 family on post production you have this footage now what for the next hour we will be exploring video and storytelling post production how to bring your story together how to handle editing questions how to deal with all of the pieces as you are collecting and gathering your story and getting it ready for distribution. My name is Yvonne Haney thank you for joining us today I'm the interactive producer here at TechSoup and you have joined us for TS Digs the digital storytelling challenge we do yearly here at TechSoup. If you note on the screen right now at www.tsdigs.org that's TS.org you can enter your own stories until February 29th at 1159 p.m. TST we look forward to seeing your videos and five photos for a set there are some great prizes and you can get all of your questions answered at tsdigs.org so for the next hour we are going to be having a conversation with Erin Bramley of Lights Camera Help. Erin thank you for joining us today thank you for having me and I want to confirm are we recording I want to make sure that our webinar is archiving and ready to go this archive will be made available on our website and you will be able to go back and see the other amazing stars that we've had this year with Lights Camera Help from David Ness and Rich Eskaz as well. Today we have Erin Bramley is the co-founder and director of Lights Camera Help you are leading up communication and education for this organization is that right Erin? That's correct. Yes so you focused on the nexus of communication, collaboration, nonprofits, video and social media and we're going to dive deeper into that in the next hour is that correct? Yeah that would be great. Great so for those of you looking for resources we will be plugging those in and with links throughout the hour again that you can also go to tsdigs.org for more information about the digital storytelling challenge and it is not too late to get started you have about two weeks left to get those entries in. Erin I'm going to pass the screen off to you and thank you for joining us today. Great thanks Yvonne for that great introduction and hello everybody I am very happy to be here we've had a fantastic time working with TechSoup so far on the digital storytelling challenge and we're really excited to see what all of you guys put together and produce it's going to be a really fantastic experience to take a look at the entries and figure out sort of what's looking good and what needs improvement and all that sort of stuff. You'll see on the screen right now my Twitter handle Erin MSB feel free to go ahead and ask any questions that you have as you're producing you know to that always put the tsdigs hashtag in there and you can also find me at email that's Erin at lightscamerahelp.org and then also off of the tsdigs.org website there is the digital storytelling challenge forum that you can go ahead and post any additional questions that you guys have afterwards there but what I'm really excited to talk to you guys about today is post production I'm not sure if my colleagues have said this in some of their previous production and pre-production webinars but when we're putting together a digital story there are essentially three versions of the story that get told there's the story that you set out that you set out to tell so that's the one that you put down on a production grid or that's the idea that you have when you're you're walking your dog one day or whatever that is right that's story that you sort of intend to tell and then there's the story that you capture right so whatever you set out and intend to tell well people sometimes say the most incredible things in the story changes a little bit or you capture a certain image that you want to focus your video or your photos set around or there's there's something that happens as you're out in the field capturing your story that changes the story just a little bit but then there's the the third story and that's the story that you actually edit and produce the story that gets told in editing maybe I'm a little biased here but I think is the most important of the three stories and the reason for that is because that's the one that you share with everyone up until this point you know all the stories that you told as part of the production process have entirely been internal they've been with your organization or they've been in someone's mind or even right now on paper or whatever that is or just captured in digital files but the one that you share with everyone is the one that you're actually editing and that's the story that you wind up eventually telling so we're going to talk a little about how that story comes together and and then a little bit about how you go ahead and get that story out to your audience afterwards. Yes and Erin I think we're going to start just as we get going with the poll question so that we have a clear sense of what skills we are looking to gather together in this hour so there are a handful of skill levels here in this webinar room and we want to hear where you're at are you looking to learn more about editing you looking to maximize your social media presence is this your first time creating a social story and where can we help you in this hour we appreciate your answers to that poll question we're going to leave that open for another 10 seconds thank you for and those answers it sounds like we have a lot of newbies coming in the room and a lot we're looking to learn about impact and creating editing for effective impact I'm going to go ahead and close the poll now and share the results so that we can all see this together 30% of you are looking for direct help with editing and we will definitely be tackling that in this hour and over who aren't just getting started this is perhaps your first time creating a digital story so we'll do our best to make this as accessible and easy for you as possible and I'm going to go ahead and let you get into editing basics excellent great well thank you for that information that's very helpful so here's a little bit of considerations before editing right so you have all your footage or whatever you have your story already to go but there's a bunch of questions that need to be answered so the first one oftentimes is Mac versus PC you know what should you you know if you're fortunate to have a bit but to get a machine for editing what should you get or you know what should you be using on this the software that you actually currently