I post our music videos each week to Steemit and thought it might be an idea to explain how our videos are created. Just for interest purposes.
New Videos
When we start a new music video we work out the type of mood we want to create with the music. Then go on to compose and record the music, all of our music is original music. This can take a day a week or more. Once the music is mixed and made into long and short variations, the videos can be created.
Images
Images for videos come from a range of sources:
- Some are purchased in multiple quantities. Only a small percentage are suitable for us to use but we do get a good number of images we can use from them.
- Videos of moving swirls and animals we also buy in large quantities but use very few of them. Several times on Youtube they have picked up the odd video and said it was a copywrite violation although we have a license to use them. These get removed in a month as they are not violations. All it means is that someone else has used the same short video clip as they bought the same video package and is in the YouTube copyright system. Usually because they are in a Multi-Channel Network (MCN.) So rather than have the hassle we don't use many of those now.
- We take some photographs ourselves but not many. These are the best sort to use however, living on a quite barren looking limestone island, the variation of photographs we can take is not very great.
- Pixabay and Pexels provide a lot of our newer images. They are usually free to use for any purpose including commercially. Pixabay have a "buy the author a cup of coffee" system and Pexels a donate system which helps the author who provided the images for free use.
Images are adjusted for size and pixel density. We usually use 300px and adjust to 1280 x 720. We upload to YouTube, Facebook, Daily Motion, Vimeo and sometimes DTube. Dtube is not always perfect we find, so for Steemit I usually use a YouTube link. Not all of these platforms can accept larger formats, so all videos are in 1280 x 720 format. Videos are created in 1920 x 1080 but rendered as 1280 x 720. If videos need to be made 1920 x 1080 in the future, it will be easy to do as the base files are in 1920-1080.
We have tried all sorts of methods for obtaining images in the past:
- A single image throughout the music
- Multiple images that change very slowly, perhaps every two minutes
- Images that change every few seconds on the beat
- Images that expand or contract
- Images that pan across
The view count, likes and comments seem to remain similar in every method used. Probably because the music is essentially background music and does not need the screen looking at while listening. To use just one image seems a bit cheapskate, so we generally use multiple images that pan or zoom in a repeating pattern, with fading transitions between each image and on the beat where possible.
We then:
- Create a title
- Create a description
- Find suitable keywords
- Create a thumbnail
We try to be several weeks ahead of the release date to allow for when a piece of music takes a week or more to create, possible illness, electricity power cuts, (we get a few of those,) and family visits especially in the summer. We once had family turn up over a six-week period. It was like running a hotel. Once one set left the next set arrived. We also had to take each set of people to the same places repeatedly. But it was fun and nice to see everyone. A regular schedule of video releases helps ranking with YouTube.
So, there you have it. How we create our music videos. Maybe you will find it interesting!