522 – Make great videos without spending a fortune: Tom talks Beginning Video Editing

Episode 522 – Beginning Video Editing
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and twenty two of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about beginning Video editing. Now I have to preface this with the fact that I'm not in favor of you trying to do complicated video editing unless you're willing to devote pretty much full time to it for many months and figure out the software

[00:00:46] And, you know, take training and all that. I'm talking about simple things you should be able to do to knock out quick videos wherever you happen to be and without the delay of waiting for professional video editor to do it for you. Now we have a professional video editor on Here Now. Marc Bullard. He's been with me for one hundred and twenty two point five years. I think long time from before he had kids that are growing up like crazy. So he's going to give us some idea of the things that you should be able to do easily to not have to wait for delays, for a professional to do it. And and sometimes the time delay makes the video not even worth it anymore. If you got some video that's, you know, right on topic on a certain time and it's in the news and and then a week later, who cares, you know, so this will allow you to take advantage of those situations.

[00:01:47] So we'll bring Marc on in a minute. And Marc's written several books. I don't know how many now on YouTube and video editing and, excuse me, video marketing. So he he works here at the retreat center and has been around a long time, and he's also the chief instructor at our school. So there we go. All right now, I hope you didn't miss episode 521. That was our other right hand left hand guy, Larry Guerrera, who is an IMTCVA graduate, my school graduate. And we talked about WordPress plugins. So you got to listen to that episode because there's so many things going on behind the scenes in your website. And if you just divorce yourself of it and think that your web designer is going to figure it all out, they won't. And then you'll get screwed over. So definitely listen to episode 521. Anytime you wanna listen to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number and then a couple more. I usually only just talk about one, but a couple more I got to tell you about episode 520 is I told you all the kinds of marketing tools that I use currently, and there's been over a thousand of them over the years. I've been doing this, but now a lot of them were worthless, so I threw them away. A lot of them are obsolete. And so I tell you this stuff that I currently use. So that's a good episode. And then I got a series of episodes 511, 514 and 517, all on Pinterest, beginner, intermediate and advanced. Based on the webinar that we did with John Kremer and Daniel Hall, which is one of the best webinars I ever hosted ever. And I think as of this morning, I'm up to thirty eight thousand views a month, and I started out at five hundred views a month three weeks ago, just from what I learned from this webinar. So really great we'll have in the show notes for you. All right. Hey, if you'd like me to send your big checks and PayPal, we have an affiliate program where if you refer our stuff, you get commissions for it and all our stuff is high quality and good, so you never get any complaints and we'll be glad to send you money for it. Now, pick up a copy of our automation e-book. It's saved me millions of keystrokes over many years and allows me to ethically steal customers from other competitors that are too slow to get back to people. It knocks your workload down. It's just awesome. We sell it for 27 bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the show. Grab your copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's screwthecommute.com/app, we have video to show you how to use it and screen captures, and you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road.

[00:04:40] Now we're still in the middle of this wonderful pilot program we have of getting persons with disabilities educated in digital and internet marketing, and we're going to get them hired or get them in their own business or both. And then roll it out really big. So we'd love to have your help with this. We have a Go Fund Me campaign if you go to our school website at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. That's. Internet Marketing Training Center, V.A. for Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia. That will be in the show notes and click on the Go Fund Me campaign. You'll see videos from these people and just very inspirational there. You know, two of the people are blind and they're making videos and going through an internet marketing school. So if you're feeling bad about yourself, watch that and you'll see the struggles these people go through and they're still making it. So I'd love to have your help on that.

[00:05:36] All right. Let's get to the main event beginning video editing and some of the things even when you do when you're shooting your video will make it easier when it comes to editing the video. So here's a little sample. If you if you think you made a minor mistake, don't do yourself harm by going, Oh, darn it, you know, and making a big deal of it. Just. Keep on going. Right, and and the video might be just fine if you if you pause a little bit and keep on going, it makes it easy to edit.

[00:06:08] So don't overreact on things and also leave time at the beginning of the video and the end of the video so that you can do all kinds of things. So, enough of me yapping. Marc, are you ready to screw? The commute?