have or hardware you currently have so from the PC side of things free that comes on all PCs is software called Windows Movie Maker and there's actually a great tutorial online about Windows Movie Maker that is available through the Microsoft website and I'd recommend it's kind of a long link and I was going to post it here but a great way to find it is to actually just Google getting started with Windows Movie Maker and there's a terrific little tutorial about sort of the nuts and bolts of Windows Movie Maker and how it works now Windows Movie Maker is is fine for producing some very basic kind of stories it doesn't do a lot of effects and it has significant limitations just because it is free software that comes with your computer but it certainly can be used in order to create some stories so if you guys are out there and you're looking to sort of work with some footage or photos that you already have and you want to understand a little bit more about how to use Windows Movie Maker go ahead and visit that webpage that I was talking about by searching getting started with Windows Movie Maker on Google and it should be the first result that comes up today we're going to talk we're going to show you a few other softwares some PC and you'd like to sort of step up a little bit to some professional video editing software the Adobe Creative Suite is something that I would recommend the production premium that they have there is great software I think it's it's available actually through TechSoup for $160 which is a pretty fantastic deal for software like that that I was I was noticing today so Adobe is is definitely one of the industry standards especially if you are editing on a PC and the parallels between that and Final Cut Pro are pretty evident you know the the tools are largely the same the abilities that you have are very very similar and if not identical and it's it's really terrific editing software in fact a lot of people are moving towards Adobe Premiere right now simply because the new version of Final Cut is a little bit limited as far as the pro functionality goes but we can talk about that a little bit later on from the backside of things we have iMovie it comes free on your your computer when you when you buy a new Mac these days and you know it's actually a fairly robust editing software capable of quite a bit it is user-friendly to some extent there are some things that take a little bit more advanced knowledge order to do the one trap that I see people falling into with iMovie is using the user-friendliness to create things that look exactly like they've been produced in iMovie that's not to say that it's bad to produce something in iMovie you just don't want it to instantly be identifiable that hey this looks like it was produced in iMovie because it has some of those sort of canned graphics that they have or some of the you know canned effects and things like that like star wipes or clock wipes and things like that that we'll talk about as we go a little bit further on the presentation i'm on the max side final cut pro is the industry standard for professional editing software it's definitely very expensive it's definitely something that can suit any video editor's needs but it takes quite a bit of education just like adobe premiere product does as well final cut pro recently updated to something that are calling final cut pro 10 or final cut pro x and there was actually a fair amount of uproar among the video editing community because it limited a lot of the pro functionality and actually started to look a lot more like iMovie than like the professional video editing software that people had come to expect from final so they've since added a little bit of that pro functionality back in but we're really looking at the version that you'll see today is a previous version of final cut that really has all the pro functionality and is really more of a parallel to that adobe editing product that i showed you earlier other considerations before editing is is this project something that i can do in a web based editing software and as far as web based editing software goes there's several options there's youtube actually has an editor in it that i'll show you in a little bit here when you're producing slideshows there are great services like animoto out there that actually you just upload your photos and it instantly sort of animates them and puts background music and and gets your story sort of a little bit more emotive by providing some of those additional effects and and things like that they provide free nonprofit accounts as well for for producing slideshows you just have to sort of apply and i think the application process takes about fourteen days you enter your e i n number and why you want to use the product and they will allow you to have a license for free and the spelling of that i'm sorry i don't have it written on this page but it's a n i m o t o dot com animoto dot com there are a bunch of other video editing softwares that are out there that are sort of existing in the cloud and what i mean by that is you take all of your video clips and you upload them to a server somewhere up in the cloud or or you know giant warehouse in california and then you can use a web based application to actually edit some of your your software a lot of these video editing softwares online are doing things like like animoto where it will automatically add some animations and some music and things like that to your project but there are also some that are simply allowing you to edit like you would a normal project so there's some good ones check out j cut was one that i was really interested in for a while unfortunately there are no longer but i'm looking forward to the next project that comes out from them adobe does have an online product as well uh... the problem with the web based editing software is that for the most part some of the functionality is limited although for you guys from a nonprofit standpoint it's probably enough it can take a while as far as processing goes and they they still are a little bit clunky that is to say they're in uh... sort of the the beta stage almost right they haven't uh... perfected the kind of user interface that we'd like to see in order to be really truly compatible with with the way users are using software uh... another consideration is do you want to take class uh... something that a lot of organizations don't take advantage of our video