editing web video content made easy

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SLICING AND DICING

How to edit in iMovie.

Ben: So now we’re going to talk about editing and specifically we’re going to focus on

iMovie. There are lots of editing programs, all different levels. iMovie is the one that I use

with Dave for most of his work. I also use Final Cut Pro.

David: I had to arm wrestle him to get him to start using iMovie. Video people love to use

Final Cut. I tried to say look, for me it’s all about I like speed as well as quality, so we met

somewhere in the middle.

Ben: Yes, you can have speed with some of these other programs. iMovie is really fantastic.

Once I really got the hang of it, it’s actually a really good program to use. It’s just

sometimes you want little tweaks that you can do in other things. It’s just like anything.

Editing Programs

These editing programs, the basic ones are

iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, Intermediate

Final Cut Express which is a broken down

version of Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas Studio,

Final Cut Studio, Sony Vegas Pro and Adobe

Premier Pro. There are other ones like Avid as

well which are editing suites as well. But really,

for most of the time, iMovie will get you there.

Question: ScreenFlow is not just a recording application, it’s a fantastic editing application too.


Importing

Ben: That’s true, absolutely. Here’s one we

prepared earlier. Now this is Dave, now

I’m going to play this for you in very fast

time. I’ve done a ScreenFlow recording of

me editing some of Dave’s footage and I

was going to play it for you, super speed.

Instead, I’ll just talk you through the

basics and we’ll do it. Importing, so generally your camera will automatically connect with

iMovie, whatever your program is, by USB. It’s easier just to choose the footage you want

to keep, click import and then just wait. Go make coffee, it’s just going to take a few

minutes depending on the size of the footage.

The Big Event

Now I’m just going to take you through

these things. Setting up, setting up your

project, creating it, getting the footage

into the timeline, cutting and cropping,

intros and outros, etc, that’s going to make

up the bulk of this session. So this is the

footage that Dave recorded before.

David: It’s pretty easy to import, so I actually recorded it on that little Sony Handycam.

Then I just used a USB to connect it. You plug it straight in, iMovie detects straight away.

You flip it to manual to give you the option to be able select which clips you want to

import. Then I just selected the one I wanted. I did it during the break. It’s only a minute

forty-two long and it only took a couple of minutes, if that, to import. It gets saved into

what they call the event library and that’s where we are now.

So just with a show of hands, who works,

or has worked with iMovie? Yes, great, ok,

so what else, Movie Maker? Yes, ok. So you

would have seen this interface before. Yes,

this is for Mac. Well, Dave’s got one at the

end of the day for the best. You’ve got a

free Mac to give away.


David: I think it’s definitely worth having both. I used to always be a PC person. I was a PC

person back in the days of BBSs, Bulletin Board Systems dial up, old school ASCII type thing.

I’ve always been on PC. Then a good friend of mine recommended that I start on Mac.

Once I got accustomed to the interface and made the change, I think it’s probably one of

the best decisions I have made. I feel more efficient. I think I enjoy Macs better, they look

beautiful. I love touching my iPhone, they make really good quality products. I’m much

more relaxed now that I use Mac. I still have both. On my desk I have Mac and PC.

So you can jump through both. The reason we lean towards this is probably it’s easier and

the quickest and easiest way to get started. But the process that Ben’s going to go through,

it’s not about the software, the process. It’s all about what he does and the order in which

he does it and what’s he including in the videos.

Ben: I’m just going to make this screen a

little bit smaller. For those of you who

have used this, what I’m going to do is

basically select all the footage, because it

is only one minute forty-two long. Up the

top you’ve got your event. The iMovie can

flip them back and forth, it’s basically your

preference. I like to have the bulk of my footage, my raw footage as you call it, up the top

and I work with the timeline down the bottom. It’s because of my Final Cut. That’s how it

works. You can change it around, it’s just a preference. So then you just drag it in and it will

populate your timeline, so there it is, all there.

What I usually do, I’ll watch through the footage, just to get a feel for it, especially if it’s

material that David has recorded when I haven’t been there. I need to get a sense of the

context of what it is. It might be half an hour’s worth of material. I say, ok, we need to

break it up into chunks of five to ten minutes and just get a feel for what I need. Then I

start looking for where I can start cutting it up. In terms of when Dave does work, I look for

those times when he starts and stops, that’s my fastest way to do it. But for something like

this, where as Rob pointed out, you might just be recording someone at an event or just

out somewhere in an uncontrolled environment and this is what you have to deal with.


Once I watch it through, I will just fast forward to where there might be a good point

where I stop. Let’s do it here where there is a change in direction. One thing about editing

is that the best way to edit, if you’re moving beyond having just one image on the screen

the whole time and you want to get some angles, or as we were talking about, I’m going to

show you about cropping and zooming in, the golden rule for editing, is to edit on the

action.

If someone is just standing there, and then suddenly you just zoom in on them, it jumps it.

