Friday, January 18, 2008

How To: Make A Youtube clip in 10 steps on a Mac


As previously advertised, here's a quick guide to making a quick, single image clip, and then post it on youtube with iMovie (If you have iLife '08, with the new version of iMovie, I can't help you, because it works differently, you can however download the older version on Apple's site for free).

1. Well open iMovie for a start
2. You'll probably be want to choose "Create A New Project"
3. Now iMovie should be open and on the right hand side, you should see a selection of the following tabs: "Clips ; Themes; Media; etc" Choose Media
4. You should see a list of songs, that's your iTunes library. If you don't see them, make sure you're in Audio and not Photos at the top right hand side.
5. Choose your song and choose "Place at Playhead". Alternatively, you can drag it on your timeline.
6. Now you may want to choose a picture. You can choose one of your own, or drag one form wherever on your computer into the top line of your timeline.
7. Don't forget to make sure that picture will last as long as your song: In the timeline, grab the right end of the picture and drag it until the end of the song, but don't go too far either.
8. Now, in your Menu Bar, choose Share, and whole you admire all places you could send your video to, you will choose boring old QuickTime. This is how you'll compress your "movie". You'll have a more specific choice of compressing methods, I usually go for Web Streaming.
9. Once that done, choose a name for your clip, which should go in you Movies folder by default.
10. Meanwhile, I'm guessing you'll have a Youtube account, and will have clicked on Upload, which usually on the upper right hand corner of any youtube video page. There you'll fill in all the relevant information about your "movie" and then click on Upload a Movie (I don't know what QUickcapture means, I should really check it out sometime); "Choose file", (choose it); let it do its thing, and shazam! It's up there!

5 comments:

goneforeign said...

Ejay: I look forward to dealing with youtube, but for now my frustation level is UP!
Can you do a similar step by stem for Podbean? I've tried Nilpferd's umpteen times but it's not happening. The problem lies at the 'copy and paste the code'part. Where do I paste it? The box at New Post where the edit html is won't accept it, everything else seems to be OK, hope you casn help, I've been trying to put some music up for 2 solid days.

goneforeign said...

Ejay: OK, it finally clicked, it just wouldn't paste but it finally did. Now I'm onto youtube; just had a look at your site and you've been busy! I have to go back when I have a little time.
How do you do the 'moves' with stills? Is that just an iPhoto slideshow?
Where do you find footage?

ejaydee said...

The moving ones (I assume you're talking about the Caetano) was my first clip and it took ages. Basically I gathered of bunch of related pictures from the internet (one of the shots of the ocean may be mine) and then played around with the Ken Burns effect. In case you're not familiar with him he does pretty good documentaries on American culture (he did Baseball, the Civil War, and Jazz, which I have and really liked). It's an effect whereby you zoom in or out of a still picture. You could make a clip with your own footage, if you, otherwise I'm sure there's a software that allows you top record what's going on on your computer, sort of like a video version of Wiretap. I also know of a program called Podtube that allows you to grab a clip on youtube and it'll transfer it automatically to you iTunes.

Blimpy said...

archive.org has amazing old footage that's in the public domain, I've used it before for music videos.

Great fun. Imovie likey QuickTime files if you wan to do this.

goneforeign said...

Ejay: I suspected Ken Burns from the start, I use him a lot in my slide sequences. So you would just create a short clip of images with KB and time it for your song? I'm going to have a go.