editing classes identifying a staff member who is interested in this and actually wants to go take class to find out a little bit more a place where folks can can really check out some actually fairly price classes generally speaking are the local uh... local broadcast station so public access television stations in your town oftentimes teach classes about producing video uh... oftentimes there's a catch with those is that you have to produce content that they can display on their network but hey whoever uh... had a problem with getting your your content seen by by people uh... so that's something definitely consider that i think a lot of people don't take advantage of as well as some of the other uh... up educational opportunities in your your town is their community college is there a major university that does provide uh... some community classes uh... is there a school of film in your town as well i think consider uh... and do they offer non-profit discounts for people wanting to take classes to learn how to for very basic editing you know you don't necessarily need to take class it's just if you're looking to take it up to that next level a little bit in order to actually produce something that looks a little bit more professional and and can really translate that story that's in your mind into something that you're sharing with your audience finally are you the personality type for editing uh... and what do i mean that by that well editing is very tedious it's it takes uh... an attention to detail that a lot of people uh... don't want to to take uh... it's it's very much like editing a novel or something like that right where you have to stay very focused for a very long period of time uh... staring at pixels all day long and sitting in a room clicking buttons is not something that everyone is capable of uh... so oftentimes you know you see guys like this uh... who are pale and pasty and their hair is messy and they spent a lot of time staring at monitors now obviously your editing station is not going to look quite like this it does take a little bit of time in order to really produce that story and if you're the kind of person who sit at your desk for more than an hour to to really focus on something and make my new adjustments to it then maybe it you should look for someone else to do a little bit of that in order to really sort of get the most out of your story you want to make sure that you are spending the time and and taking that effort and precision in order to to really produce at the right way yes and erin and in editing our webinar together today i would like for you to speak up as much as possible uh... we have a number of people got really want to hear you and are struggling just a little bit to understand you so this is part of the editing process thank you for helping us understand uh... different personalities and what it takes to get it effective and clear short thing and i will hold the microphone a little bit closer my face as well uh... i apologize to those of you who missed any of that but as we move forward i'll make sure that i speak up some great and then the other question is you know are you going to hire an editor so a lot of times as a non-profit organization you footage because you're able to get uh... someone to volunteer the time to come be a videographer at your event or you have a photographer who loves to come here events and and shoot great photos but uh... you don't have anyone who can really take the time to dig in and and the editor and you haven't found a volunteer who wants to do that uh... hiring editor just uh... for the sake of of your own application can be anywhere between a hundred to like this uh... probably actually seventy-five to about a hundred and fifty dollars an hour is what you're looking for uh... six hundred dollars a day essentially for an editor uh... so that is expensive right but there are folks out there who will do it for reduced reduced costs in in exchange for having their logo or their their name on your website and that kind of things so thinking about offering sponsorship benefits for editors as well uh... and things like that as you're sort of thinking about putting together your stores great so moving on and editing uh... in the old days when we're putting together a film uh... we would use actual film right so there was the cellulite film that went to the camera and each little frame uh... had an image on it that had to be developed and these pieces of film would be kept and strung up and kept in order and actually cut and taped together uh... and it was a very linear process from start to finish because you couldn't i guess you know you could a little bit but it was much more difficult to find something in the middle of your film and go and drop something in it took huge warehouses where people would hang films to dry and and keep them in line and organized and hold teams of people to actually produce film so there was a lot of specialized equipment that was involved it was cost prohibitive it was time prohibitive uh... so producing film was very very expensive now what's happened with the digital revolution is that everything has gone digital uh... so everything from the sd card that's in your camera can be plugged directly into your computer the digital file taken off and put into the computer that you already use right the one that you have sitting on your your guest right now is most likely capable of editing video to some extent video has really gone down in in in costs in the editing process has become way less cost-prehibitive and way less time prohibitive as well uh... even you know ten years ago when things were first starting to go digital we were still usually recording uh... video tape and then you have to go to the digitization process where you would actually import the footage into your computer from your camera uh... connecting your camera through firewire usb to your computer and then using what's called a log in capture feature on your editing software in order to import the footage and this would actually be a one to one time ratio so if you shot an hour footage it would take an hour of sitting there and watching the footage come in to your editing software not so anymore uh... some of you may still have film cameras or or you know that use uh... film of some on some type they might be digital but still use in film uh... so you may still have to go through that process but uh... i