[00:06:21] Yeah, the commute. Yeah. All right.

[00:06:24] All right. So good to have you here. The day before Thanksgiving, we're doing this recording so that we can have it for you on Friday and you'll have something to listen to on the road. So go ahead. Take it away. Marc, what are the things you think they should be able to do to for a beginner to get started with simple video editing?

[00:06:45] Ok, simple video editing. Well, if you're a if you're very right there at the very beginning beginning, you probably don't even have some sort of video editing software. So there's your first decision. There is how you're going to do your editing and you have some choices you can edit now on your phone. You can edit on mobile or you can edit on a desktop computer. And there's pros and cons to both. If you work on an actual desktop machine, sometimes it's a little faster, more powerful.

[00:07:19] You can do more effects and stuff along those lines and see things better, too, because it's much bigger.

[00:07:25] Yeah, you got a bigger screen and all that stuff.

[00:07:26] Yeah. But you know, mobile is just that mobile. You can do it on the fly and you can get a video out there quickly and it can still look very good. So what's also nice is you can do a combination of both and and we did that here. We most of the time we work on a PC on a desktop machine, but we also train people at the video weekend on mobile video editing. So we done both. And again, that's where the pros and cons come in. So once you make that decision on where you're going to be doing your editing now, you have to decide what software or what app you're going to use. There are many, many choices. There are even online options, there are desktop options. And again, we like to focus on the desktop for the main bulk of our editing. And so what do we use? Well, there are different options. There are Mac options and also PC Microsoft options. So with Mac, you're going to have the intermediate to beginner video editing software iMovie. And if you have an iPhone, it might already be on your phone, but that would be the mobile version of iMovie. But there is also the desktop version and that software on your computer and or phone works very well, and I will talk about what what we need the software to do in just a second, but that going that comes on the Mac automatically, right?

[00:08:53] It comes on the Mac automatically.

[00:08:54] That's right. So it's a great starting point. You don't have to do any work to even get it on the machine, you know, turn it on and get going. If you want the next level up, the professional level on the Mac would be final cut pro. You might have heard that.

[00:09:08] And if not, if you start doing some Googling, it'll will come up a lot. Final Cut Pro and that is Mac only. So iMovie and Final Cut Pro are Mac only on the PC side of things and also actually PC and Mac. We recommend Adobe Premiere is the or Adobe Premiere Pro would be the professional version. I believe there's Adobe Premiere. I think it's elements I might not be right in the name, but there is an intermediate version as well floating around out there on Adobe. If you want to take a look at that and if you want to use the mobile, I believe it's called Adobe Premiere. It's the mobile version and we've used that and that actually is very user friendly. So again, that goes back to the the mobile vs. the desktop options, whatever you want to do. Ok, so is Vegas.

[00:09:55] Vegas. Sorry, I was about to throw in Vegas. Yes. Vegas is another PC only video editor that we have used in the past, and I feel that is very user friendly as well. And it does a lot of things that all of the other professional ones do as well, but for a fraction of the price.

[00:10:12] So and that's what I used a lot myself until I upgrade, you know, I got more serious about it and went to Adobe Premiere. But and I was going to say Sony Vegas. But Sony Vegas stuff has been bought out by a company called Magic secrets. So they also have sound forge for the audio editing. So I think it's Magic's bait. Is it Magic Vegas? Yeah, I think, yeah, Magic Vegas. Vegas will get you there. Vegas video editing software where whoever is selling it now, that's that's what it is.

[00:10:47] Yeah. Vegas video editing software. Fantastic.

[00:10:49] There's a lot of tutorials out there on YouTube to show you how to do this editing stuff for all of the above names that I mentioned, and it actually might be a good idea to take a look at some of those. Before you even decide and just kind of get a feel of OK,

[00:11:01] This is how editing is working and my words, I would warn people, though, to stay away from Premier and Final Cut Pro at the beginning. If you're a total beginner because I mean, these things will, you can do full blown movies on these. They're so sophisticated. The learning curve is going to be pretty high. So I would say avoid those if you're a total beginner, right?