But if Dave is standing there, I won’t edit on him just standing there like this, I’ll edit when

he starts to move, when he says, ok, the next thing I want to talk about. That’s when you

zoom in because it’s a moment when the eye is sensing movement so you can move in. It’s

just a natural thing that the eye responds to.

I’m going to choose this moment where I

start to spin. Then what we do is, I just split

the clip, just right click, so it’s control click,

if you’re using a pad. That’s just given me

two clips. Then I select the second clip, so

I’ve got this clip. I spin and down the

bottom here, this is your little menu, your

little tool bar that you can use on the clip. When I click it, it brings up these options for me.

Move that over a little bit, so it brings up all these things I can do.

In this situation, I’m going to go to crop

and rotation. So this brings up in this

screen, you see that now you can change

the image that you see, you can change

the dimensions of what you’ve got. Now

iMovie, you basically can just make it

larger and smaller, that’s what you’ve got

to choose from. There’s a choice. You can say ‘fit’, so it will fit whatever is on the screen

into the screen that you’ve got. You can crop it, so in this situation, that’s what we’re going

to do. You can see this green box that we’ve got, this will allow us to crop it. For some

reason it’s off the screen. This is something you going to have to deal with, glitches. I’m

going to close it down and open it back up because it should be taking up the whole

screen.


David: Occasionally you do get glitches in iMovie but it’s worth overcoming those glitches

for the speed at which you can move through doing the material as well.

Ben: Yes and usually closing it down and opening it back up fixes it. It saves and renders on

the fly. Let’s see if it has fixed it. So I’ve got my clip there, so I’m going to crop, there we go.

So now, once I start to move it around, I get to choose, whatever is within the green box is

what happens on the screen. I’m going to move in and if we talk about, this is where you

can control your framing. I could put myself in the centre but I want to do it like this

because I’m the subject and I’m pointing in a different direction and that’s where I want

your eye to go. I want to be like, this is the space you want to follow.

That’s just an editing technique. Generally

the subject will be on one side, dictating

where the eye should be going. So that’s

what I’m going to do. Now if you go up to

this button here, that lets you have a test,

see if you like it. So if I play that, so that’s

zoomed in. Now I’ll change it around, see

how that’s a little bit different? I’ve got all this space on the other side and it doesn’t quite

fit properly, so I’m going to leave it like that and click ‘done.’

Now in this situation, I didn’t edit on the cut, I should have been editing there. Now you

can make adjustments. Where I want this to start is there and I control click. Go to trim to

selection. Let’s see what happens here. It’s going to cut. I’m making mistakes because I

want you to see the things that can happen. Watch this. I just skipped a bit because I’ve

altered one clip.

What you can do is, what I would do in this situation, I would actually reconnect them, I’d

join them back together, (control z to undo that mistake) or you go back to join clip. I want

to get more precise at where I want to make that cut because it wasn’t very clean. It had

me standing there and all of a sudden I was moving, so I want to get a flow moving it. Now

there I want to be cutting it. So go control, split my clip, go back to this clip, go to crop, set

what my crop is, that’s where I want it, give it a little test, give it a bit more room.


This is the thing, this is what happened, anything takes time because you’re going to be

going back and forth getting a feel for what you want. Especially something like this where

it’s live action and you can’t control the environment. So be prepared for it to take a bit of

time. So I’m going to leave a bit more space still because I’m going to be moving over that

side. I’m happy with that, I’ll just play that through. It’s not perfect but it’s better. It’s

following the action.

Question: Going back to the outsourcing day yesterday, I like editing but it is incredibly time consuming. You all of a sudden find three hours down the track you’re having fun and not making any money. But I’ve always avoided outsourcing it because the files are so big to pass on to someone. You end up with 100-200 meg files or whatever it is. So the idea of

finding an editor and getting those big files to them to say, just weave some magic?

David: The way that we handle that, a couple of things to note. One, I’ve got someone in

house who can help me with the really heavy going material. Then for things that are more

YouTube related, it’s always best when you’re working with YouTube to make sure that you

export out at the highest quality. YouTube is going to re encode it anyway. That said,

working with YouTube when we’re doing certain thins like those slide presentations

particularly, Ben doesn’t do those slide presentations. We have another assistant who does

that. The way that works, we’re working with a lot smaller sized video.

Live video we try and compress it down. When you’re working with people off shore, it is a

little bit hard. If we’re doing a DVD rip, we have some software, I think I can double check

the name of it, that will rip the DVD and put a DVD, an hour long DVD’s about four

hundred meg. Then he works with that. It does depend. It is awkward working with people

offshore for video work and that’s how we overcome that by picking what videos they’re

working on.

Ben: Also we either upload to the back of a website, use FTP to upload files. Or you can use

something like YouSendIt or Transfer Big Files and you can have a subscription. I pay $5 a

month for transferbigfiles.com and I can transfer two gig files at a time and that should be

enough. Or you can use Dropbox as well, depending on how much. Dropbox has a two gig

limit for free. For me, that’s not enough because I’d be sending multiple files like that.

