Video Paths allow you to add choice-based paths to your videos and create a fun and engaging experience for your viewers who can “choose their own adventure”.
This article contains some helpful tips and tricks, gathered by Kaltura experts, that can help you create your next interactive video.
When creating an Interactive Video there are two main phases:
- Planning – As this is not a regular video, planning is key to creating an engaging video to keep your viewers following through the path.
- Content Creation – How you build out and time your content can make a huge difference in the viewer’s journey.
Planning
Planning includes the understanding that an Interactive Video is different from a regular video in that it is not viewed in a linear way. Your viewers will be able to navigate through the video and create their own experience. To create a successful interactive video, planning is key.
Here are some tips to help you plan your Interactive Video.
- Use the editor as a planning tool
- Create multiple empty nodes and start creating possible connections and paths. This will help you better determine the possible destinations and routes your viewers can choose.
- To avoid viewer confusion and optimize the transition between videos – try to limit the number of nodes connected to each video. We recommend no more that 5 nodes connected to one node.
Content Creation
How you build your Interactive Video and what content you create, can make a big difference in your audience engagement. We gathered some tips and tricks from our experts on how to create content for your Interactive Video
- Keep your content short – Each node should be no longer than 60 seconds. Otherwise, you may risk losing the viewer’s attention and they will not proceed viewing the interactive video.
- The first interaction, or hotspot in the first node, should appear in the first 30 seconds of the video. This interaction should engage users and keep them interested in what is coming.
- Once an interactive button appears, it is clickable may lose your viewer to the next video. Be certain that important content is shown before the button is displayed.
- Create a video menu to help your viewers navigate through the video. If your viewers lose track of where they are, they can always return to the main menu.
- After the interactive buttons appear, it is recommended to continue subtle movement in the background to keep the video alive. We suggest nothing too bold to distract viewers from making a selection, but something subtle to keep the viewing fun and engaging.
- You can create nodes that viewers are directed to automatically, if you want to make sure they are viewed. In these cases, it may be helpful to display a timer to show how much time is left.
- To create a seamless transition between nodes and to avoid jump cuts that will impact the flow of the video, try changing the angle or frame instead between videos. You can do that by trying to time the nodes switch to scene switches.
- To ensure the player has enough time to load the videos for a seamless transition, allow at least 10 seconds before the button appears, if a node is pointing to a few other nodes.
- If you think that one node will be more likely to be chosen than others, you can make its show-time a bit earlier than the others. The player pre-caches the next node’s videos by their appearance time on the timeline. You can use the timeline appearance times to manage the priority of the pre-cache order, even by a few miliseceonds, if you do not want to make a real significant difference.
- In case the snap tool is active, disable it to make that change of order.
- If your videos have captions, make sure that they are set for display on player before adding them up to the video paths project. In case the "Display On Player" setting was not enabled priorly, the captions might not appear on the output project display. For additional information, please see Setting Up Captions for Display.
Additional resources on configuring the Interactive Video Path player
See Introduction to the Kaltura Player | Kaltura Knowledge Center for everything you need to know to get started with the Kaltura player, including information on the timeline scrubber.
See The Kaltura Player Studio Admin Guide - Player Settings | Kaltura Knowledge Center to learn about the Player Studio player setup and customization settings menu, including information on captions default display.
See Advanced Settings | Kaltura Knowledge Center for information on advanced configuration. The Advanced Setting widget allows you to manually edit the player configuration by adding/removing properties that are not exposed in the studio interface. This guide demonstrates several examples of how to control the core capabilities of the Kaltura player via advanced settings.