[00:11:25] You also get lost in all of the features. There's almost so it's almost overwhelming the things you can do with it that you can just get very confusing really quickly.

[00:11:34] iMovie, Vegas, and the mobile versions try to keep it very simple for you.

[00:11:40] Oh, that's the thing I should throw in is with video editing. Like he said, there's all kinds of things that the video editors will do, but that doesn't mean you should do it just because it'll do some fancy crazy thing. See, there's an art and a science to the software, and you might figure out the features and how to use them, but you might suck at the art to put them together into something that looks good. So. So just stick to this is beginning just if you want something really fancy or I mean, if you have all kinds of time and money grow, go ahead. But the thing is, you still it's like it reminds me of some rich person that thinks they're an artist, you know? And so, so they they have they pay the gallery to let them do a show, but it all sucks. Even though they could do it, it doesn't mean they should. So I learned that lesson very hard years ago. On editing I had I was making the edit decisions on all my speaking demo tapes, and then none of them ever got me hired, probably got me fired more. And then I turned it over to a retired guy from Hollywood. And the first time they saw the video that he did. I got a $100000 spokesperson contract with CBS. So. So you got to know it's like that old Clint Eastwood movie. A man's got to know his limitations. So, all right, take it away.

[00:13:11] Ok, so that's right. So all of the above editors I just mentioned are going to be able to do the the things I'm going to mention now. So basic editing when you get to the editing stage actually a little bit before the editing stage, once you shoot your video, you have to bring that video into the computer and you want to keep that footage organized. So be clean and organized in a folder somewhere that you know where it is right from the start because it'll save you a lot of heartache, heartache and trouble later on down the road. But let's say you've done all that. You're very good and organized, and we now have some video footage that you have recorded somebody recorded and it's now into your video editor. What I mean by that? Well, when you play, when you open up the software or your app, you're going to import this. They usually make it very easy to import your video footage into the app program and then you can start. So what do you do once you start, OK, so you're going to watch your footage and you're probably if you've also been the person that has recorded it, you're going to be familiar with it, but you're going to focus on you want to find the best shot, the best and I mean shot the best take. If you're if there's audio, if there's somebody talking, you want to find the best one where the sentences are full and complete and all of that stuff, you want to take out the dead stuff and there's always going to be dead stuff. You want that stuff when you're recording. And it's usually at the beginning of a good clip and it'll be at the end of a good clip. So you need to go through and find where this good little section of your footage that you want to use starts and ends.

[00:14:45] And then you would go in or you use your video editor to say, I wanted to start right here at this right before Tom speaks. And I also and then Tom would say a sentence, and then I would tell the editor I wanted to stop here. And when you put in these two places, they start place and the stop place. Some editors call them an endpoint and an out point.

[00:15:06] You now can have used that little section to. You can take that little piece out and add it to your main project, your main. They call it a timeline anyway. So it gets a little fancy talking about the timeline, but you want to be able to set a start point and an endpoint that start and in and out start and end for each one of these video little video clips that you're going to have in your final project. Ok, all of these video video editors can create a start point and an end point of your footage, and then you can put that into your main project. And that's basically what you do over and over you. You get your good pieces of footage, you take out all the dead stuff, you add it to your main final project. And all of these little clips will start putting up against to each other, back to back to back. And that's your main video. Once you have the clips in the order and it's playing in some sort of, you know, linear fashion, then you can get fancier where you can start adding effects and they don't have to be crazy. It doesn't have to be like lasers and Star Wars and stuff unless it's appropriate, but you can add a little bit of stuff that adds professionalism. And by that, I mean, you can have a dissolve or a fade in at the beginning, it'll go from black and fade into the shot. You can also do things do that at the end of fade out, so it would have the shot and then fade to black, which is nice also for a lot of business videos. A lot of the videos at Tom is created in the past. We want to focus on information and so information. Can Trump fanciness in a video? We it would be nice to have both, but you don't want to have a lot of effects and overabundance of of a lot of fancy stuff in the video unless it focuses on the information. And Tom focuses on a lot of informative videos to build traffic.