would suggest anyone who's looking to buy a camera really think about that the sd card or the p2 card or even the internal hard drive route for your camera uh... so that you can just take that card straight out pop in your computer click drag the files straight over and you're done uh... it's on your machine and ready to go uh... so that's uh... really pretty crucial in terms of putting down the cost and putting down the amount of time and specialized equipment that you need in order to to create a film uh... so we sort of got through a little bit i'm gonna show you guys uh... since it seemed like a lot of people want to actually take a look at that editing actually learn how to do some editing yourselves uh... but we're gonna ask another poll question for you guys right now uh... and these are the three options that i wanted to to show you guys and i'm gonna show you a little bit of all of them but uh... if when this poll question comes up you want to select whether you'd like to spend the majority of the time looking through i movie uh... final cut or the youtube editor as far as our demo goes we can go ahead and move forward from there so i'll take a moment for you guys to to fill that out at the screen goes away uh... don't worry about it we'll just pop up with your question and it'll come back as soon as we're done okay and this is kaila i'm going ahead and showing the results it looks like twenty one percent would like to see a demo of i movie twenty four percent wanted to see a demo of final cut and fifty five percent would like to see a demo of youtube editor so hopefully that helps you when you're in your presentation yeah that sure does great okay uh... terrific well since fifty five percent you guys want to take a look at the youtube editor let's go ahead and do that one first so have a pulled up here and uh... essentially you need a youtube account uh... i would suggest that you in your organization go ahead and create a youtube account for your organization you don't already have one youtube has great non-profit program uh... go ahead and check out youtube dot com slash non-profits in order to figure out that non-profit program that it allows you a few additional benefits including um... displaying a google check out uh... super donations on your uh... youtube channel it also allows you to but special banners on your page uh... for branding it allows you to be cycle through the promoted videos tab it allows um... auto play on your youtube channel which i don't necessarily recommend my clients do because kind of annoying to have something instantly play at you but uh... it also allows for uh... see here some special other customization and things like that so uh... check out that it's it's another application process where you enter e i a number and let folks know why you want to participate in the project but anyways once you've you've done that uh... you have your uh... you go to youtube dot com slash editor or from the back end you can you can track it down but i always just sort of entered it the url and which can see the library of all the youtube videos that you have uploaded uh... so the first step in the process of editing through youtube would be to go ahead and take all of your video clips from your camera and upload them to you too and uh... i'm not going to upload anything right now because that would be a little bit of a waste of your time uh... to watch progress bar for a little bit but uh... what you know that that's a little bit of a time-consuming process to upload all of your clips and things like that but once you have them all appear i recommend checking the box uh... you know keeping them private for now there's a box from the upload screen check that way people aren't seeing your clips uh... as you sort of upload them right uh... because that's unfinished product you don't want folks to be seeing that in all of these video editing software uh... what you're going to see are three essential things and the first one uh... is we're going to call the library of footage uh... and that's all of this right here and you know all video editing software have a library of clips and and uh... sometimes there's a visual way to see them sometimes it's just a list uh... as in final cut the next thing is that there's going to be a window that you can view your final product in and that's over here on the right-hand side uh... and it looks like you know you can see your edited project or a current project or pull the project from from the past uh... name your project right up here and and then you're gonna sort of see your final product right here and you have what's called a timeline and that's this area right down here uh... where you're actually going to see a visual representation of all your clips and this is what we're talking about when we talk about non-linear video editing so i'm just gonna drag a few clips into the timeline and some of these are finished videos that i've made for clients or something like that but uh... we'll just go ahead and put together a little story through some of them right now but you just simply take it and drag it right in uh... and it starts to load your timeline and you can see that this clip is from zero to one minute and thirty three seconds uh... it's actually one minute thirty two point eight seconds as i said it's very tedious and sometimes you need to get down to that tenth of a second or even a hundredth of a second when you're editing um... and you can pull in as many of these clips as you want to and it just sort of populates uh... the timeline as you sort of see and goes out of the ways uh... showing you exactly sort of how far things on most timelines so that you can zoom in also have this sort of feature over here and i'm gonna show it to you in in all of the video editing software that we look at today but if you want you can extend out a little ways so that you can actually see smaller portions of the video so um... you may want to get down to the one second mark is as small as youtube allows you to make here so that's the the timeline uh... and for non linear video editing what's really crucial is that if you want to move something around you could simply click and drag it and move it over here uh... or move them back now imagine you're doing an interview you wanted to cut someone up speaking so someone is telling a story about uh... how your organization help them if you may have one click that's an entire