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How do I create a YouTube video for my web site from scratch? Why should I add video to my web site.

Scenario: I have a new(ish) PC, never made a video before, never put a video any web site. Where do I start? What are the pitfalls?

This article is aimed at producing a demo video which will play on your company or home web site. You may use video captured from your computer or alternatively uploaded from your video camera or even mobile phone. We will cover:

• Getting free software to upload to your PC for capturing and editing the video.
• Editing the video, adding a new sound track. (This is much easier than trying to record everything in one go!)
• Creating a (free) YouTube account and uploading the video you have created.
• Adding the YouTube video to your own web site.
• Making the video searchable in Google and other search engines.

The really good news is that this is surprisingly simple and also can be done totally free. All it will take is some small amount of your time. Apart from you thinking it may be a cool thing to do, why should you do it? One of the things that search engines measure is the time people spend on your site. At the current time it really doesn't matter if they spend time reading quality copy (written information that they want) or watching a video. Simply it will have the effect of making your site easier to find. It's probably a given that you want people to find your site.

We have taken loads of screen shots so you should be able to see quite easily where you are at every point.

Step 1: Get some good free software for editing your video.

By editing we mean choosing the bit or bits of video you want to show. It's not complicated to chop off the wobbly bits at both ends, the odd pause, and efforts that did not quite work: leaving the polished message that you want to show.
Assuming you have a reasonably modern windows PC (a net book may not be sufficient): go to the Microsoft site and download the free edition of Microsoft Expression Encoder 4.

This application does a bit more than just capture windows screens. It allows you to trim (top and tail) videos so you only publish the bits you want. You may simply want to have a video of a power point presentation or any other windows application. To remove bits you dont want (edit the video) then the free tool is movie maker(so you can leave out pauses and things that went wrong).

If you are not interested in capturing screens, but have a video from your phone or camcorder, then there is the free Microsoft application: Microsoft Movie Maker:
If you're on Windows XP then click here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx
For Vista and Windows 7 you can download it here: http://windowslive.com/desktop/moviemaker

The download process may be confusing because it appears as though you are signing up for Windows Live.

Do not worry, the screens below will follow and in the end you will get Movie Maker, but just carefully uncheck the products you don't want!

 

 

Then more progress...

Now make sure you uncheck the programs that you do not want. You want only Movie Maker.

 

 

More progress....

 

 

Microsoft and all other free software providers never avoid an opportunity to switch you to their search engine or the company that they have a contract with for anti-virus, not to say other unnecessary software to slow your machine (you should have a good antivirus package already)...Just say no and uncheck those boxes.

 

 

One of the features of video editors is that they allow you to add and edit audio and video separately:

Please note that if you add any music or other copyright material you should obtain explicit written permission from the rights holders and/or performing rights controlling body.

In addition, if a rights holder complains to YouTube: (let's assume your site becomes popular) and rights holders object, YouTube will remove the entire offending video and may block your entire YouTube site under their "3 strikes and you're out" policy
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83766
So please use stuff you've made yourself and not ripped off someone else.

Step 2: Edit your video or capture screens and use Expression to make a windows based video.

Let's make part of this video. There is a very comprehensive set of video tutorials at:
http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc268308.aspx
There is a comprehensive Getting Started video at
http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc268308.aspx
Talks about stuff at quite a technical level, so here are the basics.
Let us assume you are you are making some how to guide and want to capture a specific window on the computer.  Uploading video from your phone or video recorder is really a matter of using the user manual for the phone / recorder and this is too diverse to cover here.

Open the application that you are going to record or capture.

First size the window that you want to capture. It should be large enough to show what you want, but not too large, YouTube may scale it down. Also (we hope) it will be shown on a wide range of screen sizes, so allow it to work on small screens. Also the larger the window, the faster the internet connection needed to display it without it stopping and starting.

Once you have downloaded Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 you will have some new menu items: the one you want first is the Encoder:

This will launch the following application. There is no obvious help!

 

If you are recording audio as you capture your screens, we highly recommend that you purchase a plug-in microphone which you can speak directly into. This will produce much higher quality and if you do the recording in a quite well furnished room, the sound will have far greater impact. By default audio recording is off.

To record audio as you capture your screen click on the microphone button.

The little symbols that appear alongside the mic button are a volume control and volume meter.

Now click on the red record button.

The screen will change and you will have some red lines which will snap to areas of the screen.

Size the square to surround the window you want to record.

At this point we probably have the text "custom" bottom right. This is because the red box size does not correspond to a standard screen resolution. Whilst the encoder will sucessfully record the area selected, when we come to upload to YouTube, YouTube may not recognise the size and some of the features may be disabled or it may not even work at all.

Select a standard size for the recording area.

Click the red record button again!
You will now get a three second count down and then the window behind the red square will have flashing green brackets around it.

When you have recorded what you want: click the square white stop button.
Your screen will now show the file saved with some snappy name like ScreenCapture_Date_and_time.xesc

You can either send to encoder (which will allow you to start editing or trimming the start, end and removing pauses etc. to produce a YouTube compatible file)

You may also close the window and manually launch the main Encoder application.

If you do it this way (and probably some time in the future) you will want to upload clips that the encoder has saved away on your PC somewhere. To do ths click the Import button.

and navigate to : / your documents / expression / expression encoder / screen capture output.

the net result will be a screen as follows:

 

The video at http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc950433.aspx does a very good job of explaining how to basically edit video. The video is about version 2 and you have version 4: so apart from the odd button being in a different place (crop is on the enhance tab) it tells the story well.
I recommend downloading the videos: the user experience is far better and you will probably want to view them a couple of times.

 

So our creative juices have flowed til the cup runneth over...

 

Finally you need to save or encode your results. The default settings work quite well.

Click on the Encode button.

The application may take some time to complete this process with a little clock stepping round.

It will finally produce a windows (media) file that can be used on YouTube. We recommended that you choose the name of your article or your search terms as the name of the file as this will help its use later.

Step 3: If you have not got one: get a YouTube account.

Go to YouTube http://www.youtube.com/
You will need to sign up for a free account. If you have a Google account you can use your Google id.
Last time I looked the 'create new account' was top right:

Step 4: "Publish" the video on YouTube but play it directly from your web site.

Go to YouTube http://www.youtube.com/

This is known as embedding the video.
Once you have done this upload the movie file you saved earlier.

Then click the upload video button.

The upload will progress and if you have chosen a standard windows size to record or the video comes via your camcorder, all should be ok.

Make your video searchable from Google etc

It is important that you now fill in the details, because this is what search engines use to find your video. The 'tag' should be your site search terms. Failing to do this will reduce the effectiveness by more than half.

You will notice that there is a lable "Embed" and if you copy the entire contents of the embedded text into your web page, the video will magically appear there.

In all blogging sites and web page designers you will have what is known as an HTML view as well as a text view. It is the HTML view that the entire contents of "embedded" should be copied and pasted to. It should be pasted between text where you want the video to appear.

 

Ok that all worked, now I need to remove the test I did from YouTube so I don't accidentally display it somewhere.

Go to your YouTube home page and click on the dropdown symbol next to My Account.

Now select the videos you want to remove.

 

Links to other stuff that might be of interest:

 

• How do I find good key words (search terms) to help advertise my site?
• Should I include video on my site?
• Simple DIY search engine optimisation (SEO)  for everyone.