Recently I learned an interesting thing about Windows Movie Maker.
While it has a Split button on the bottom right of the preview window, which I've been using for years, apparently you can also split clips simply by pressing the M key. I don't know why they chose M; I don't know what it stands for, but it splits.
In Sony Vegas, you use S to split, and I knew that long before I knew this. XD I had no idea clips in WMM could be split with a button until now.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Friday, July 4, 2014
YouTube Downloader errors
Today I've been busy editing several videos to show to my brothers later. When I tried to convert one particular video to AVI, it gave me an error message saying ".ffmpeg has stopped working" and then showed that the conversion had failed. It was confusing and frustrating, especially since it often happened just as the conversion reached 100%. How could the conversion fail if it was already finished???
Well, I found a way around it. As any videophile would, I had set the conversion quality to Same As Original. I changed it to High, and the video converted without a problem.
The problem is solved, but it still doesn't make sense to me. Why was it just one video that refused to convert, while the other hundreds of videos I've downloaded have converted with the same setting without problems? What makes that video different? And why was it only the quality setting that made it fail? I've converted a lot of videos with that setting and nothing went wrong until today.
Oh well. I guess the lesson here is that if something goes wrong with YTD, change a setting or two and see if that works. But try not to let it bully you into converting a video to low quality. If that happened to me, I'd record the video with Fraps instead. Fraps always saves as AVI.
Well, I found a way around it. As any videophile would, I had set the conversion quality to Same As Original. I changed it to High, and the video converted without a problem.
The problem is solved, but it still doesn't make sense to me. Why was it just one video that refused to convert, while the other hundreds of videos I've downloaded have converted with the same setting without problems? What makes that video different? And why was it only the quality setting that made it fail? I've converted a lot of videos with that setting and nothing went wrong until today.
Oh well. I guess the lesson here is that if something goes wrong with YTD, change a setting or two and see if that works. But try not to let it bully you into converting a video to low quality. If that happened to me, I'd record the video with Fraps instead. Fraps always saves as AVI.
Saturday, June 14, 2014
YouTube Downloader tutorial
A lot of people wonder how to download videos from YouTube, and whenever I get the chance, I recommend a handy little program called YouTube Downloader to them. It's small and simple, but it does exactly what I need it to and rarely fails me.
You can download it here: http://youtubedownload.altervista.org/
Click on the green Free Download button. The trial has a few minor limitations, but it does not expire, although you will occasionally need to go back to the site and re-download it as YouTube's code changes and the downloader starts having problems.
To download a video, simply copy the URL and paste it into the white box in the Download tab. When it's finished downloading, you can convert it to various formats such as .avi, .wmv, and even .mp3. You can view the progress of both downloading and converting in the Activity tab.
I've been using YTD since an acquaintance recommended it to me in early 2009, but only recently did I notice that the Convert tab gives you the option to retain the quality of the original file. This makes me very happy. =) Sometimes I want to convert a video just so it will take up less space on my computer, but I don't like degrading the quality.
One thing I don't like about YTD is that it won't let me download age-restricted videos, even if I sign in on it. I've re-downloaded it several times and it still has this problem. Oh well... I don't download many age-restricted videos anyway, I promise. ;)
You can download it here: http://youtubedownload.altervista.org/
Click on the green Free Download button. The trial has a few minor limitations, but it does not expire, although you will occasionally need to go back to the site and re-download it as YouTube's code changes and the downloader starts having problems.
To download a video, simply copy the URL and paste it into the white box in the Download tab. When it's finished downloading, you can convert it to various formats such as .avi, .wmv, and even .mp3. You can view the progress of both downloading and converting in the Activity tab.
I've been using YTD since an acquaintance recommended it to me in early 2009, but only recently did I notice that the Convert tab gives you the option to retain the quality of the original file. This makes me very happy. =) Sometimes I want to convert a video just so it will take up less space on my computer, but I don't like degrading the quality.