interview or one one clip here rather that's an entire interview uh... and that one you may need to drag in twice so that you can have different pieces of it so so i want to take it from that little section and this little section here at the end then you would just sort of uh... shorten them that way um... most video editing software does have the ability to shorten and elongate clips the exact same way that i just did there so you grab the end and you drag it and that instantly sort of chops up the clip um... so erin as we are moving forward um... we have uh... couple of questions about the process and so thinking whether you think you can do it or i movie what do you do with the footage how does it work okay that's a good question so i'll start with uh... the process for you here and organization is really key when it comes down to it so having a proper way um... of nomenclature for your files so with each file knowing exactly what's in the file uh... is super crucial so if you have an interview of sam smith right talking and there's a good section at minute one and thirty seconds and there's a good section at two minutes and ten seconds then you'll want to go ahead and note that in the name of the file so you take the files from your camera put them on your computer right watch them all and name the files accordingly so that you know what what everything is uh... that's called logging and then you upload them into your video editing software uh... and then you can go ahead and drag the clips in and edit them around you know having a production grid at the beginning of your process makes the editing at the end very much more simple because you know exactly what it is you're looking for within each of these these clips uh... so knowing what the story is ahead of time before sitting down in editing is really going to be helpful that's great we have many people who are curious about things like youtube do transitions and special effects or would they uh... there's a number of people also curious about how do i make an effective story like is there a trick to knowing how to do the cut sure okay we'll start with some of the other tricks and things that youtube does so you'll see this the bar right up here in the upper left-hand corner and this little camera icon shows what your videos are this little icon is creative commons and i believe that rich vasquez from the first presentation showed you a little bit of creative commons but you want to make your video a little bit more interesting and you just really need cars driving at night in it right now a library of video footage that you can go ahead and select from and drag right into your right into your project so there's a there's a few things here uh... american flats clouds at sunset you know little things that might be useful in your video uh... the next thing you have over here is music and youtube actually provides great music for you that you can go ahead and pick some samples of right and uh... i suggest that you guys go through and play some of this stuff and take a listen to it uh... there's some really interesting stuff there's some not so good stuff but it's all sort of public domain you can use it uh... for free right uh... the next tab over here this is the transitions uh... and one of the things that i wanted to talk to you guys about is transitions uh... and the different kinds of transitions that we have the most common type of transition in video uh... it might surprise you is actually no transition at all and the only thing that we know we call that the cut to cut transition and that comes from the time when it was actually film right so you cut a section of film and then it ran directly into another section of film and actually just became shot shot shot shot with no transition at all and that's actually the most common type of transition that you're going to see in all types of uh... the next type of transition that is most common is called the cross dissolve or the cross fade and that's this one right here uh... and in order to use it in youtube you simply drag it straight in you put it between two clips uh... this one takes place over two seconds and i'm not exactly sure how it's going to to look for you guys over there but we can go ahead and try it uh... as it's loading i'm not necessarily sure and to note that it and any of these tools a cross dissolve a cross fade a fade to black or fade to white at the end all of these are available in most of the tools i move the final cut effectively knowing how to use transitions so that it creates right breaks without becoming a distraction to the story is a bigger challenge and maybe you can think about yeah absolutely so you never want a transition to like a transition unless you are actually sort of changing the feel in your video right so um... the idea and that's why we use cut to cut transitions so so often is because it allows you to move between clips without actually making anything that's super noticeable uh... you know i think a lot of times when we were starting out editing video they overused transitions and they'll actually something in like this heart white for the star white or a clock white for something like that and that sort of a dead ringer for uh... unless you're george lucas right we don't exactly know what we're doing uh... and a lot of the editors kind of upset about george lucas using those kinds of transitions in his uh... star wars films because people sort of see that and think that that's professional but it doesn't quite quite look right so thinking about transitions and how do you use them effectively in your video well you really have to pinpoint exactly what you're trying to to get cross first so um... let's see here i'm trying to think a little bit more about how to provide some good on maybe something that you know is largely in intuition at this point uh... for myself whenever i put a transition into a video i always watch that transition and think to myself did that feel smooth did it or or was it jarring uh... i think that part of what makes a transition successful also is what your footage is doing at that time uh... so the way people talk to some extent can really affect your the way you transition between one person talking uh... in the same person talking or one person talking another person talking so when i'm when i'm looking for putting a break in uh... when someone speaking i always try to find a place where their intonation