Video Editing

People that know me know I love to be creative. Writing, graphics, sugarcraft, painting, knitting, video editing… the list goes on.

Today, I’m going to talk about video editing. My publisher, Omnific publishing, provides a video for their authors’ books. But, that’s not the case for every author out there and videos can be expensive.

I’ve put together a simple teaser trailer for my novel, Shades of Atlantis, showing how, using equipment at your hands, content kindly provided free of charge and music from youtube, you can put together a simple video.





Starting with the images, there are several sites that provide Royalty free images free of charge for use in commercial and private projects. Most require an acknowledgement to the creator, which is very little to ask. Please check the individual image for requirement and not only the over all site.

www.freedigitalphotos.net

http://www.sxc.hu/

http://www.morguefile.com/

Next, software to put the images together. Most people have access to imovies or Microsoft moviemaker. I used sony vegas, because I already have it. There are a variety of other programs available free.

Wax
http://www.debugmode.com/wax

Zwei-Stein 3.01
http://zwei-stein.en.softonic.com/

There are many others depending on the user’s level of experience. Play around with effects and fonts until the video until happy with it. There is no need to add music at this point. I have found the best file type for uploading to youtube it MP4 but they also accept WMV, .AVI, .MOV, MPEG.

Upload the video and keep it set to private for now. There is need to add information yet as this is not the final video. After uploading go to ‘My Videos’ and open the youtube ‘Video Editor’. Drag the video into the timeline. There are a vast number of tracks to choose from, simply drag into the timeline and try them out with the preview screen. When the track is decided publish the video.

The next step is to ‘Edit’ the video details in ‘My Videos’, not forgetting to credit the images and music and we’re done. The video can now be viewed on youtube and embedded to other sites and blogs.


Links to the images I used are in the video details, here they are again incase anyone would like to check any of their other work.

prozac1 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=732

Evgeni Dinev / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1256

dan/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=587

http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ophelia

http://www.sxc.hu/profile/naraosga