Two organizations we work with make heavy use of video content in their operations but lack the ability to physically distribute it to larger audience. By placing their video content on YouTube, the organization gains a whole host of benefits:

• Reach a potential audience of million at little to no cost
• Publish video content online without worrying about the technical issues
• Increase the value of their website to users through video content

If you don’t want to miss out on how publishing on YouTube can help your charity read on.

Whilst we can’t talk you through every step in this short article it’s likely that you’ll fall into one of three cases. It’s less common for video to be produced in an analogue format so we’re going to presume that we’re starting with some digital source.

• A short DVD made by a production company or yourselves and all you want to do is place the video as it is on YouTube. You will need to use a DVD “ripper” to produce a video file on your computer. We recommend AutoGK for Windows and HandBrake for Mac OS X.
• The video is still on your digital video camera which you can connect to your computer’s firewire port. You might be happy with the video as it is but there’s a possibility you may wish to edit the video before publishing. You should import the video from your firewire device into your video editing software. Edit the video until you’re happy and export it to a file, ready to upload to YouTube. YouTube limits the size of the video you can upload to 100MB and ten minutes in length so it’s important that your exported video fits in these limits. Your video software is likely to have a wizard or guide to help you with compressing the video to a suitable file size.
• You already have the video in a file on your computer. All you need to do is check that the video is suitable for publishing on YouTube, perhaps recompressing it in your editing software to make sure it fits within the acceptable limits.

You might wish to look at the following video editing packages. Don’t forget the limitations of 100MB and ten minutes!

• Windows - Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premier Elements, Ulead Video Studio
• Mac OS X - Apple iMovie, Final Cut Express, Adobe Premier
• Linux - Kino, LIVES

Currently we recommend Apple’s iMovie for it’s ease of use. For basic editing, Windows Movie Maker should suffice. In a future article we look at video editing with free and open source software tools.

You’re ready to go, sign up for a YouTube account and upload your video. Be patient as a 100MB file can take some time to upload even on a broadband connection!

For further information, advice and help on how you can best use YouTube, please contact us.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.