Some of my files are eight gig if I’m using a camera that has a lot of juice. Generally there

are ways to send it over the Cloud. So you can upload it to a server like Amazon S3 as well.

Question: Another solution is LogMeIn, they can access your whole computer and just do everything on your computer. It’ll be staying on your computer and that’s the way it goes.


David: There’s another one that does that, TeamViewer. There are some things to test out

there. There is no super easy solution, you work with what you’ve got. The way that we do

it is the way that I was talking about there. We try and outsource anything that is lower

quality type video, the material that I don’t need high production value. The high

production work we do in house.

Ben: Now back to our regular programming. With the editing, personally, I’m not happy

with this cut and I’d spend more time with it until I got it right. Now with iMovie, you can

get more precise. If you click on the clip you can, see this yellow thing, you can drag that

where you want and click to start and end. Once you get it there you right click or go up to

your menu and choose trim to selection or split the clip and things like that. There’s also,

once you click on it, this is an older version, this isn’t 09.

In the newer version of iMovie, there’s a precision editor where this yellow becomes

orange on the end. You can move frame by frame where you want the clip to start or end.

That’s the kind of precision you want because it will be the difference between something

being clunky and something being more precise. For the purposes of today, I’m just

showing you very rudimentary things.

Editing takes time and practice. I am learning every single day about editing. Every job I

get presents another level that I want to go to. If I want to do Picture in picture and I want

to do a whole bunch of different things, colour grading and all these different things, you’ll

keep evolving. The great thing about iMovie is you can get tutorials on it either through

iMovie on the Apple site or over on YouTube as well.

All we’re going to do now, we’ll pretend that is fantastic. Then I’m going to maybe do it

one more time. Look at now what’s happened. I’ve disappeared out of the frame. Let’s find

out where that happens. That’s when Dave moves the camera. Hire a good camera person

as well. What we’ll need to do, this is a perfect example. Before that camera moves, may be

just when it’s about to move, we’re going to do the same thing again. So I’m going to split

the clip, and all I’m going to do is do everything in reverse. I’m going to go down to my

cropping and you can either just drag it or say fit so it will go back to that. You can just test

it.

This is the thing, we talk about the different ways to learn and with editing, it is a

kinesthetic thing. You have to do it yourself. If we all had computers here today, we’d all

get you to do one and go through, but it’s just something you’re going to practice. Fine, so

we’re back out to that one shot.


David: The other thing I like to do as well when I’m doing a little bit of editing or working

with Ben, I can either do it at the point at which I cut and I’m making a new point, or if I

really want to put across something important. If you remember Ben was talking about

wide, medium and close up shots. Close up shots are ones for when I’m trying to get

emotion across. So you’ll watch certain videos like in the BBS Formula and if I might say

something, ‘you could trust what it is that I’m saying’, that’s a really good time to zoom

into my head because I really want to get that feeling across. Depending on what the

message that I’m trying to get across will determine where I’m zooming in and out.

Ben: Let’s assume that we’ve got our

content, everything we need, it’s cut up

the way we want with zooming in and

zooming out and things like that. So that’s

all great. Now we want to add an intro or

and outro, or as Rob said, transition in

between. Just say instead of us wanting to

cut between like this, we might want to do something, now up the top right here, these

are all your menu or functions or tools that you have to use in iMovie. This one is music,

this one is images that will come out of a browser or iPhoto. Then you’ve got titles which

I’ll show you, and this is transitions.

What transitions do is load. You’ve got a

whole bunch of transitions. So this will just

add a nice effect to what you do in terms of

the footage, especially if you transition into

something else, if you’re trying to denote

time passing or cut a few things together.

When we showed you the testimonial from

Heather, we actually shot it just out there. Because we’re not going to any other footage,

we wanted to cut out all the times when I’m asking a question or she’s saying um or the

information isn’t relevant. You might do something like this, which is a cross dissolve or a

fade to black or a fade to white, sometimes called a dip to colour as well, where you just

flash to another colour very briefly and it just denotes that time has passed in some way.


David: As Ben is choosing those cross dissolves as well, something to keep in mind. Think

about when you’re doing it. Often when you see these new little cross dissolves and you

think, oh that would look cool. It’s one of those things, going back to that thinking, one or

two colours, one or two fonts. I like simple, so I like fade to black, cross dissolve, that type

of thing. Occasionally I might use the dot or the page turning, depending on what it is I’m

trying to get across.

My friend is a design person and we always joke about the lens flare. I don’t know if you’ve

seen that tool in Photoshop. You add a lens flare to something and it looks really cool and

it does and it’s super easy, but it’s a very amateur thing to someone who knows. It can look

cool to the untrained eye but the trained eye will look at it and say, they’ve just added a

lens flare. So I find some of these things can be a little bit gimmicky. So I personally like to

go for, and again, it depends on the situation and there are always exceptions, but I like to

go for the simple dissolves and the fades and so on.

