How to create video

How to create our own video and upload it to YouTube?

YouTube is one of the most visited multimedia websites in the net. It allows us to share our favorite videos with millions of people, provided that we don’t break any copyright laws or distribute unauthorized material.

If you’re a professional film director or just an amateur who loves cinema, this site is the right one if you want people to get to know you.

The first thing we need to do is decide what we want to show the world. Our video can be a slideshow of different pictures we have in our computer or a real film recorded with a video camera. So, in order to start we must have in our PC the video file we’ll share.

After that we’ll begin editing our video. This consists of cutting parts we want to eliminate, combine different scenes, add sounds or music, add text and even special effects.

For this stage we need a program called “video editor”. There are several programs from which to choose. There are more complex, professional ones but also easy to use, beginners’ versions. Some are free and others are not.

If you’re starting with this kind of hobby I would recommend a simple, free video editor.

Windows’ users may have on their computers an editor which is often included by Microsoft; it’s called “Windows Movie Maker”. For the latest versions of Windows the editor has changed its name to “Windows Live Movie Maker” or similar.

With this program we can make all the changes we want to our video so it will be ready to be shown in the web. After we make all the editing we want we’ll save the video file before uploading it to YouTube.

Here we need to have in mind some limitations. YouTube allows us to upload videos which are below 10 minutes long and files of not more than 100 MB.

This presents us a scenario where we should make some decisions.

If our video is not more than 10 minutes long we can move to the next step. Otherwise we must go back to our editor and cut some fragments until me meet the criteria. After cutting we can use the features of the editor to combine the scenes in an elegant, gentle way.

Once we have obtained this we’ll take a look at our video’s quality. This is related to two aspects: the format of the file and the resolution.

Videos with better quality would take more MB, so we’ll have to look for a lower quality until we get to the 100 MB or less.

YouTube accepts different video formats: Windows Media Video (.wmv), 3GP (mobile phones), AVI (Windows), MOV (Mac), MP4 (Ipod/PSP), MPEG, FLV (Adobe Flash), MKV (h.264). Each one of them represents a different quality and size.

If we have a short video we may choose a high quality. The longer the video the lower the quality we’ll have to choose from to have a file size below the limit.

Movie Maker gives us the chance to save our video files in different formats. In case we don’t find the right one we can use another program called “video converter”. Again we have many options to choose from. Basically a video converter would transform our video into another one with a different format. We should keep in mind that doing this won’t give us a better quality, on the contrary.

We’re looking for a video file of a smaller size with the best quality we can get.

Once we have the file with the requested length and size we can go to YouTube and upload it.

The final step is very simple. We’ll need to create a YouTube user, if you have a Google account the same user will do. We’ll then have to provide some information: title of the video, a brief description, some tags or keywords, selection of a category and language.

We’ll then select the file to share and decide if we’ll allow anyone to see it (public) or just our guests (private).

We can change these options at any time. To finish just click on “Upload video” and done.

So go for it and show the whole world what you can do!