One thing I don't like about YTD is that it won't let me download age-restricted videos, even if I sign in on it. I've re-downloaded it several times and it still has this problem. Oh well... I don't download many age-restricted videos anyway, I promise. ;)
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Corrupted projects
Not often, but every once in a while, when I'm working on a project in Windows Movie Maker - especially if I've been working on it for a long time - the preview screen will go black and the timeline will refuse to play. This means the project has become corrupted. Sometimes it happens when I'm in the middle of an editing session, and that's when it's most irritating. I don't even know why it happens at all.
So far, though, there's always been a way to save it.
The first thing I do is copy all the project media in the timeline and paste it into a new project, one track at a time. The new project should work.
If it doesn't work, I delete some of the media. For some reason, a project being too long can eventually cause corruption. Sometimes just deleting one big clip fixes it.
If you need part of the clip for the video, you can either delete something else or try copying and pasting the clip you need into another project, cutting out the part(s) you don't need, then copying the part(s) you do need and pasting them back into the original project.
Corrupted projects are very tricky and I don't know any other methods of recovering them, but those two work for me.
So far, though, there's always been a way to save it.
The first thing I do is copy all the project media in the timeline and paste it into a new project, one track at a time. The new project should work.
If it doesn't work, I delete some of the media. For some reason, a project being too long can eventually cause corruption. Sometimes just deleting one big clip fixes it.
If you need part of the clip for the video, you can either delete something else or try copying and pasting the clip you need into another project, cutting out the part(s) you don't need, then copying the part(s) you do need and pasting them back into the original project.
Corrupted projects are very tricky and I don't know any other methods of recovering them, but those two work for me.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
You know you're a YouTube Pooper when...
It's been quite a while since I've posted... I started a draft of a basic Sony Vegas Pro tutorial but haven't been working on it. To be honest, I often forget that I even have this blog. :P But I like teaching people about video editing and I like talking about my own experiences with it and how I do things, so hopefully I'll be able to remember more often.
In the meantime, I've been writing down a ton of "symptoms" that I think a lot of YTPers experience - I know I do - in one of my notebooks during church, just out of boredom. Today I got the idea to post what I have so far on here, so I shall do just that.
You know you're a YouTube Pooper when...
-You can't watch anything without thinking of everything you can do to it
-People often give you strange looks because you think of new spoof ideas in public and laugh to yourself
-You amuse yourself at otherwise boring social events by thinking of ways to edit other people's conversations, and you wish you had recordings of them
-You think of so many spoof ideas that you don't even remember, let alone get around to making, all of them
-You quote YTPs, even the heavily edited ones with impossible vocal sounds
-You download random things from the Internet because you just know they'll be good YTP material, even if you don't know exactly what you'll use them for yet
-You have a million unfinished projects and are always starting new ones
-Video material takes up most of your computer space and you've been meaning to clean it out for a while
-Random spoofs and sounds from YTPs pop into your head at random times and sometimes result in you bursting out laughing for no apparent reason
-You record quotes and sounds off TV to use in YTPs (well, I could do this when we had DirecTV, but now we have Vios which you can't watch on a computer *grrrr*)
-You were upset when the Nickelodeon shows were removed from Netflix because they have so much YTP material
-Downloaders, converters and recording software are your best friends
-You've tried to imagine what it would be like if real life were like a YTP
-You have a growing collection of GIFs, sound effects and random music that you never delete in case you ever want to use it again
-You consider YTP an art form
-You question the sense of humor of people who don't laugh at YTPs
-You hate copyright and have sworn to fight it until your dying day
-Your Videos folder is a hopeless mess
-You've seen too many YTPs of politicians to take any of them seriously
-You'll never watch Spongebob, Blue's Clues, etc. the same way again
-You refer to original content as "unpooped"
-You know who Michael Rosen is
-You're familiar with converters, different file types, vocoders, etc. and your relatives think you're a computer genius
-You want to reverse, G-major, and vocode absolutely everything
-You are thrilled when your favorite YTPers subscribe to you (but you try to hide your excitement online so you won't look lame)
-You YTP videos of people you know and show them
-You refer to all funny video editing as "pooping"
-Most of the computer-related stuff you say to people goes right over their heads
-You know and appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into a quality YTP
-Advanced software like Sony Vegas Pro makes you feel omnipotent (especially when you learn how to use it... haha)
That about sums it up. If I think of more, I'll post them in a new entry.
