Creating and sharing online videos

By Derek Boiko-Weyrauch

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YouTube has risen to prominence in recent years as the Internet's choice for getting video from point 'a' to point 'broadcast' - attracting Google's attention and purchasing dollars with its one hundred million video views per day. While there are other options to get your video online, YouTube remains, by far, the most wildly popular. Its massive amount of content attests to its ease-of-use. However, these tips and tricks will help you out with just about any video broadcast site out there - from iFilm to GodTube - since they focus on the basic practices of capturing, editing and converting video into a format the Internet can understand.

If you would rather watch than read, we have prepared a short video tutorial showing you the steps involved.

Getting started

To get your video up on YouTube, you need four things:

• The footage itself
• A computer with a high-speed Internet connection
• Basic video editing software
• A YouTube account.

The editing software is optional if you're happy with your footage, or if it's already in a usable form on a digital still camera or mobile device. The other three are necessary. You can get fancy, of course, and bring in boom mics, best boys, craft services or feisty starlets, but those are by no means necessary and may even prove troublesome.

Webcam or mobile phone users can cut the middlemen out of this process and by either capturing the footage directly with a webcam, or capturing it on a mobile phone first and then directly uploading the video.

If you don't have access to a webcam or mobile phone for direct capturing or uploading - or if you want to play around with your footage before you upload it - there are many ways to get a video onto your computer. Videos taken with digital still cameras are more than likely already in a YouTube-format that you can import into your computer by dragging and dropping the file onto your hard drive like you would an image.

Getting videos from a digital video camera ('DV camera' for short) to your hard drive is slightly trickier. The easiest way to do this – without having to buy any new software or download arcane free software – is to go through a video editing program on your computer. You'll need to capture the video from your DV camera. All that means is you'll have to play the tape on the camera, which is then picked up by the editing program using a FireWire or USB cable, and turned into a video file. Different editing programs capture video in different ways, so be sure to read up on how your editing program captures before you use it, because YouTube doesn't accept every format (see box).

The next section provides a good rundown of a few free and easy video editing programs for both Mac and PC. Once your video has been captured, you can either use the footage as-is, or you can play around with it in the editing program to add titles, music and transitions.

Making movie magic

Once your video is on your hard drive, you can do all sorts of things to it with a video editor. A lot of video editors are expensive and require multiple hard drives, fancy recording equipment, and sometimes even a special studio in your basement if you want to go pro! But there are many free and easy players that require nothing more than the video and your computer to work their magic.

• Windows Movie Maker: It's free, it's easy and it comes with Windows so there are no extras to install. Microsoft has a good rundown of all the program basics here .
• iMovie HD: Like Windows Movie Maker, but available free on most Apple computers as part of Apple's iLife Suite. Check out Apple's handy tutorial videos here for an idea of how to use iMovie.
• Avid Free DV: If you're curious about the world of digital video editing, and want to test-drive a professional product, check out Free DV , Avid's free trial version of its multi-thousand dollar application Media Composer.

Take a little time to become familiar with the inner workings of whichever program you use. Even if you just want to do simple things with your video, take a moment to explore the full extent of the features. You may come across things you never thought you could do. As with all software, video editing programs reward curiosity, so don't be afraid to try out new things and stray from the beaten path. And if you make a mistake, that's what the "Undo" option is for!

If you're stumped or pressed for time, however, you can always let your video editing program do the work for you. Both iMovie and Windows Movie Maker have automatic editing features that will look at the footage you have and piece it together with titles and transitions with a single mouse click.

When you're happy with your final product, you can export the video into any of the formats accepted by YouTube and get on with uploading. Pay attention to the format you save your video as, and make sure it's either .WMV, .AVI, .MOV or .MPG, because many programs automatically save videos as project files (so that they can be changed and edited with the program) instead of video files that can be viewed with a media player or played on YouTube. To get the most out of your video for the web, YouTube has a list of recommendations for file format and audio here.

Finishing touches

By this point, you should have a video you're proud of. If not, no worries. You can always go back and re-edit your footage until you have something that suits you. It also doesn't hurt to double-check that the movie is in a format YouTube can understand and that it isn't longer than 10 minutes or 100 megabytes. Otherwise, YouTube won't be able to handle it.

The final step is to upload the video to YouTube -- a much easier process than editing it. All you have to do is enter in the relevant information about the video (such as title, description, keywords, category, etc) on the screen shown above, pick which video file you want to upload from your computer and who you want to see it, and voila! You've broadcasted yourself!

Where you go from here is entirely up to you. Your video is now online, available for all to see. You can email the link to your friends, post it on your blog or website, or even transmit the link via smoke signal or carrier pigeon. Below are a few links to further reading for adventurous folks who want to learn more about the world of video editing, production and promotion on the Internet.

Further reading

• How Video Editing Works - A good run-down by How Stuff Works on the ins and outs of video editing.
• 10 Tips For Buying a Digital Camcorder  - If you want to get a better digital video camera, make sure you know what to look for first. Salespeople can't always be trusted to give you the full story.
• YouTube For Dummies  – The "For Dummies" series has finally taken notice of the YouTube juggernaut, and has released a book that tackles the details of using and promoting videos on the site.
• YouTube's Help Center  – Video creation sometimes stumps even the savviest, which is why it doesn't hurt to check out a help file every once in a while. YouTube's Help Center covers everything from account basics to copyright questions.