talk tour of the home. While that works in person, there are a number of issues with it in video form, some of which are addressed below:
Camera Stability
In person, your mind naturally stabilizes your view as you walk and take uneven steps. When you’re sitting stationary watching a video, this same effect is not at play. As a result, video shot with a moving, shaking camera can be very unsettling to watch. It can make some users feel like their head is spinning, or even make them feel sick to the stomach. Obviously you want to avoid this.
While a professional cameraperson who is used to shooting video on the move may be able to hold the camera steady, it’s not easy to do for a newcomer, especially with a hand held camera. As a result, it’s a good idea to avoid using the walk and talk in a real estate video tour.
Sequential Editing
Another issue with the walk and talk in a real estate video tour is that it can significantly limit your options in the editing room. When you are narrating it live and the video shows the agent or narrator walking from room to room, any edit would cause a “jump cut”. This is when something on the screen is in one place in the shot at one moment and jumps to another spot the next. In other words, if you were to show someone walking out of one room and then just cut into another room, you’d obviously be skipping something. The viewer might then wonder whether or not that was done for a reason, and it can make the video less impactful.
While there are techniques to enable those types of edits, such as covering the edit with other video known as “b-roll”, they may be a bit more complicated than a beginner would want to tackle and should probably be saved for the future.
Shooting Difficulty
The other issue with real estate video tour, walk and talk is that the shot must always be framed carefully because the cameraperson is continually on the move. Instead of moving from room to room and setting up a camera, the video is shot all at once. This means there is no time to look around a room and position a camera perfectly on a tripod. Instead, the cameraperson has to be on their “A”, game from start to finish in order to deliver a high quality product. That can put a lot of pressure on, and for beginners that can be a little bit disconcerting.
Regardless of whether you wanted a walk and talk real estate video tour or a more conventional product, it may make sense to work with a team of experts who can deliver a great finished product reliably.