In the meantime, I've been writing down a ton of "symptoms" that I think a lot of YTPers experience - I know I do - in one of my notebooks during church, just out of boredom. Today I got the idea to post what I have so far on here, so I shall do just that.
You know you're a YouTube Pooper when...
-You can't watch anything without thinking of everything you can do to it
-People often give you strange looks because you think of new spoof ideas in public and laugh to yourself
-You amuse yourself at otherwise boring social events by thinking of ways to edit other people's conversations, and you wish you had recordings of them
-You think of so many spoof ideas that you don't even remember, let alone get around to making, all of them
-You quote YTPs, even the heavily edited ones with impossible vocal sounds
-You download random things from the Internet because you just know they'll be good YTP material, even if you don't know exactly what you'll use them for yet
-You have a million unfinished projects and are always starting new ones
-Video material takes up most of your computer space and you've been meaning to clean it out for a while
-Random spoofs and sounds from YTPs pop into your head at random times and sometimes result in you bursting out laughing for no apparent reason
-You record quotes and sounds off TV to use in YTPs (well, I could do this when we had DirecTV, but now we have Vios which you can't watch on a computer *grrrr*)
-You were upset when the Nickelodeon shows were removed from Netflix because they have so much YTP material
-Downloaders, converters and recording software are your best friends
-You've tried to imagine what it would be like if real life were like a YTP
-You have a growing collection of GIFs, sound effects and random music that you never delete in case you ever want to use it again
-You consider YTP an art form
-You question the sense of humor of people who don't laugh at YTPs
-You hate copyright and have sworn to fight it until your dying day
-Your Videos folder is a hopeless mess
-You've seen too many YTPs of politicians to take any of them seriously
-You'll never watch Spongebob, Blue's Clues, etc. the same way again
-You refer to original content as "unpooped"
-You know who Michael Rosen is
-You're familiar with converters, different file types, vocoders, etc. and your relatives think you're a computer genius
-You want to reverse, G-major, and vocode absolutely everything
-You are thrilled when your favorite YTPers subscribe to you (but you try to hide your excitement online so you won't look lame)
-You YTP videos of people you know and show them
-You refer to all funny video editing as "pooping"
-Most of the computer-related stuff you say to people goes right over their heads
-You know and appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into a quality YTP
-Advanced software like Sony Vegas Pro makes you feel omnipotent (especially when you learn how to use it... haha)
That about sums it up. If I think of more, I'll post them in a new entry.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Tutorial for beginners
Here I will show the basics of video editing for anyone who's just getting started.
What you'll need:
Windows Movie Maker
The video(s) you want to edit, and any pictures or music you want to add
YouTube Downloader, if you don't have any material
First, open up Windows Movie Maker, which should have come with your computer. If not, you can download it here. I recommend version 6.0 because the quality of the finished product is better, but if it's incompatible with your operating system you can get 2.1.
Once you have Movie Maker up, import your video(s) into it by clicking the Import button on the left and finding the files you want to use. It's a good idea store them all in your Videos folder. It will look like this (here you can see material I'm using, lol):
If there's an error, check to see if the file is an .mp4, .flv or QuickTime movie. Windows Movie Maker doesn't accept those formats, so you'll need to use YouTube Downloader to convert them. I recommend the .avi format if you have Windows 7, otherwise the video might not publish.
Once you have your media imported, drag what you want to use into the timeline (which you can change to a storyboard, but I find timeline much easier). Once it's in there you can edit it many different ways.
If you just want to use a few small clips of the media, you can split or trim it. The split button is on the far right of the preview window. Using the preview window, find the place you want to cut (you can go frame-by-frame by clicking on the buttons beside the play/pause button) and the click the split button.