Ben: Yes, I agree, because especially these kinds of things, if it’s about you delivering some

content to people. Really you don’t want to distract them with the fancy things you can do.

It’s about just making it clear and concise. Most of these things, good audio, good framing,

those kinds of things, it’s about the things that you don’t notice, the invisible things. You

notice bad audio or you notice a bad shot because it’s unpleasing to the eye or the ear. So

in these situations, you want something that just gets the job done.

For these it’s really easy, you just hover over it, you click it and you drag it in. You’ll get a

green bar. So we’ll just play it. So this softens it a little bit. The great thing is you can adjust

the length of these. If you double click on it, it will bring it up, you can change it so I can

make it one second long so you’ll get a slower cross dissolve. It has a default setting. A

slower cross dissolve will denote a little bit longer time and things like that. You can do a

fade to black. So with iMovie it’s great you can just drop it in and it will replace it and it will

go back. See, it doesn’t work there, no it doesn’t work in general for this one. It works in

different situations but for this one it doesn’t. So let’s just go back to a cross dissolve.

So play around with it. I’m a button pusher. When I got that camera, I sat on the ground in

my apartment for three hours pressing every single button, I wanted to know how it

worked. It’s the same with iMovie, go in, play around, get some footage and just get a feel

for it. You’ll get a sense of what works for you for what you want to do.


That’s a bit about transitions. I’m going to use transitions again in a sec. One thing you’ve

noticed with a lot of the videos that we do with Dave is an intro and an outro, it’s really

important, that first act and call to action as well. The way we do that is, start by, I usually

put my transition in first and inevitably I always use a cross dissolve for that. Going from a

transition it fades into the next thing, it’s a nice use.

Then we go in and make a title screen.

The way you do that is go to this ‘t’, which

is next to your transitions, click on that,

thanks iMovie, thank you Apple, there is a

whole bunch of choices of things you can

do. You get all these cool little things you

can do and they will only be matched to

what you need them for. We use simple things. Mostly for the beginning I’ll use a centered

text or the zoom one. The zoom one is good, because it is ’you need to be looking at this

thing getting closer to you.’ We inevitably use that at the end, the call to action.

Just for a bit of variety I’ll just use a centered one. I want my title to be right at the start, so

I just drag it as far left as I can and then I’ll give you some choices. What do you want? Do

you want it to look like you’re doing it in front of a curtain, do you want Daryl Guppy,

underwater shot? I generally go for simple things or go for the things that are relevant to

what we’re doing.

If we’re talking about being this far-out

cosmic thing, use a space theme. In this

case let’s just go white, no we’ll go black.

So we’ll select that, select the duration

which you can change in lots of ways.

Generally if you’re putting something up

on a screen, you want it up there for at

least five seconds so people can view it. If you’ve got a quote up there that you need time

for people to read or a logo or an intro of some kind, get a feel for it. You don’t want it on

there for ten seconds so people think, get to the point, or if it’s too short, so let’s just

choose five seconds.

Once you’ve got that, you go in and select it, it will appear up the top like this and then

you start adding your new text. So let’s call it a Web Video Essentials with Ben.


David: I’m going to put this on YouTube as well.

Ben: I’m going to call it that. Have you got any suggestions? He’s the SEO expert.

David: No, you were talking about viral content at this point I time. So maybe something

along that, Web Essentials, Viral versus Branded Content or something like that.

Ben: Ok, let’s do that. Another great technique is you could start with a quote. We often do

that with testimonials, we put the quote up first. It’s about hooking them, piquing their

interest, they want to find out more.

David: Remember that hook, that’s really important and that’s why we spend a bit of time

getting that right. Once someone starts to watch the video, you want to make that value

proposition straight away so they know what they’re getting out of it.

Ben: In this case I might just format it a little bit differently. Now it might be you pose a

question. If you’re doing a series, like podcast interviews, we’ve got a logo that comes up.

There are going to be eight videos so it will say, David Jenyns interviews Yanik Silver and

it’s part 1 of 8, something like that, it can be practical as well.

David: It depends on the content as well. Sometimes we’ll use those, other times if I want

to jump straight into it like the BBS Formula, I jumped straight into ‘the biggest

opportunity on the internet right now is buying, building and selling websites.’ It depends

what it is you’re trying to do.

Ben: Now you’ll see here the title is five seconds long and goes straight into the footage,

which we don’t want. So we need to balance this screen down here with this. So you can

do two things. You can click on it, and we know that this one is five seconds, so we’re

going to make that five seconds as well. So it’s a nice little lead in. Who is this guy on the

screen? We need to contextualize who this person is delivering.