goes down uh... right and rather than intonation going up meaning that they're going to keep on talking so um... thinking about the intonation and the flow of what someone's saying and making sure that you're putting that transition in when someone is finished with their thought is helpful that makes sense and and we're getting a lot of questions coming in sound and music and i was hoping that we could possibly go over to final cut and show a little bit of how uh... for instance you're able to drop the sound off a clip so that if someone needs to replace it with music or a voiceover they understand how all those sorts of toggles work in a different system absolutely so i have just pulled up final cuts and you can see instantly there's a lot more going on here there's tools things don't have a graphic representation uh... there they're a little bit different uh... this is still over here the the same video editor of the final the same uh... video window of the final product we still have a clip library that's down here with all these different clips in it uh... you can see that they're not represented as uh... visual or anything like that but these are actually all photos uh... and then there's this other window which serves for that uh... so you can sort of see what you're looking at uh... and figure out what you want to do that to use that one so uh... this is a project that i worked on that's actually a uh... photo slideshow but specifically if on you are asking about how you drop the sound off the clip uh... so i can go ahead and answer that question first but uh... in order to do that i'm going to need to import a clip real quick uh... and i'll start a brand new project uh... so you can sort of see how that works as well so i've started a brand new project uh... there are a bunch of settings that you generally speaking need to adjust at the beginning but what final cuts really good about is adjusting the setting automatically to your clip so as a beginner uh... i think that that's something that you should sort of take advantage of i'll go ahead and import just a video file here so you can sort of start to see this is how i've uh... well that's not a great example logging and capturing uh... done that from another place let's see here i have no idea what this is going to be right now so i should be uh... boyscouts very interesting questions coming in as you're doing this uh... questions around uh... how to deal with uh... how and when to use certain types of transitions or certain types of text to break it up uh... and specifically around impact like if you're thinking about a one-minute story how can you make that time as effective as possible sure so i think that really it's it's important to start by using largely just uh... the cut to cut transition i think when you're cutting from one shot to later in the same shot so for instance you're you're cutting you're taking an interview and you're cutting from one point in that to another point in that you know the camera angle hasn't changed or anything like that then that's a good time to use the cross-dissolve transition when you're really trying to capture someone's attention and highlight something uh... it's a good time to use the the fade to white or flash transition so that it sort of looks like that flash i think that the best advice that i can give you about transitions is turn on your tv and watch commercials and look at the transitions um... and think about what it is that the transitions are doing so that you can actually then implement that yourself um... there's no recipe for okay this is going to be the transition that you need to use at any particular time uh... it's largely going to be what what feels right and i wish i could give you that sort of recipe but in a in a very short one-minute piece most likely because you want people to be engaged in looking at things you're going to use the cut to cut transition and you're going to use it every unless someone's talking you're going to use it every four seconds or so four seconds is kind of the sweet spot for keeping people's attention uh... when it comes to eclipse uh... it right once it goes shorter than that but going longer you may lose them if you're on youtube exactly so we have a number of people asking for some how would you add text to this if you could just show us briefly what that looks like in front of a problem we can look at it in nine years well yeah absolutely so if i wanted to add text to this right here um... there's an effects window and i have a whole bunch of effects in my favorites uh... but there's something down here called video generators so you go ahead and you find your text in there but if i wanted to add text to this i take uh... this little effect that i've done called text copy simply drag it straight over on top and you can see sample text is right there now one thing to consider when you're talking about taxes that there's this thing called title safe lines and hopefully that's showing up all right but uh... you want to make sure that your titles stay within this inner line uh... and that's just because of the way tv's work uh... there's actually some screen that doesn't show up or or can potentially be lost that's exactly how you put text on and you would just sort of put on their oftentimes if uh... this you know this is a little bit difficult to read it looks like because there's a lot of white underneath it want to do this thing called drop shadow where we actually put a shadow behind it and that's going to make it a lot easier to read and that makes sense and it sounds like yes and um... it looks like this may feel a little complex for a first time editor so why don't we switch over to iMovie and take a look at a slightly simpler version of the same process sure absolutely so we'll pull up iMovie here uh... and you can see again right here's your project uh... library here's going to be where your your clips uh... wind up being uh... here's your display and then the timeline is right up here as well so very similar through iMovie if you want to bring footage in you can either go import from camera here if you have a camera that is doing some film or if you have clips that you want to import simply go there and uh... track down your clips and import them and so i'm gonna find something real quick for you here thank you erin i've used all three of these tools and i found that iMovie and YouTube editor are both a little simpler