You now have more clips to work with.
Trimming is different from splitting. To trim, you take hold of the beginning or end of the clip and drag it. Any part you drag past is removed - but if you shorten the clip by trimming, you can re-extend it to get the material back. You can't extend clips after splitting them, although you can press Ctrl+Z to undo the split (and anything else you do).
There are a variety of effects you can add to your clips as well. Right-click on the clip you want to edit and click Effects, choose what you want to do to it and click Add. You can add up to six effects to each clip.
You can add music or other audio by simply dragging an audio file to the audio track below the video track.
If you want to completely dub over the video clip with the audio, expand the video track by clicking the plus sign to the left of the track, then right-click on the tiny audio track that appears, and click Mute.
You can put captions on your video by clicking "Titles and Credits" to the left, under Edit. Select the type you want to do and write your caption, then click Add Title. You can also change the color, font, size and animation of the text. It will go in the small track under the audio.
Once your video is finished, click This Computer under Publish, or Publish under Finish Video (I think) if you have Windows Movie Maker 2.6. This will turn your project into a video file that you can upload to websites like YouTube and Facebook.
The first time I made a video - a slideshow of screencaps from The Aristocats, which is still up on YouTube - I didn't know I had to publish it first, and I tried to upload the WMM project file to YouTube instead. XD As you can imagine, it didn't work, but I figured out that I needed to publish it.
All in all, video editing is easy once you know how to work with your software and videos. I'm not sure if I've covered everything in this tutorial, but it's just a basic one and I'm sure anyone who reads it will figure it out. :)
What you'll need:
Windows Movie Maker
The video(s) you want to edit, and any pictures or music you want to add
YouTube Downloader, if you don't have any material
First, open up Windows Movie Maker, which should have come with your computer. If not, you can download it here. I recommend version 6.0 because the quality of the finished product is better, but if it's incompatible with your operating system you can get 2.1.
Once you have Movie Maker up, import your video(s) into it by clicking the Import button on the left and finding the files you want to use. It's a good idea store them all in your Videos folder. It will look like this (here you can see material I'm using, lol):
If there's an error, check to see if the file is an .mp4, .flv or QuickTime movie. Windows Movie Maker doesn't accept those formats, so you'll need to use YouTube Downloader to convert them. I recommend the .avi format if you have Windows 7, otherwise the video might not publish.
Once you have your media imported, drag what you want to use into the timeline (which you can change to a storyboard, but I find timeline much easier). Once it's in there you can edit it many different ways.
If you just want to use a few small clips of the media, you can split or trim it. The split button is on the far right of the preview window. Using the preview window, find the place you want to cut (you can go frame-by-frame by clicking on the buttons beside the play/pause button) and the click the split button.
You now have more clips to work with.
Trimming is different from splitting. To trim, you take hold of the beginning or end of the clip and drag it. Any part you drag past is removed - but if you shorten the clip by trimming, you can re-extend it to get the material back. You can't extend clips after splitting them, although you can press Ctrl+Z to undo the split (and anything else you do).
There are a variety of effects you can add to your clips as well. Right-click on the clip you want to edit and click Effects, choose what you want to do to it and click Add. You can add up to six effects to each clip.
You can add music or other audio by simply dragging an audio file to the audio track below the video track.
If you want to completely dub over the video clip with the audio, expand the video track by clicking the plus sign to the left of the track, then right-click on the tiny audio track that appears, and click Mute.
You can put captions on your video by clicking "Titles and Credits" to the left, under Edit. Select the type you want to do and write your caption, then click Add Title. You can also change the color, font, size and animation of the text. It will go in the small track under the audio.
Once your video is finished, click This Computer under Publish, or Publish under Finish Video (I think) if you have Windows Movie Maker 2.6. This will turn your project into a video file that you can upload to websites like YouTube and Facebook.
The first time I made a video - a slideshow of screencaps from The Aristocats, which is still up on YouTube - I didn't know I had to publish it first, and I tried to upload the WMM project file to YouTube instead. XD As you can imagine, it didn't work, but I figured out that I needed to publish it.
