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.

Editing Web Video Content Made Easy

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