What we’re going to do, we’re going to put a lower third in, which is a classic thing they

use in news a current affairs. I use it in pretty much every corporate doco that I make and

it’s just the best way to introduce someone without them having to say, hi, I’m Ben, I do

this. It’s just a way to qualify the person. There are a few different versions that you can use

in iMovie. This is the one we tend to use because it’s got two levels on it. I’ll show you what

I mean.


So we click here. So it’s got a top and a bottom, so you put your name and then maybe

either you put what your title is, so Ben McEwing, web video producer or Ben McEwing and

then I could put on the same web video producer and then a Question: What Is The

Difference Between Viral And Branded Content? We tend to use title case when we’re

doing things like that, it depends again, it’s just your style. Now it defaults to being

centered. I like putting everything on the left.

David: There’s another good reason to put things on the left as well when you’re

embedding videos on YouTube. Often YouTube can have their logo on the bottom right

hand corner and some of the video sharing sites will have their logo on the bottom right

hand corner. So always position your material on the bottom left hand corner and then

that way it won’t get distracted.

Ben: Yes, so I’m going to move it left. The

way you do that, you highlight it, you go

up to show fonts and that opens up

everything you need to know about the

fonts. It will default to different fonts that

you can use as well. Then you can show

system font panel and you’ll get a choice

of every font that is available on the Mac. Dave loves Myriad Pro. Does everyone know

Myriad Pro, that’s the one used by Apple? So we’re going to use Myriad Pro. No we’re not.

We’re going to use the next best thing, which is Helvetica New which is a nice font. Over

here, that’s our alignment, the same that you would find in Word, just move it to the left.

You can change the colours, you can put an outline on it, you can bold it, you can italicize

it, you can do all those different things. So we’ll just leave it.

I lean towards simplicity. It depends though. When I’m making a video for a client, I will

have a custom made lower third designed with their logo on it and branding because I

want to help them brand that way. For us, we use it simply because it’s more about

presenting content in that way.

So now we’ve got a lower third in there. So let’s just run it through.

Question: So with a custom lower third, is that just made up like a transparent gif or something?

Ben: Yes, it’s just built in.


Question: You said you made custom ones for clients.

Ben: Yes, it’s a transparent, you can have a gif or you can use a movie file, a PNG file.

Question: And you just slide that over the top.

David: You’re usually doing that with Final Cut. You can also do it in iMovie, you just drag it

in. iMovie is really easy that way. It’s the same with ScreenFlow as Rob was talking about,

it’s very easy just to drag things in. Make your image and drag and drop it in.

Ben: It just ups the quality of it. I’m going to make that four seconds because it is a bit long

for me. Ok, so now we’ve got a lower third, bang, so we know who I am. The last thing is

we like to put a watermark all the way through for a few reasons. One is just for branding,

so people embed where it’s coming from and two, can be so people don’t rip it off. We’ve

had a great compliment, I’ll let Dave tell you about that.

David: A little while ago Ben created that Google versus Yellow Pages, just Google it on

YouTube. We started to find a whole lot of people started to rip it off, snipped the front of

it, snipped the end of it and then put their own SEO company at either end of it.

The main reason we like to put the url throughout the entire video is when you’re thinking

about distribution. What is the primary goal of getting these videos out there? Getting

them back to the website. Not only that, as they’re watching it, people have short attention

spans. They might click away really quickly, so if the goal is to get them back to the website,

and they’re ready to get back to your website now, don’t put the hurdle for them that they

have to watch the entire video before they find out where to go. So through your entire

video you have the url and you have it over to the left hand side so it’s not constricted by,

or covered by any sort of logos.

Ben: There are only a few more steps and

everyone is getting tired and hot and

ready for lunch, so we’re almost there. So

now I’m going to put in the watermark. I

use a different lower third, this is the one

next to it, it just says lower. I put that in.

You see it highlights blue. That’s just

telling me how much coverage it’s going to get on the footage and we can change that. So

first of all I get it in there, I click into it, usually you don’t need to put in the www because it

just takes up space. Where’s this one going?


David: That would be, just do melbourneSEOservices. Ben, Ok, melbourneSEOservices.com.

It’s on the right hand side, so it’s going to conflict once it gets on the YouTube watermark,

so I just show fonts, put it on the left. I usually get rid of the outline because you want it to

be quite strong. What’s going to happen is, it’s going to stand out.

To me that’s not a watermark, that’s very clear, it’s quite distracting. So what I like to do is,

I’ll go into it again, I click into it in this right hand editing screen and I go to show fonts.

Then I change the opacity of it. I bring it down to make it transparent. So we just go into

colour and then at the bottom you’ll see opacity. You just play around and usually around

50% is good, depending on your background, what it’s going against. If you’re on a dark

background you can afford to make it more transparent. If it’s a lighter background you

need to make it darker. It defaults to white, so let’s have a look at what it looks like.

Once we put that on full screen it should be ok. You might want to make it black and then

make it less transparent depending on the background. This is something just to play

around with. What happens is you get that instant, you find out who the person is and you

know what it is.

