There comes a time in every savvy, blog-reading techie type person's life when you want or need to produce a smallish, but good-quality-ish video that looks decently like it is at least screaming "cool little video" if not "Oscar." For me this time came at work when I was asked what could be done to really spice up our sales pitch to hook a really big and important customer. What better way to inspire confidence and awe in the customer, but to put together a video on the cheap (nearly free) and wow the customer with a timely expose of one of our new state-of-the-art distribution technologies? When my boss didn't answer, I knew I had hit pay dirt. He enthusiastically said "go for it" once I elaborated on the idea of a video a little bit. Honestly, I didn't quite knew HOW I was going to do this, but I knew I could figure it out, I mean we're talking about tipping the scales in our favor on a $10 million/year deal here, so why not give a shot? I typically give myself more work this way, volunteering for tasks like this, but now I can share my experience with you and the best easy and free ways I found to produce such a video in a day and a half on no budget that looks decent and make customers drool. You don't need excellent computer skills either, but a little will to learn and a few hours time depending how involved you want this video to be. Take one, marker, action!

Setting up your rig, Action!, and Pre-production after the jump...