[00:17:06] And so we really want to focus on that first. But you can add some professionalism here and there, such as Fayed's and stuff like that.

[00:17:13] Well, and the younger market that you have, the more of that stuff you can throw in. But but for older markets, you just don't want to get too crazy. They get overwhelmed with it, and it looks hokey to them.

[00:17:27] Yep. Mm hmm. Yeah. And so you focus on the message a little bit more than how it looks, but of course, you know, make it look professional and that's how we can do it simply with just cutting out the dead stuff at the beginning and the end of each clip, putting them together, maybe having a nice little fade. It doesn't always have to fade. You can even dissolve from one shot to another, which sometimes looks very nice. And all of these editors that I mentioned earlier will do that. And so also text. All of the editors will be able to put text on your screen, and you should consider text for many different uses. A first again information. You can have a list on the screen. You can have information that might not have been said in the video. No, Tom has done that a couple of times, so forget something,

[00:18:11] But he goes, Oh, don't worry about it. We'll put a sentence on the screen and clears things right up. So text is very important at times, and so you want to be able to know how to do that with any of these video editors. But I've talked about texts, I've talked about the images, I've talked about your footage.

[00:18:30] But one other main, very important thing that sometimes is neglected is audio. The audio, what people can hear in your video speaking voice affects so on can at times Trump. The video If you have good audio and a bad shot, you can still use the audio and then edit or superimpose something else over the bad audio so people can still hear the good good through that video. Yes, the good audio. The bad video So yeah, so people can hear the good audio. But now in the video, it cuts to maybe text, maybe an image, maybe another shot, but you still have that good audio. But if the reverse if you have very good video, but a terrible audio that people can not hear and not understand the information, the message is almost impossible to fix. There are. There are ways to do it, but you don't want to get stuck in that situation if you can help it. So remember, audio is almost more important in the editing and in the video shooting phase. Then the video. So and all of these editors that I mentioned before, they can handle audio to certain degrees, but they can't fix audio, but they can. They can put you can put a music under underneath. You can raise the volume of the speaking voice. And just like video, you can take out the dead spaces until you get the the audio

[00:19:57] That you need. Yeah. And I mean, you if you if you're holding your cell phone up to your mouth and shooting something that you're looking at the point of view that's called POV.

[00:20:07] Sometimes you see that you don't need a microphone because you're right there at the at the cell phone. But if you're any further, if you're further away than three or four feet, you've got to start thinking to have a microphone, either a wireless or a long wired that's not seen by the camera because your audio will will go bad very quickly. Every foot you get away from the camera. Yes.

[00:20:33] Yeah. Now, I mentioned footage a little bit, and usually I was I was talking new footage about like maybe a person speaking, maybe, you know, demonstrating a product or anything along those lines. But there's another area of footage that you should have at your disposal when it comes to editing, and that's called B-roll and B-roll is it helps add context to your video. It helps with transitioning between shots. It also can cover up any bad audio. But what is B-roll? Ok, so it is extra shots. It is extra footage that you recorded, just in case it doesn't have to be a person. It can be trees, it can be backgrounds, it can be the weather. It can be just anything that you could possibly use if you need it. So and this actually has to take place during the shooting phase, but it sure can save you in the editing phase. So, yeah. Let me give you a good editor.

[00:21:30] Let me give you some examples of that. So when we had Greg here for his VIP video weekend, I took him out to the park and we're shooting stuff and he's shooting with a selfie stick and we're teaching them how to do that. And but we shot pictures of the ducks in the pond and we shot geese flying over. And all those kinds of those are B-roll shots so that if something went wrong or if the wind was too loud on a piece of thing, we could, you know, cut it out, cover with or or bad video you could cover it with a shot of the ducks that gave context to where we were at this beautiful park. That's B-roll.

