In this week's post of our YouTube Thursdays series, we are going to get back into video editing. The last few weeks we diverged a bit from editing so we could be inspired some from fellow members and their YouTube channels. We also took a look at YouTube channel banner artwork. You can see all previous week's posts via the link above if you want to catch up.
This week we are going to take a look at another one of the resources that we have to include in our video projects. When we have photos related to our subject, we can drop them into our timeline. Ideally with our business video projects, we will not simply be creating "video slideshows" because the value of doing that is only marginally better than just posting an online photo album. However, if we are doing video projects composed mostly of video clips and we have the ability to supplement with an occasional photo, then you have used a good resource.
But for this week's lesson, we are going to make a video slideshow. I'd like if you went back into your camera rolls and pick out several photos (and short video clips if you have them) and compose a new project. Maybe you'll want to highlight a particular family member or remember a certain family vacation that you took. What you might create could look something like this one that I just composed. It is looking back at fun beach days with my son over the years. Take a look
Now in this video, I also include background music for the finished edit. I'll be talking about that next week so be sure and come back to learn that aspect. This week we are just looking at the visual parts.
When you drop a photo into your timeline, you can have it display for as many seconds as you want by dragging the end of the clip to the left or right to shorten or lengthen it. By default it will come in for a duration of 5 seconds. Once we introduce the background music, you will want to coordinate the cuts with the beats of the music. But for today, we won't be concerned with that quite yet.
Here's a peek at the timeline that was used to produce the above video. Some of these things we'll learn today. Others, will be for future discussions.
One of the things that you will discover before long is the concept of aspect ratio. In videos now, the standard is a 16:9 ratio for the video frame. That means for 16 units of width, there is 9 units of height. For math geeks, that translates to a ratio where the width is 1.77 times wider than the height. Older TV productions used to be in a 4:3 ratio or the width 1.33 times the height. Now we watch programs in wider format. Some cameras take photos in a 3:2 format. If you take a vertical photo, that usually is a 9:16 (inverted from the 16:9 horizontal). In any of these cases where the aspect ratio does not match the video frame, you are going to end up with black bars where the two do not match. We call these bars either letterboxing (if they go across top and bottom) and pillarboxing if they go on the left and right sides (like vertical pillars).
When you insert a photo that is not in 16:9 aspect ratio, you will want to scale the image up so that it fills the whole frame. In the CapCut editor, scaling up an image is as simple as dragging one of the corner handles outward to make it enlarged. One of the consequences of enlarging however, is that two of the edges are going to be clipped (or cropped) off as they fall outside the frame boundary.
The final concept to cover in this week's lesson is called keyframing. Keyframing allows us to set a start and stop point of a change in one or more of the properties of the video clip. So let's say you want to zoom in over the duration of the clip. You will set a start keyframe where it is scaled at normal size and then a few seconds later another keyframe where the image is scale up. The result is that the scene will zoom in over those few seconds. Little animations like this will add a whole level of making your video presentation more interesting.
Enough talking about it. You'll learn about all of the above in today's video editing lesson:
As always, I hope that we get some that not only are curious about watching all these things but are willing to give it a try! Consider some theme for your project (a person, place, event) and then pick a set of photos from your archives (and short video clips if you have them) and compose a short 1 to 2 minute video like I demonstrated. Once you have that, we'll add music to it next! Stay tuned. See you next week!
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