Embedding Video into Email
Just this weekend, I was preparing my weekly newsletter to an organization that I work with and I wanted to share a short video that I’d made from some pictures I took while hiking in one of our Missouri state parks, Rockbridge Memorial State Park. The park is known in this part of the state for its cave called The Devil’s Ice Box, and is usually a great place to explore especially in the summer when you appreciate the coolness of the cave. It was a great walk since the weather was beautiful, and the scenery breathtaking.
I used Windows Movie Maker to put the video clip together – I had never tried working with it before now, very easy to work with. It’s got some limitations in editing capabilities, but I liked the transitions it had to offer, some not even found in Camtasia Studio. But then again, who works with just one tool – I can just add it to my ‘tool kit’.
Now making the video available for viewing became a little bit of a task since I couldn’t just embed it within the html email with confidence that it would work by the time it got to its destination. So, I uploaded the video to a host site, and then in the email I used a graphic image for the viewers to click on, and that was hyperlinked to the web page where the video could be played.
Now I find out today that the programmers over at Mail Chimp have made this easier to do, provided your videos are on YouTube, blip.tv or Vimeo. You can read more about it on their blog. That’s one thing I do like about the WP blog, it’s pretty easy to embed your video, like the one below:
