The art of video production and editing to get your video ready for broadcasting over the internet. Here you will find articles, guides, tutorials and reviews that look into various video editing and production tools, the world of video compression and an insider look at videography.
YouTube would be nothing without content, and original content, no less. And the people who create that original content need as many tools at their disposal as possible. YouTube has delivered a new set of features to content creators that should help make their jobs easier than ever before.
The old adage that content is king has never been truer than for YouTube at this very moment. What started out as a site where short, crappy clips ruled supreme, has evolved into a site packed full of interesting and original content.
The production values are through the roof, and certain individuals are gaining fame and fortune purely as a result of running popular YouTube channels. YouTube understands this need to foster the talent, hence its extra efforts to help make the lives of content creators easier than ever before.
The mobile video space is becoming more crowded by the day. Following on from Vine and its six seconds of recording simplicity, and Instagram and its 15 seconds of recording simplicity, comes MixBit. Can this new startup compete with its more established brethren?
MixBit is a combination of app and website. The app lets smartphone users take short videos (of up to 16 seconds in length) and offers simple editing tools. Up to 256 clips can be stitched together to form videos of up to an hour in length.
The website is where these stitched together videos are published for the world to see, though they can also be shared via Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. There are no filters and no standalone social networking shenanigans, just simple video features.
YouTube is set to continue its efforts to evolve from the home of a disparate collection of funny animal videos into the home of truly talented individuals all creating professional-quality programming. In order to affect this change it’s opening YouTube Spaces around the world, with the latest due to open in New York in 2014.
When Google paid a whopping $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006, most people thought the search and advertising giant had overpaid by a considerable margin for a site that, despite growing a rapid rate, was still only 18 months old.
However, seven years later and with YouTube now dominant in the space it occupies, Google’s acquisition looks to have been an extremely intelligent one.
Where Google has triumphed in that time is nurturing independent talent, allowing filmmakers and amateur content creators to become partners, which benefits all concerned.
Facebook and Twitter have been at war as competing social networks for a number of years. But the latest battleground between the two is mobile video, with Video on Instagram (owned by Facebook) arriving as a direct response to Vine (owned by Twitter).
Vine was launched at the beginning of 2013 for iOS devices, with an Android version added later. It offers users the chance to record and share short video clips with consummate ease.
This week has seen Facebook launch Video on Instagram, adding moving pictures to the photo-sharing app snapped up by the social networking site in 2012 for a cool $1 billion. And so we have two almost-identical services competing for users.
Google is currently carrying out a full-on assault aimed at cementing its place on iOS and Apple devices. We’ve already witnessed the Apple Maps vs. Google Maps conflict, and the latest front in this ongoing war is Capture, a new YouTube app clearly aimed at usurping the current default camera app.
YouTube Capture, which will appear simply as Capture on the homescreen of your iOS device, is designed to simplify the process of capturing, uploading, and sharing video clips recorded on mobile devices.
It’s currently only available on iOS for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but Google is already working on bringing the dedicated app to Android as well. Capture gives you multiple options in one complete app, all of which benefits YouTube, and, consequently, Google.
After recording your video clip you can label it, use enhancements such as stabilization and color correction, trim the length, and even add a soundtrack. You can then upload it to YouTube and/or share it with various social networks. All without ever having used Apple’s own camera app.
YouTube is now the largest depository of Creative Commons videos that are free to be reused or remixed for free by anyone with the desire to do so. This places it alongside Flickr, which is currently number one for CC photographs.
This time last year saw YouTube unveil the Creative Commons video library, accessible right from within the YouTube Video Editor. At the time YouTube announced 10,000 videos were on offer under the CC BY license which allows anyone to reuse or remix a video as long as they give credit.
The library was conceived as being “ever-expanding,” and ordinary users were invited to also label their videos with the CC By license. This was alongside organizations such as C-SPAN, Al Jazeera, and Voice of America. This move now looks to have paid off in a big way.
YouTube now not only offers a place to easily and speedily upload videos to, but also the ability to edit them after the process has been completed. And the new YouTube editor has proved a big hit in the two months since it debuted.
YouTube has long been keen on improving the quality of content on the site. Cute cat videos are great, but premium content is better. And while badly-shot video is better than no video, video you can actually watch without having to skint to see any detail is better.
YouTube has offered editing options to its users for some time, with simple, on-site tools having been available since 2010. And in September 2011 YouTube launched a new editor which upped the number of options and usability of the features on offer by a considerable margin.