[00:22:11] Yes, and it's good to have so. Part of being a good editor is being a good cameraman. Yeah, so try to be aware of that or you you might be out of luck. Another thing that I don't know if we want to touch on it, but it is starting to become an important factor in editing, especially for the web and for your business. And that's accessibility, I think, Tom says about applying in another podcast and such. But now you have to be aware of putting in captions and subtitles. And again, that's where the titles titling feature of many video editors could come in handy. However, there are now other. There are services that can use artificial intelligence and actually you upload your video to it, it scans it and creates the captions for you.

[00:23:03] It can also create transcripts for you, which can make it very handy and very accessible, which depending on where you are in what business you are, it might be needed, it might be required and so on, or it might be required in the future. So you start now, it could be you could be ahead of the game. So now video editing all of the video to editors that we briefly touched on. They do not specifically have this artificial intelligence that can create the captions for you. You have to use another party, a third party. We can recommend one. One that we use all the time it's got a funny name, it's Kapwing. Yeah, every time I say it, Tom laughs. It's all one word. KapWing is usually how I say it, and it's kapwing.com. Yeah, and whenever I add subtitles to a video I tell Tom and Larry, I say I was swinging some videos today or I could bring a bunch of videos today, so they always get a kick out of that. But it is a fantastic program. Another interesting thing about Kapwang is they are also can do editing. You can edit on this and it's all online. So that kind of saves you with the whole mobile PC, the debate but it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles. But if you are in a pinch, kapwing.com can help you out. Now there is a fee. I don't know what it is. It's fairly reasonable.

[00:24:38] Oh, it's very cheap. I don't remember either, but cheap.

[00:24:40] But yeah, but we use it for. I put a ton of videos through it and then making making subtitles, making it accessible, making all that stuff ready for, especially for the school. And so that is something to start being aware of now. But let's get back to the editing, I guess. Well, talk about for a minute. Formats, what's the distribution? You know, .mov, .MP4, used to be .flv. You know, tell him about the formats.

[00:25:11] That's perfect. I was about to get to jump right into that. Ok, yes. Formats, there are many different formats. When you start getting into the video world, it can be very confusing.

[00:25:20] But luckily, what we need to know, most importantly, is that the internet really likes MP4. If you've been around the internet, you probably have heard of that. And if you've been around a cell phone, you've probably heard of that when your phone. Well, I know iPhones will record in MP4, so that makes it very handy to go from your phone format to, let's say, YouTube, for example. So and or a WordPress site or something like that. MP4 is a very small file, but the quality looks very good. And so that's perfect for the web and streaming and all that streaming anymore. But like, yeah, streaming on your blog or on YouTube. Ok, so there are other formats such as movie that's usually a quick time format. There's also .WMD, which is like a Windows movie video format WMD. However, since the internet is kind of taking over most mobile and most, you know, programs and apps that have to do with video are using and creating MP4.

[00:26:34] You're just asking for trouble if you end up trying to distribute in anything but MP4, because people just mess them up and they won't know what to do and all that.

[00:26:44] Yeah. So just remember that write that down, MP4. Another interesting thing that you have to be a little bit aware of now is when you are shooting a video, especially on your phone. Be aware of where is it going to go. If it's going to YouTube, then you want the phone to be horizontal. Most of the time, if you ever looked at the YouTube screen or a computer screen or TV screen, it's longer, more than it's tall, so you've got to be aware of that. However, if you're doing like Instagram or TikTok, and I want to say Pinterest, right? Tom, I think those are vertical. Most of the time. So that can you can get yourself in a little sticky situation if you record in one and you want it to go to the other. Now, having said that? It's a little bit more advanced, but you can use these video editors, you can use video editing to fix that problem. If you had a vertical video. You could actually get it. You could use your video editing skills to get it into a horizontal video, and it still would look OK. And I'm sure you've seen it in the news. Yeah. And vice versa.

[00:27:50] All right. So speaking of what you were just saying, so if you see a square video on YouTube or roughly square that tells you that the video is older or shot in standard definition, what Marc is talking about the wider screen that's called HDR or high definition and is, you know, came around later than standard definition. So if you see a square one is probably a much older video.

