Producing High Quality Video Content to Uplevel Your Real Estate Business

By Bob Caniglia, Director of Sales Operations, Americas

A real estate professional’s relationship with home buyers should always center around transparency and quality as they embark on a journey to find the perfect home. We all know that the home buying process can sometimes be grueling, and it can take some time to find a home that ticks all the boxes. Meeting with the home buyers, whether in person at an office or open house, is usually the first step. But what happens when real estate professionals can’t meet in person to give a tour of the property they’re looking to sell?

While the pandemic created a lot of challenges, real estate professionals had to get creative and quickly adapt, relying on technology to promote their businesses and listings, as well as communicate with clients remotely. According to a report from Redfin published in 2021, 63% of the people who bought a home in the past year made the offer without a physical walkthrough.

Listings have become an immersive online experience with 360-degree tours, drone footage, and cinematic quality video to highlight the property’s best features. Real estate professionals had to wear many hats to accommodate this, including purchasing the right cameras and gear, shooting and editing the content themselves, and posting videos of their listings. They’ve also taken the initiative to live stream events, as well as promote their content on social media.

Undoubtedly, technology has become an integral part of real estate, and the tools to achieve high quality video are at the fingertips of real estate professionals now more than ever. Blackmagic Design offers a variety of products, including cinema cameras and live production switchers, that enable real estate professionals to optimize the quality of their videos, establish new avenues to attract more potential buyers and promote their business through live streams. And even better, these tools don’t have to break the bank.

Blackmagic Design’s line of compact digital film cameras, ranging from the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K ($1,295) to the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro ($2,495), offer real estate professionals cinematic quality without having to pay the large Hollywood studio price tag. The combination of high dynamic range and great low light performance provide feature film images with gorgeous colors, essential to showcasing a property in its best light. Key features include a large 5" LCD touch screen for easy focus, recording via readily available SD cards, or higher performance UHS-II and CFast cards, EF or MFT lens mounts and more. These compact cameras are lightweight, making them ideal to mount on drones for overhead shots, something we’re seeing more and more in real estate. Additionally, they are also incredibly easy to operate and use, allowing anyone regardless of ability, to dramatically improve the production value of their work.

With the Pocket Cinema Cameras, real estate professionals don’t have to worry about carrying another camera to take photographs, as the cameras can also capture high resolution stills, 21.2 megapixel images on the 6K camera models or 8 megapixel images on the 4K camera model. In addition to still photos, users get controls for ISO, shutter, aperture, white balance, power and more. These features are important when heading into a property and taking stills and video to upload to the listing portal or share directly with clients.

Included with the cameras is DaVinci Resolve Studio, Blackmagic Design’s solution for editing, color correction, audio post, and more. With DaVinci Resolve Studio, real estate professionals can take their home tour videos, for example, quickly edit them and make them look like our favorite shows and blockbusters. Showing off the best part of a home and adding that special touch is key during the selling process, and DaVinci Resolve Studio is a fundamental tool to help achieve just that.

Our gear is also ideal for vlogging and live streaming, and real estate professionals can take advantage of it in many ways. The ATEM Mini line of live production switchers, which includes the entry-level ATEM Mini ($295) all the way up to the more robust ATEM Mini Extreme ISO ($1,295), makes it easy to create professional, multi-camera productions for live streaming to YouTube and business presentations using Skype or Zoom.

Real estate professionals can simply connect an ATEM Mini and switch live up to eight high quality video camera inputs for dramatically better quality images. They can also connect a computer for PowerPoint slides, and the switchers’ built-in DVE allows picture-in-picture effects, perfect for commentary during real estate training videos, education and more. All ATEM Mini models have USB that works like a webcam, so users can use any streaming software, while the ATEM Mini Pro and ATEM Mini Extreme models add live streaming and recording to USB disks.

Combined with the Pocket Cinema Cameras, the ATEM Mini line creates the ideal kit for any real estate professional who is either looking to live stream a house tour or set up a home studio for business meetings or to conduct training sessions for clients and industry peers. Users can even connect a Pocket Cinema Camera to an ATEM Mini and get control of the camera parameters, lens and tally light, perfect when creating a professional studio workflow.

If there’s something we’ve learned during the past year, it’s that the real estate market has seen its ups and downs. It’s been a rollercoaster ride, from homeowners who became hesitant to sell, to the physical limitations of potential buyers attending open houses. Through it all, real estate professionals have adapted to their circumstances and turned to technology to guide their clients in one of their most important life decisions: finding their forever home.

The adoption of technology in the real estate industry is not going anywhere. With more professionals relying on a hybrid model to showcase their listings and grow their businesses, the tools and technology supporting the industry will continue to grow over the next few years, and at Blackmagic Design, we hope to be part of their ever-evolving journey.