for the first time user uh... so if you're looking for something a little more complex than your flip cam editing software can provide uh... but you're feeling daunted by a full editing suite uh... this is very much a drag and drop system you can take one cut in and cut it into two, slice it up as you need to uh... drop the audio very similar to what he showed you a few minutes ago and voice over and special effects and add music alright so here's some voice gals this is not terribly interesting footage someone demonstrating the chimney climb but i've imported this clip into my library here and you saw that it went to the process of importing and an optimization for this the software so i just know that your video clips will most likely have to go through that process and that can be fairly lengthy uh... but if you want to take apart and drag it into your video right you simply click on it and find this this yellow line and you highlight the portion that you'd like to take in and just click and drag it directly in and if you want to take another part take that click and drag it in right uh... and you start to build your video that way if you want to take a transition you have to see the same transition button over here uh... and you can drag that transition in now like i said the cut to cut transition that just goes one clip directly into another clip is most common but if you want to put the cross dissolve transition in you certainly could people asking about using photos in their videos and yes you can you can do a whole one-minute video that is all photos and that could be sixty photos or that could be four or five there are two different ways to enter the textual digital storytelling challenge one of them is through a five-photo set which would be uploaded to flicker and that doesn't need to be a video at all or you can choose to take uh... more of your photos and create something that works with video or works with music or works with voiceover so you have a number of different options for integration of photos and videos and any of these tools will be able to work with still images as well as with video and the way that photos work in iMovie is you have to actually have iPhoto and you import all of your photos into iPhoto and then once you're in iMovie you click on this little camera icon and it shows your photo libraries directly in here so create a folder for your project and in iPhoto and then go ahead and import it that way uh... as far as text in iMovie goes you have a whole bunch of different options that you can see right here now if someone's talking you're going to want to use uh... what we call a lower third and that's going to be text sort of on the bottom of the screen that sort of shows what they are and there's a few different options for that but the ones that i like in iMovie are this gradient white or this soft bar white because it allows there to be some foot some kind of this gradient underneath your text so that your text stands out quite a bit uh... but that was as simple as it was right if you want to add text to something you simply click and drag it directly onto your clip that way and it will show up uh... kind of where you want if you want to change it you click on it right here uh... enter your text in and uh... move forward from there and it will sort of automatically fade in and fade out uh... i'm not sure how to fade showing up but that's definitely how the text works there very simple uh... iMovie is also great because you can record voiceover directly into it so if you wanted to have a slideshow going and you wanted to explain what it was people were seeing uh... you have your photos up uh... going through and you click on this and you can automatically record voiceover from your computer directly into iMovie so that you're talking over the video and you know what you're looking at when that's happening so that's a terrific way to do that rather than having to record it separately and import it from there uh... there's some other cool effects that you can use with uh... iMovie that uh... you know some of them i would recommend using some of them i wouldn't for instance far far away star wars i would steer away from however this pull focus is actually a very cool effects uh... if i can go away from the spinning wheel here up so there's another thing to consider folks is that uh... video software can be fickle and sometimes it does crash on you luckily opens right back up to where you were uh... so always save your projects is the lesson there save save save save save save uh... my first editing was working on my first real big project my boss actually came in and accidentally knocked my hard drive off my desk there it went so save and back up uh... whenever you can when you're working with video projects and i just want to honor that we have so many questions coming in that we're not going to get to all of them in this hour uh... but we're going to do our best uh... there is a in-depth forum that the guys who like the camera help uh... Erin at this staff and the trackers have also been contributing to and these sessions are archived uh... we welcome your questions and we will do our best to get to the end of the forums and there are many many many questions coming in uh... many people who were wondering about file conversion can you uh... for instance bring in a flip cam uh... footage into iMovie and the question is the answer to that is yes you can bring that into most any editing software whether you're shooting on a flip cam uh... even on your smart phone you'll be able to bring that into most editing tools can you speak to uh... file conversion a bit though and also file output and tools like youtube allow you to pull a video out and leave it on your hard drive or print it to a DVD sure so as far as file conversion goes um... you're right the flip cam will go directly into iMovie um... it creates what's called we're called AVI files which typically are um... PC files but um... iMovie does handle them it will have to convert and optimize them um... as far as final cut goes you're gonna wanna convert all your footage into something called a ProRes file which is uh... very good video format it's extremely large though um... so a minute of ProRes footage is generally speaking takes up a gigabyte uh... which is pretty gigantic when you're thinking about not having specialized equipment for it um... and having enough space on your hard drive