As promised, I wanted to say a few more thoughts about making my first YouTube video (see below). I had fun doing it, but I won’t be giving up my day job just yet.
Old tech: Even before I could start editing, I consumed a lot of time. As I said before, I don’t own a video camera and the one I borrowed was an old High 8 camera. (I’ll spare you the details of how I got it converted to an editable digital format.) Also, I shopped around for a video editing program and asked a number of different people for advice, so that took some more time. I couldn’t figure out how to work the iMovies program on my old iMac, and was just about to plunk down some money to buy a Windows application when — lo and behold — I discovered I already own Windows Movie Maker on my new laptop.
Windows Movie Maker: A very easy program to use. I knew nothing about editing before using it. WMM did the trick.
Telling a story: Once I got the hang of editing, I had a lot of fun trying to tell a story from the raw video and photos taken by my students. It also helped to have an amazing original song from one of my students that I really liked. My goal was to make a very short, tightly strung video. My long version was over 5 minutes, the shorter version a little over 3 minutes. Still a little long by YouTube standards, but I needed to get in as many of my students in the footage.
So what did I learn?: Besides editing, I learned that one of the real advantages of video is that it captures a memory almost like nothing else can. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a video may be worth a million. When I watch the video of my class, the memory is priceless. YouTube fits into the picture by providing an easy way for me to share the video with my class and others. That’s the original idea — sharing video — that prompted YouTube’s invention. That the YouTube founders perfected their idea so well is a blessing for innovation.
December 21, 2006 at 10:18 pm |
Hi from Peru
For me, the best video editor is MAGIX MOVIE PRO10. I use for my youtube videos. I dont have a camera, so y download the videos of youtube or photos from google.
Bye!
Luis
June 4, 2009 at 5:03 am |
Sweet blog. I never know what I am going to come across next. I think you should do more posting as you have some pretty intelligent stuff to say.
I’ll be watching you .