The way the eye works, people will look at that at first and then it will just become part of

it, it’s still there. This lower third, the watermark only goes to there, really simply you go the

end and you just drag it down and it will populate where you need it to go. So now it goes

all the way through, right to the end. You want to take it right to the end and then it will

fade out as you leave. That’s the bulk of it.

Now I’m going to do an outro, add some music and then export and we’re done. The last

thing is we’re going to do an outro, the call to action. The whole point of making a video,

what do you want them to do next, subscribe, pick up the phone, book your seat etc.

Generally we put a url on there. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to add another

transition. I like to do a fade to black, generally I do a fade to black and then I add a title.

The one I do at the end usually is a zoom

because I want it to really stand out for

people. I usually match, if I’ve used a black

screen at the beginning, I use a black

screen at the end, it just helps to keep it

clean. You don’t need to overdo it. So

what are we going to put in our call to

action?


David: Something about, to see the rest of this seminar, visit, or something like that. It’s

almost like they’ve watched a little bit of the video and we’re hooking them. Then we’re

saying, if you want to see the rest of it, head back to our website to see the rest of it, or

something like that.

Obviously it’s going to vary, but usually, thinking about what the goal is, the goal is to get

them back to your website, so you need a very clear call to action. Because we’re going to

be distributing this and this won’t necessarily be embedded into our web page, it’s all

about getting them to come back to the site, whereas sometimes the call to action might

be opt in below or something like that.

Ben: So ‘See The Next Part Of This Seminar, visit’ Generally we use title case, this is up to

you, I’ll leave it like that. Underneath you just put in your url. So what are we doing?

melbourneSEOservices. I actually colour the SEO because that’s what our logo does, so I

just add a colour there, just to add a little bit of branding as well. The way we resize it, you

just highlight it, show fonts, and then you’ve got this slider here. Basically we just slide it

up as big as it will go and it balances with the title above it.

David: Building on that, when using any text in video, for me bigger is always better

especially if you’re talking on black screens like this at the intro or outro, depending on

what size they’re looking at the video. If you’ve got space there, you might as well use it

and make it as easy to use for someone as possible. So by doing that, just make it as big as

you can.

One thing with YouTube, you can insert links. They’ve got some post editing material that I

can show you. But they won’t let you link off site. You can link to other videos, you can get

them to subscribe. There are different ways you can embed actions into video. Traffic

Geyser is a good place to look, they’ve got custom video players that you can add those

sort of actions. So at the end of a video, the video changes to an opt in box. There are a

few different ways to do that but iMovie obviously we can’t do that and this is going to be

used on video sharing sites.


Ben: So it defaults to about three seconds,

three and a half seconds, that’s not long

enough. So we just go in, double click it, go

in, make it eight to ten seconds usually.

That’s a good amount of time. What will

happen is, the default for iMovie is it will

fade out at the end. You don’t really want

that, you want that url to stay out there because when YouTube stops, it stops on the last

frame, the last thing you see. So the way around that is, you go up to your title and you

double click on it and then see here, the fade in and fade out. It has an automatic one, you

go to manual and you set it to zero.

What that is telling is that, I don’t want you to fade out. So when I go back and I play it, it

just stays there, which is a really good technique.

David: The other really good technique Ben talked about there is the idea of the length of

that last screen. As he said, at the end of the video, especially on YouTube and a lot of the

video sharing sites, it will pop up all of these related videos. What I like to do is make sure

that last screen, sometimes I’ll run it for fifteen seconds, twenty seconds. The person isn’t

going to sit there and watch through the twenty seconds, so the last thing they see is my

url and hopefully it gets them to take the action. So I’ll extend that final screen out quite

long, so it’s, go on, go visit Melbourne SEO Services before all these other options pop up.

Ben: That’s our basic lay out. The final thing we’ve got to do is add a bit of heart, a bit of

punch, bit of music. The great thing about iMovie again is that it gives you access to your

own music which has its benefits and its problems in the sense of copyright and things like

that. One thing you can use is royalty free material which is where you find in iLife, there

are jingles we pretty much use all the time. Has everyone used these, the built in music?

Once you hit your music tab, it will be in iLife

sound effects or something like that. Go down,

find jingles. You get a whole bunch of choices. I

do spend a bit of time listening to music because

I want it to enhance what the message is. If it’s a

really casual message, come check this out, we’ve

got a whole bunch of things going on, that’s one thing. Or if it’s, you’ve got to take this

seriously, the music will convey an emotion. So I’m quite careful.


Also because Dave has so many different avenues that he goes down with his videos, I try

to get a different sound for each one. You don’t want to be rehashing the same sound all

the time because it can get confusing. I guarantee if I started humming a tune right now, it

would be in your head in two seconds and you’d remember it, it brings up a memory.

So we choose something. In this case I’m going to choose Chaise Lounge is a good one.

You get different choices as well. This is a great thing, you get short, long and medium.