[00:28:19] Yeah, that's correct. Square would have like the black lines, possibly sometimes on each side, sometimes all the way around a little bit

[00:28:26] And don't pick up your old video camera and think, Oh, OK, I'll just use this since I have it already, because if it's really old, it's going to be standard definition. And so the quality won't be as good. You'll look old and out of touch as soon as you put the video up. So. So you know the it's so cheap nowadays and your phone, they're shooting TV shows on these phones nowadays, so you have it in your hand. Super high quality things. So don't try to use some old technology.

[00:28:59] Yeah, don't the old stuff, but you'd actually probably have a difficult time getting it onto a computer anyway with those old like cables and stuff too. And a lot of the times, yeah, a lot of the times phone is starting to be just the way to go.

[00:29:11] Quality is HD, it's high definition, it's horizontal or vertical. And there's, like I said, there's editing options even on your phone and some apps that you can view have 4K on your phones now. Oh, yeah. Right. So, yeah, so the phones, if you're in a pinch, not even in a pinch, but if you're on the fence about getting a camera or the phone, try it out with the phone first.

[00:29:35] And a tip for that and this is an editing thing. But but you'll drive yourself crazy if you get a lot of phone calls. So you put it in airplane mode if you're shooting something important, because if you don't, you'll get a call in the middle of some good shot and then boom, you got to throw it away. So put it in airplane mode if you're really serious about getting a good shot with your phone.

[00:29:56] Right. And so that's so we touched on MP4, you want to hopefully, if you can get recorded before the editing now is using MP4, and when you are done with your editing, your final product, you need to export the final product. All of these editors have ways to do it. Youtube is where that would come in or the manual, but you want to. Most of the time, about ninety nine percent of the time you're going to export as an MP for as well. And so sometimes you need to be aware of that because they again, sometimes all the bells and whistles, there'll be many options. So you want to make sure that you do have MP4 chosen as the export format.

[00:30:40] I want to go back for a second to, you know, because shooting and editing are so closely related. So if you're shooting your own stuff, this is something that will help you out. Like crazy is start the recording and then wait a few seconds before you start talking. And then when you're done talking or whatever you're shooting, let it run and record for a couple more seconds because that room on the end gives the editor loads of options. But if you just, you know, hit the button and start talking instantly, there's no room to to work with it. And the same thing as you stop talking or you stop shooting, you hit it the stop button instantly. Now there's no room to do anything, so I'm sure Marc has run into that. The thousands of occasions where, man, we could fix this if you only had let me give me some room.

[00:31:38] Mm hmm. Yes, I am. And the big deal again, is the audio.

[00:31:42] Like, if you missed just the first little syllable of a sentence or something, you can't go back and think that you can't fix it. You can fix the shot a little bit, but that audio, you can't stress it. So yeah, just overdo it when you hit record. Just take your time. If it's you, you know, give yourself a second, gather your thoughts. It's OK. You can take as much time, or they can take as much time in the beginning as they want because you're going to trim that off, but you can't recreate it in the editing.

[00:32:09] Yeah. Now tell him about that term trim because you do hear, Oh, you do hear that right trim.

[00:32:14] Ok, so I was mentioning you want to remove all the dead space before a good shot and remove all of it at the end. And so what you do is a lot of times people will cut those out, but you can also trim, which would mean if you have a video in your video editor and you will you, you

[00:32:33] Will be able to see it

[00:32:35] As a little graphic thumbnail. But it's actually a

[00:32:37] Video and you can click on this graphic and usually you can grab an edge of it and kind of shorten the video that you don't want. You can shorten it to the part that you do want, or you can even lengthen it as long as you have some video recorded long, you know, there. So trimming is just grabbing, you know, the beginning part and scratching it either right or left until you get right to that beginning spot where you want your video, your video clip to start and you can do the same thing at the end.

[00:33:11] Yeah, and folks, just because you sketched it a little, this is the topic of destructive and non-destructive editing. If you just say, well, you know, there's too much in the beginning of this, so you pull the starting point over a little bit, it doesn't mean you erased all the stuff before it. It's just when you pull the cursor over to start. At a certain point that video that other stuff is still there if you change your mind, you know. But if you a lot of people think, Oh, I erased everything, no, you just you're just picking the parts you want to actually show in the final product.