All in all, video editing is easy once you know how to work with your software and videos. I'm not sure if I've covered everything in this tutorial, but it's just a basic one and I'm sure anyone who reads it will figure it out. :)
Friday, December 20, 2013
Introduction
In 2006 I moved from Olean, New York to Austin, Minnesota. For some reason, it was not until after that move that I became more Internet savvy. I found a bunch of Lion King fan sites on Freewebs (now just Webs) and joined them by making my own. Not long after, I mentioned in the guestbook, which we used as a chat room, that I wanted to watch The Little Mermaid but my mom wouldn't let me because she thought the mermaids didn't wear enough clothes. XD Someone in the guestbook told me I could watch it on YouTube. I'd never heard of YouTube so I looked it up, liked what I saw, and wanted to make an account, but couldn't because the age limit was 13 and I was only 12... and didn't want to lie about my age either. :P So I decided to make an account right on my 13th birthday - but ended up making it the day after because I had friends over the night of my birthday and forgot about it.
So after that I wanted to put up videos of my own but I had no idea how to make them, so I asked another friend of mine that I knew from Freewebs for help. She showed me how to install Windows Movie Maker, and when I was done she told me to import videos into it to get started. I didn't have any videos, though... and I didn't want to look stupid by asking how to get them. XD I'd been asking enough questions already. As a result, my first video was a slideshow instead, because I knew how to put pictures and music together.
I figured videos out on my own from there. My brother had a file sharing program called LimeWire, which I used to download some Disney movies (I now know it's illegal but back then I had little knowledge of copyright and the YouTube laws weren't as enforced). The first one I did was The Lion King 1 1/2. I had the DVD, but didn't know how to transfer from it to the computer, so I downloaded the digital copy and used it to put up a couple of scenes that I and others wanted on YouTube.
Eventually I taught myself to make music videos and spoofs as well, and I also learned other ways of collecting material. Today I don't use LimeWire at all anymore, but use mostly YouTube Downloader for material I find on YouTube, and Fraps for recording from DVDs, and I make YouTube Poops instead of random spoofs from random cartoons.
A lot of people asked me how to do things like make certain types of videos, acquire material, etc. My mom thought this blog would be a good idea for me to write about how to do that, and I'll also write about the little adventures of video making, share videos that inspire me, and rant about copyright laws and the people who enforce them. I have a LOT to say about copyright.
So let's hope all goes well with this blog. :) I look forward to sharing all my thoughts here.
So after that I wanted to put up videos of my own but I had no idea how to make them, so I asked another friend of mine that I knew from Freewebs for help. She showed me how to install Windows Movie Maker, and when I was done she told me to import videos into it to get started. I didn't have any videos, though... and I didn't want to look stupid by asking how to get them. XD I'd been asking enough questions already. As a result, my first video was a slideshow instead, because I knew how to put pictures and music together.
I figured videos out on my own from there. My brother had a file sharing program called LimeWire, which I used to download some Disney movies (I now know it's illegal but back then I had little knowledge of copyright and the YouTube laws weren't as enforced). The first one I did was The Lion King 1 1/2. I had the DVD, but didn't know how to transfer from it to the computer, so I downloaded the digital copy and used it to put up a couple of scenes that I and others wanted on YouTube.
Eventually I taught myself to make music videos and spoofs as well, and I also learned other ways of collecting material. Today I don't use LimeWire at all anymore, but use mostly YouTube Downloader for material I find on YouTube, and Fraps for recording from DVDs, and I make YouTube Poops instead of random spoofs from random cartoons.
A lot of people asked me how to do things like make certain types of videos, acquire material, etc. My mom thought this blog would be a good idea for me to write about how to do that, and I'll also write about the little adventures of video making, share videos that inspire me, and rant about copyright laws and the people who enforce them. I have a LOT to say about copyright.
So let's hope all goes well with this blog. :) I look forward to sharing all my thoughts here.
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