for it um... it can handle other formats as well there's some great conversion software out there um... called it's free um... called FFmpeg uh... that you may want to check out and you can go ahead and download that software and um... it's built for Linux but there's a Mac version and a PC version as well um... but it will it will essentially translate any footage into any other type of footage uh... so that you can get it into your editing software as far as the question about YouTube editor whether uh... we can export from there well yes so um... from YouTube uh... when you're once you finish editing um... you can actually export any download any of your videos by one of the video manager and um... clicking on edit and then there's actually a download mpeg four uh... link at least there there was um... you can download oh yeah it's it's from this this arrow right so download mp4 file right there and that will go ahead and put that on is there a best format of video for YouTube or any of these others do you recommend a specific format for capture there's no best format for say for YouTube uh... the idea is that you want to keep your files relatively small just to make sure that you're not uh... taking a huge amount of time to upload them uh... so the format that i like these days is uh... quick time it's actually a codec called h point two six four uh... mp4 is a great format as well and dot avi is a fantastic format for pcs great i hope that we've gotten to a great question for the hour we will be answering many of them in the forum uh... those of you there are many questions coming in wondering if their computers are strong enough you need a special video card to do video editing uh... you need uh... very robust machine or can a two-year-old laptop do the job uh... to your laptop probably will be able to do the job uh... you have to check on software compatibility for any software that you want to download uh... the older your computer is the slower and more laborious the process is going to be uh... so yes generally speaking your your computer will be able to handle it uh... but it may be frustratingly slow and so you're gonna have to test a little bit just to see whether or not something that you can tolerate or whether you need to unfortunately upgrade as far as the video card goes i know that as far as max work uh... all max since uh... they started putting i movie on max come with a video card that can handle that uh... as far as pcs go well that's going to be another story and uh... i've been a mad guy for so long that i'm going to have to do a little bit of additional research and figure out what the minimum requirements are there right and understand there are tools available at texas dot org including uh... the adobe creative suite there are various tools like after effects and premier uh... i have used them just a bit but i found them to be very effective to like a more robust solution for your organization uh... there are and if you're if your computer can so i was going to say if your computer can play a youtube video it can use the youtube editor so uh... that's definitely a way to go if if you have worried about the processing power of your machine right and should also work for many of our international audience we want to think everyone from around the world for joining us today uh... this has been the digital storytelling challenge webinar on now that you have your footage now what we've been looking at different editing systems with erin gramley of lights camera help and and thank you for powering this entire challenge your team has been extraordinary to work with and we thank you for answering so many of our questions from the nuts and bolts to the how to actually get it done great thank you so much yeah and one last thing for you folks uh... lights camera help is just now watching a non-profit video benchmarks that we're going to try to figure out what the scene of coser media looks like all over the world uh... you can find it at that link or point your smartphone at that qr code real quick uh... i don't want to go full-on time talking about it into your email address on uh... the form you will actually on uh... the form survey you will actually be able to get the results once we're done uh... yes and we have many questions coming in we would like to go ahead and direct you to the text form if you did not get your question answered there were people wondering with that fm peg erin so i want you to go ahead and hop on the forum to help people to understand you as clearly as possible uh... we will be archiving this and you can share it with your organization we highly encourage you to replay it for them as you are preparing your own story uh... we will be accepting entries for the text to digital storytelling challenge through the end of february twenty-ninth that's a eleven fifty nine p m p s t uh... we are based in san francisco at tech soup and you can go to t s digs dot org that's t s digs dot org to find out more and to enter your one-minute video or five photo story uh... you can also go to tech soup dot org if you're looking for resources and tips blog posts uh... there are many webinars are packed there on every aspect of production social media and storytelling and we encourage you to go on and take a look at the best comments you can tweet to us uh... use the t s digs hashtag if you want to take a look at that and if you want to show us your movies as you're uploading them go ahead and put a tweet out and tell us what you're working on we really want to see what you're doing out there and we want to help you spotlight it in the best possible ways so erin uh... and thank you thank you thank you for answering so many of our questions absolutely thank you very much i look forward to having uh... many conversations with you folks afterwards uh... i will be available the next few hours on the forum uh... so go ahead and leave them there and erin i also heard that you get to be one of our amazing judges we have an extraordinary group of judges that will be viewing your videos this year so thank you for being a part of this entire process of for helping all of the non-processing libraries out there to refine their stories from all of us at tech soup this is a bond-hating producer for the social media team thank you for joining us thank you to kyla on the webinar production side and thank you to erin bramley and everyone at life camera help have a great day