Generally we use short because we only do intros and outros really with music and the rest

is content. You can have a sound track all the way through, it comes down to your choice.

With the more corporate docos and so on

that I do, I like to have music going on the

whole time, it depends. Just let’s have a

quick listen. (music) This one is dynamic, it’s

let’s take some action. What we do is, very

simply, just drag it to where you want it.

When it goes green like that it, what that’s

doing, it’s telling me that it’ll put the music on the whole thing. I put it over a clip and it

will put it just in the area that I want it. Towards the end, I basically take it and I push it

right to the very end of my clip and I want it to begin towards the end of my content. So I’ll

show you what it sounds like.

That’s frustrating because it’s the same level, it’s actually louder than what I’m doing. The

way around that is you choose whatever the clip is and you go up here to this blue section

again, tools, and you go down to your audio adjustments and it’s got this cool little thing

called ducking, I don’t know why it’s called ducking. You click this button here, ‘reduce

volume of other tracks’. What that’s telling you is the clip I’ve selected, any other tracks

around it will be reduced in sound. It defaults to 15%, so you click that and you can play

around with that again. What will happen now is, it’s in the background and it will go back

to its normal speed after that.

What I would do is, I’d play around with that, I’m really precise with this material. I like the

main part of the music to kick in when you get to the action. So it comes in and it is bang,

the new title screen is on and the music kicks in. It makes such a difference. If it’s out by a

frame or a second, it’s really annoying, so I spend a lot of time with it because it’s the way it

has to be.


Usually we do an intro as well at the beginning.

This one is the opposite, you start it from the

start. Because we’ve got separate clips in here,

I’ve got to select this clip and go through that

audio ducking thing again. Otherwise we’ll get

this. I’m just going to select it, just the audio,

go to my ducking and it will just slowly fade

out. You can fade it out as well.

That is really the basics of what we do with most of Dave’s work. There are so many

variations, have a play, get in there, use your own footage, find out what you like, press lots

of buttons.

David: To recap, the main elements, and I do this with all of the videos, or Ben does it with

all of the videos. Make sure you have an intro screen, or you can lead straight into it.

Thinking back to what I was talking about that sales letter, you want that hook very early

on. Then you want to make sure that you mix up the shots throughout because your eyes

can get tired or someone can get bored if it’s the same shot.

That’s another reason why we mix up camera angles and zoom in and out. That’s why, if

you watch TV they usually, I don’t know how often do they change on TV, every minute or

two they’ll swap, zooming in and out, just to keep that interest. Otherwise the shot can get

very stale. Then towards the end, then you want to make sure that you have the call to

action which is in the final screen. We like to have lower thirds at the start of every clip and

then you also have the url which runs throughout in the bottom left hand corner because

you want to make sure that they come back to the website.

That’s pretty much it. If you do that to your videos, and all of the techniques that Ben

talked about, as far as the way to set up your equipment, do all the recording, nine out of

every ten industries that you go into, your competition won’t be doing this and you’ll look

professional. At the moment you can get away with having very average looking video

because there isn’t any competition. I don’t think that’s any excuse, once you’ve learnt now

what Ben’s teaching you now, put out that high quality work.


The competition is now coming. People are starting to wake up. Video is still very early

days but once people start to wake up, who are they going to choose? The one that looks

more professional. So you might as well start getting as good quality as you can. I try and

find that balance because I also don’t want to be a hindrance to not getting content out

there. Did you want to add something to that?

Question: Yes, just on the subject of that url on the video. Obviously there is a purpose there to attract traffic. The other reason you need to do that is called watermarking,

you don’t want people stealing that content.

David: Yes, that was the thing Ben was saying with the YouTube clip that we had. I think

we might have said that just as you hopped out to the bathroom. We had someone take

our videos for that, so that’s important.

Ben: The last thing so that’s our finished

product, it’s ready to go, Dave’s given it the

tick of approval, it’s uploaded. So now is

about getting it back out of the editing

software. This is where the minefield can

begin; it’s really easy with iMovie though to

get footage out and then get it up there. So

what we do, we go to share, you have a bunch of tools. You’ve got export movie. You can

go to YouTube, you can go straight to YouTube and it will ask you what size you want to

do and things like that. You can also export it using Quicktime, so into a Quicktime movie

file.

Generally what we do is just do ‘export movie’ and it comes out as an M4V which will play

in iTunes. Then we go and convert in other software. Ultimately I think if you’re just using

this, I would go and export it using Quicktime. The reason I wouldn’t go straight to

YouTube is you never know how many applications you want for this video. YouTube is

one thing.

When I make videos, I record it in the highest definition I can, the highest quality, because

my clients say, I want to put it on my website. Six months later they say, can you make a

DVD out of that? I say, oh, well, I’ve got to go and redo it all. If I’ve got a master file in the

highest resolution possible, then it can be used in other applications. So for us, we’re going

to use Quicktime and we’ll call it Viral vs. Branded. We’ll put it on the desktop so it’s easier

to finally upload it.