[00:33:51] Exactly. Yeah, you're telling the computer, I just want from this time to this time, really, but the whole the whole entire time is still saved right there in your project.

[00:34:02] All right, so I want to go back to you talked about, you know, a simple fade in or fade out. And it reminded me of the time. Sometimes you'll run into a part or point where you don't want to fade in because what will happen is is when the video is displayed, it's going to sit there on your website with just a black screen instead of the first scene. So sometimes you don't want to fade in, and then that leads us to the topic of thumbnails. So tell them about thumbnails and how that can get rid of that fade in problem.

[00:34:39] Ok. Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't even remember that. Yes, depending on where you again, where you're putting your video is important when it comes to the editing and even sometimes the shooting. But let's just say editing. Let's say you're on your blog and you want to put a video on your blog and you're not going to use YouTube or anything. You're going to have your own maybe FLV player or some player that that would plug in, that plays videos. A lot of these will let you upload the video and then when it's on your web page or blog post or something like that, you'll see a person visit it, visits it, they will see just the video player and they know there's a video there. However, usually these players will take the first frame, the first split second of your video and use it as a thumbnail. So what's the thumbnail? Well, the thumbnail is a still image. In this example, the still image would be right there inside the player waiting for you to press the play button, usually a triangle right in the middle of the screen. However, if you fade your video in the beginning, if you fade from black so it starts black and fades in, well, then the first frame, the first, the second is black. And so the video player is doing its job. It takes the thumbnail. It makes a thumbnail from that first frame, but it's black, so it looks kind of a little unprofessional and a little confusing at times to have just as black marks with a play button in it on your website. So instead of that time was mentioning that we don't wait to fix that is to either not have it fade from black. Just have it cut right in which is fine.

[00:36:14] What you want to make sure your eyes aren't closed, and it's not the frame that makes you look like an alien.

[00:36:20] Right? You know all that stuff and or you can. But we don't do this too much very often, but we can create our own still image our own thumbnail and have that for the split itty-bitty second. And then right after the split bitty second, it goes black and then fades in from black there. And that's if you really, really want wanted to fade in a lot of the times just to save, to make it easy. We just don't have the fade from black at all. We just have the video start right there instantly. And so the first frame is visible. And so your video player will have the first frame right there in your on your web page. But if you want to get a little bit more professional, you can do what we did make a still image, make a still image. You can have text on the still image, you can have it branded, you can have whatever you want, and that is the first itty bitty frame in vour video. It has to be in the video and then it can fade from black. And so then your player would have a very nice looking, professional made thumbnail. So those two options, beautiful.

[00:37:28] All right, what else you got?

[00:37:30] Well, when we were talking about thumbnails, if you're you know, if you're concerned about thumbnails in the video process, then you also should think about YouTube and there's thumbnails. So when you're making a video, when you're editing your video,

[00:37:43] If you when you upload to YouTube, YouTube will pick three random places of your video and you have no say other than one of those three to use as a still image on YouTube as as a thumbnail that shows up in the results and shows up on your YouTube channel.

[00:38:01] So then you might want to use your editor could actually make a still image of your video when that you want, and then you could add some text there and kind of save that as a JPEG and then upload that to YouTube and use that as a thumbnail. But that's a little bit more. Youtube marketing stuff kind of well sailing away.

[00:38:20] What do we use now with for making fancy thumbnails?

[00:38:24] Photoshop. But we also have you have the thumbnail blaster, right?

[00:38:28] Which is a fantastic it's another paid for service, but they have templates of thumbnails. So you upload you don't even upload anything you upload. Your video can be on YouTube and this thumbnail blaster is connected to YouTube, and it sees all of your videos that are in your YouTube channel and then thumbnail Blaster has these templates you can use. You could create your own and it will you. You make a template or excuse me, you make a thumbnail very easily and then just say, I want this on my YouTube channel. I want this on my YouTube video and thumbnail blaster does it for you. So it's kind of nice. It makes it easy to make them and easy to get them up on YouTube. But again, that's not a video editor. It's a thumbnail thing.

