Most of us aren't professional photographers or video-ographers or scrapbook-ographers. I'm barely a decent-cellphone-photo-for-facebook-ographer, but the desire to capture some of the wonder and majesty of our adventures pushes most travelers to try to figure it out. After all, we're going to be old and flabby and slow some day, and we need to be able to show our grand kids how cool we are. (And I know that the word "cool" was over a while ago. And I don't care, I'm still using it. And I'll probably still use it when I'm a grandma. "Hey kid, get over here. Grandma knitted you this super cool iphone cover.")
Anyway.
I'm self taught at pretty much everything I know how to do, and I spent a month in 2016 deep in video editing world. So here's a very short and to-the-point tutorial on how to burn your travels into internet history. This tutorial is for you if you aren't super tech savvy, you'd rather just dive in than do a lot of preliminary research, and you don't want to spend more than 20 minutes getting this act on the stage, or this show on the road, or this video-making started. Here's the video of I made to a weekend road trip through Michigan in early fall.
#1. Pick a great song that means something to you and kind of represents the kind of trip you had, and the way you want to remember it. If you can't think of anything, Don't Stop Believing will do just fine. I downloaded my music from Amazon. Be aware that as you create your video you'll probably be previewing it several times so pick a song that you don't hate after hearing twenty times in a row.
#2. Download Wondershare Filmora. I investigated many a different video editors and this is the best for the lowest price. They have a free trial version that you can check out, but your video will have a watermark across it. It is absolutely worth paying for the full version. It's $39 for a year, or $59 for life. My first attempt was with the built in YouTube editing tools and it was bullshit. Don't go there.
#3. Watch a couple of YouTube tutorials on how to use Filmora. It's extremely simple to use and your effect choices are basically endless. You can piece together video clips and photos, add graphics and text, transitions, fade music together, slow or speed up your video, use filters, etc. It's great. Keep it simple for your first video and learn as you go. That's how life works, guys. Here's a great overview that helped me a lot.
#4. Import your song and all of your photos/videos. You can use any copyrighted music on Filmora but be aware that if you try to upload it to YouTube, YouTube will recognize the copyright and might shut you down. I used a popular song and it allowed me to upload the video.
#5. Tweak the hell out of your video. Make the music fade in and out at the right time. Add subtitles to remind you of the random funny things that happened and how you almost peed your pants when you stepped on that snake. Get your boyfriends smile to match up perfectly with the lyrics of the song. You know what I mean. Make this video pull your heart strings and evoke the same emotions you were feeling while you were out traveling.
#6. Upload and share. You can connect to upload to any of your social media and to YouTube. I chose to upload to YouTube and then share the YouTube video on social media. This gives you an idea of how many total views there are on your video.
iceland