Now it will have default settings which you

can use. I’ll just run you into these really

quickly, what happens if you go into

options. Now the things you need to worry

about here generally are just setting size

and you can play around with the sound. If

we go into settings, you see on the right

hand side here, this is telling you what it’s going to be doing, how it’s going to be

exporting at the moment. The compression is H.264. H.264 is the most widely recognized

used video compression especially moving forward. It’s a very good codec, that’s what it’s

called a codec because it compresses things but it also keeps a high level of quality.

It’s like the Tower of Babel, There are lots and lots of different codecs and ways to do

things. A safe bet is H.264 that’s why it defaults to it. That’s the engine behind YouTube as

well, that’s what they use and it’s governed by a body that’s always trying to improve it as

well. If you do need to change it around, you go in here, you’ve got these different choices,

mp4, all that kind of thing. We’ll just leave it at that. If you want to find out more, just have

a chat with me in the break about things like that. And YouTube.

David: If you search on YouTube, just about any question you’ve got, someone has created

a tutorial to explain it. So it’s a good place.

Ben: Generally it will default to the current frame rate, that’s the frame rate at which the

camera recorded the information. Really you don’t need to change anything. Just say you

want to do a little test, say, I’m not ready to publish, I want to test what it looks like. You

might do it at a lower quality. But generally leave it best quality multi pass which means it

will go through it a few times when it’s encoding it, high resolution.

Steve, I know you wanted to know about this, the right things to do for streaming on the

internet. Generally this will be fine. If you need to play around with it, you start to restrict it

here in the data rate. I wouldn’t go much lower than eight hundred, you want to go as

high as possible. Around twelve hundred is great but if you’re in a situation where it has to

be really restricted, if you’re hosting on your own site or something, but generally if you’re

hosting it on YouTube, you can do it a higher rate because it is a bigger server.


David: To build on this, a couple of things. Ben, being the video guy, when he exports out,

he goes under Quicktime area. For me, I don’t understand a lot of these settings as well as

he does. What I do is I go into export as movie and you’ll see that’s another way you can do

it in iMovie and everything is preset for you. Just for now, when you do it this way that Ben

is talking about, it’s best just to sit on those standards. Then I use the export movie and

you can set size and a few other different options.

As Ben said, always export out at the highest quality and then later on, when we get to the

tools section, Rob’s going to talk a little bit about the way they encode videos for the 30-

Day Challenge or thechallenge.co now and he uses encoding.com. Basically it’s an in the

Cloud encoder where you upload your large size video and then you select what it is that

you want that output for. You might select YouTube, you might select iPhone, you might

select streaming on the web, you can select a whole lot of things. That’s a really good way

to go as well.

As Ben said, for YouTube in this particular example, it’s better just to export out higher

because YouTube is going to re encode it anyway and it’s going to be in a good quality

thing. For me personally, not being the video guy, you either get a really star player video

guy or just export it out at the highest quality and let the servers do it. Just for timing wise,

I know Rob we’ll go into in the tools section, if you could maybe spend some time in the

tools section and we’ll talk about that particular site specifically.

Ben: Yes, we’re just going to export it out as is. I’m just going to show it to you again

quickly. So share, export movie or export Quicktime. I’m going to call it Viral vs. Branded,

put it on our desktop and then hit save. Now it will tell you how long it will export. So what

that’s doing now is compressing it into the file format you want and then sending it out.

Once it’s done, you’ve got your file ready to go. It does take a bit of time.

David: What we might do as well, as this example, if we can cancel, re export it out and

we’ll do it as a low quality. Because we’re not dealing with the best speed internet here,

we’ll re export it out at lower quality, so when I go to the section to upload onto YouTube,

we don’t have to sit around for half an hour waiting for the thing to upload. I have to

dumb it down a little bit, but if you go cancel share, and then I just go export as movie.

Then in here, there are all the predefines. Let’s just set it to medium, medium’s fine. Usually

I’ll go large, because I know YouTube is going to redo it, but if we do this, it will just make

it easier for us when we upload it.

Ben: It will still take a bit of time.


David: We’ll let that go and have lunch.

Ben: With big files you can leave them overnight. It’s going to take a while.

David: Ben’s right, you should always export out at the highest quality. It’s easier, you can

downgrade quality, you can’t upgrade quality. So Ben always goes the highest quality

material and then lets where we’re going to use the video determine how we encode it

and use it from there.

Exporting

Ben: So that’s it guys. This was like a

whirlwind run through. We can talk about

these things when we go into uploading. It

is something that we could spend a week

talking about how to edit and things like

that. If you do have questions, just come

and have a chat with me. It’s something I

encourage you to explore, you’ll learn more and more. As you say, oh, I want to try that,

you’ll find a way to do it. Pretty much you can do it all in iMovie. Go have some lunch.

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