[00:39:11] Yeah, true. That's true, but it will get you.

[00:39:13] It is a handy thing. Yeah, yeah, we'll get you more views if you have really thumbnails that stand out.

[00:39:20] What else you got?

[00:39:22] Oh, geez, well, I don't know. Let's see, there's once you get a hold of and get a grasp of, let's see, fading and dissolving between shots, and these are called transitions. Yeah, putting text on the screen and overlaying images over your video. Those are the basic things.

[00:39:48] Ok, so we're going to take a quick sponsor break. But when we come back, I'm going to tell them how they can have a robot through this all for them. Oh, and I really am. So folks just want to remind you about our great program that we're doing with the school, with these persons with disabilities. And man, it's really something. I've raised a lot of money for homeless kids and rescued animals and all everything you can think of over the many years. But really proud of this program because I'm going to change somebody's life forever to be able to get them hired. You know, the the the disabled community,

[00:40:24] Their suicide rates are through the roof, their depression rates, their unemployment rates are crazy. So I thought, you know, I can do something about this if we get these people trained and and get them out of that, that situation and something I can be proud of for the rest of my life, that's for sure and help a lot of people. So. Same thing for you. You could really be proud to be involved in this. And when you see those people's videos, I really encourage you no matter what. You know, if you don't have any any money to give, please go over there and look at the the videos that they did to tell us about their progress in the school and keeping in mind that the two people shot the nicest videos are blind. Amazing since we're talking about video so. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and you'll be able to click over to the Go Fund Me campaign.

[00:41:24] All right. So yeah, I told you a robot can do this for you, right? So I have I've for many years, I've kept this in my back pocket just for desperation purposes. If Marc wasn't around and something that I couldn't do, but I have a program called Animoto, and there's other ones out there, too. But basically all you do is upload some pictures or jpegs and you upload some text, you know, little pieces of short, you know, promotional text about your product or service,and it has copyright free music and it will, like, generate a whole video for you. And if you don't like it, you hit the button again. It'll regenerate it all different. You know, it's just crazy. Just so you can check it out it and animoto.com. I don't have an affiliate thing for it or anything, but it's basically a robot that makes these videos from scratch with no editing. You just upload. You can even have an assistant. Upload some text, give them a whole bunch of little short lines of text and a whole bunch of pictures, and they could just generate videos all day long. You so. So I don't I don't use it as much because we have these skills to do more custom ones. But it is an alternative for you if you're not into video.

[00:42:44] So, Marc, before we go, tell them a little bit about your books.

[00:42:48] Yes, I had a YouTube marketing manual that's on Amazon. It focuses on how to use YouTube, what you need to know and how do you use all of that towards marketing? So it's updated for this year and go check it out.

[00:43:02] It's Marc Bullard, by the way, and the was this what version is this? Third, fourth or fifth?

[00:43:15] I think fifth.

[00:43:15] Yes, because things change, folks. There's all kinds of things that, you know, when whenever we get a new student and they're saying, Oh, I want to do YouTube, oh, OK, you've got to go talk to Marc, because there's things to know about the graphic of your your header graphic. You got to place things, certainly so that when it goes mobile, the important stuff doesn't disappear off the side of the screen. And and there's all kinds of things with what's it called voice recognition. They listen to what you say in the video and there's transcripts and they have their own little editing thing inside of YouTube, and you've got cards and old annotations that now are no good anymore. You got to use, I mean, just all these things, it's way more than just throwing a video up there. And then when do you do it? How often do you do it? How long should they be? All of that stuff. Marc helped you with so, so check out his books on Amazon, or he's he'll be helping you out if you're in our mentor program. So thanks a lot, Marc, for coming on, but I'm proud of him. You're welcome. All right, so everybody hope you had a good you'll hear this day after Thanksgiving. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving, but take some time this weekend to improve your business and and video is hot. And if you can do these little things that'll really speed up your success and save you a lot of money too, if you can do this stuff yourself. All right, we'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.

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