Tag: YouTube

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Video-editing for Dummies

… and I am talking about myself here!

If I wanted to do video-editing and wasn’t doing “this U3A stuff”, I’d use Apple’s iMovie which is a “really nice and easy lemon squeezy” way of producing videos, but I can’t because for the Group it has to be cross-platform, and it has to be FREE!

I have suggested using YouTube for simple editing and indeed with the new YouTube Studio that may be your best solution – especially if you’re intending to share the video on YouTube through your Google Account; Google provides some Help & Assistance on how to do some basic video-editing and provides a useful help page with a short video on how to do video-editing using YouTube Studio, and there’s a load of other YouTube videos on the subject as you might expect.

However, not all of you have Google/YouTube accounts, and not all of you would want to “edit in the cloud”, so we need to find another solution that ticks all the boxes.

The one I found that does just that, and which also has a substantial amount of Help and Support documentation and video tutorials is Shotcut.

It’s a bit daunting when you first start it up; so many controls, icons, sliders, windows, options – but don’t let that put you off. Just try the basics to get started and then go back to learn more as you need it.

Here’s a link to a “Getting started …” video, and here’s one to a “manual” which tells you more about video-editing and using Shotcut. If you want to print something out to have beside you as you learn how to navigate the interface, you might find this short (3-page) guide useful.

Having created your video masterpiece you’ll want to save it in a format that is playable on most online services and applications – choose MPEG4 from the Export option – and then decide what you want to do with it. You can of course upload it to Google Photos – there’s no size limitation on videos you upload apart from the 15Gb per week that you get against your free storage limit – which is 15Gb!!!! You could use YouTube of course (see above) – but the quality of the video may be downgraded as you upload it; but I’d recommend you also look at Vimeo as it’s a more privacy-orientated platform for sharing videos and has a better-quality of video playback too. You can do quite a bit with a free subscription, but if you’re into video-production in  big way it might be worthwhile paying  £72 for an annual subscription. Alternatively, you could decide to host your own videos, on your own website – but that's for another day!

… and that's about it – except for the dreaded live-demo!

Recorded from Zoom, my first attempt. Not all the panes were showing, so I'm afraid the Timeline pane is not to be seen – it's at the bottom of the screen. I'll need to see if I can record the whole screen – not just the Window.

[PS: I've now found out how to share the Desktop, rather than just a Window, so there's no stopping me now. Next time, next time …]

 

 

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Google and video-sharing – something in the air?

YouTube LogoA couple of recent posts on Google+ from @MrSimonWood have got me to thinking. He first highlighted that YouTube was highlighting an Import from Google+ option which raised some concerns in his mind that Google+ Photos was about to be denuded of videos which he felt would be unfortunate because of the highly granular security model of Google+ which also prevented re-shares of videos hosted on Google+ Photos. The second was a subtle change in YouTube which affected those wishing to monetize their channels.

There are obviously changes in the air at Google as I’ve been posting over the past couple of days. Are those changes going to include a separation of photos from videos? From their point of view it might just make a lot of sense. In the video-serving world there are really only two front runners – YouTube and Vimeo. The latter doesn’t do photographs, it just concentrates on producing the best streaming of videos it can, and it succeeds in that. For Google it’s hosted videos are presented differently, depending on the platform – YouTube or Photos. Note I’ve dropped the Google+, they have! If they want to concentrate on providing the best possible platforms for both photos to compete with the SmugMug, 500px, even flickr of this world, it makes sense to not complicate things by having videos on the same platform. Similarly, if they wanted to consider enhancing their video-editing capability which is currently a bit underwhelming on YouTube then they wouldn’t want videos being hosted on different platforms. So I think Simon’s right. A change is in the air. What’s to be done about it.

Well first-of-all we perhaps need to take the Import to YouTube option first announced in August 2014 a little more seriously. One could wait for the inevitable that I’ve predicted above, or wait for the migration that Google will do for us. It’s up to you but I’m reasonably confident that Google will not lessen the privacy settings in an automated move, but will you still retain the shares you’ve created?

So … I tested an Import from Google+ on YouTube and after import it retains a Privacy of Unlisted (not Public, or Private) which is correct because I’d shared the video on Google+, but no details of who I’d shared it with are transferred across, meaning the link between the video and the Google+ Circle had been broken. This therefore means that Google has some work to do if they do want to move all content off the Photos platform; or will they be tolerant of leaving  some legacy videos on the Photos platform, or might they just break the Google+ service. Which way do you think they would be most likely to go?

It’s probable that Google will most likely want you to share from the YouTube Capture App on your smartphone, or from the browser. It is also sensible to assume (as suggested above) that they will enhance the video-editing capabilities linked to YouTube maybe with a standalone application somewhat similar to Picasa (or Snapseed) for Photos. They could do that by forking uploads from smartphones and cameras into the two platforms. This could be done transparently, but I would imagine there’s quite a bit of engineering to be done in achieving that to get a seamless and nice solution.

Who knows. I’m just speculating. What I do know is that following Simon’s second post highlighting the reduced level of security provided by YouTube that I need to put my thinking hat on YET AGAIN, on where to host videos.