Video is everywhere these days. From YouTube vlogs to Instagram Stories to viral TikTok dances, if you want to get noticed on the internet, then you really need to get into video. At first this may seem like a daunting proposition, but with the right tools and a few tips you will be creating the next viral hit in no time.
Hardware
The better the camera the better the video you can produce at the end, but luckily most of our smartphones today come with very capable video recording capabilities that will let you shoot film in up to 4K quality, which is a higher resolution than most people’s 1080P TVs. More specialised cameras like the Olympus E-M5 Mark III, Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III, and Sony A6400 will still produce better results and worth the expense if you are shooting a documentary or similar, for social media use you will be served even better with the latest iPhone 11 Pro or Pixel 4.
Editing video can be as advanced or simple as you make it, with smartphone apps today perfectly capable of basic edits to a video meme before upload, but if you want to be able to play with more tracks and layers of filters, then you will need to invest in a laptop or desktop with a dedicated graphics card to do the heavy lifting.
Video editors
There are a wealth of video editors on the market today from the advanced professional level editors like Adobe Premier Pro X and Apple Final Cut Pro X to the impressive (and free) Lightworks. These tools will all let you spend hours perfecting your edit, with unlimited tracks (depending on your hardware), stackable audio and video filters, team collaboration options, and much more. However, just like with Photoshop they come with a steep learning curve and may be overkill for your project. In many cases you will be able to make your edits, trims, and exports on your smartphone/tablet or with a simpler and more easy to use editor such as EaseUS Software‘s video editor.
What about music?
Music licensing can be expensive, but lucky for you video platforms like YouTube and TikTok offer libraries of royalty-free music you can use with your videos without any costs at all.
Now whilst it may be easy to download music directly from YouTube (YouTube Videos zu MP3 konvertieren) for your videos, the reality is that unless you are paying the artist/copyright holder for that music you might get your video taken down or worse. However, with the amount of music being used by people in their videos without a license, YouTube and TikTok have made deals with record labels and artists that they will pay them for the music their creators use in their videos. On YouTube this might mean “demonetising” a video of an uploader and paying that money to the record label/band and on TikTok they do something similar (but never say exactly what).
Backup, backup, backup
So you’ve recorded your video, made your viral edit, and uploaded it to your social media channel of choice – that’s you done then, right? Not quite. You will want to keep backups of you videos, both the original RAW files and the edits so that if a platform takes down the video (or disappears itself) you are not left without an archive of your work.
If your computer crashes whilst editing you may be able to recover your files with something like the EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free, but really you should be backing up your videos to both an external HDD and the cloud as you go to make sure you don;t lose anything. The more places the better, and with cloud and HDD storage costs coming down rapidly there is little excuse not to keep yourself and your files protected.
So what keeping you from creating the next “Woah dance” now?