Video is a powerful communication tool – not just for furlough anymore, but useful for sharing everyday updates of the sort you might do in a nesletter or a blog. Viewers don’t expect elaborate production, but appreciate seeing and hearing a taste of your life. And the tools to make great videos have never been more accessible. Chances are that your phone is a pretty good video camera in itself. Below are some tips and tools to help
Shooting
Whatever you shoot with, chances are that the editing software below will be able to manage the files. Pretty much every camera and smartphone can shoot decent video these days. If you don’t use a dedicated microphone for audio, then make sure you are close to any presenter or narrator.
Video tip - Audio
Audio problems are often a bigger impediment to communication that the quality of the video. If you can, pick up an inexpensive lavalier mic to plug in to your camera. Here’s one customized to use with smart phones:
Mobile Editing Options
Shoot on your phone or tablet, and edit your video with an App right on your device. Great for simple, fast videos worthy of sharing. Great for a ministry update you can post on your blog or send to a church.
iMovie for the iPhone or iPad
Adobe Premiere Clip for Android
Adobe Premiere Clip brings basic, easy-to-use video editing to Android. You can trim clips, mix multiple clips together, and add your own soundtrack.
Desktop Editing Options
Windows MovieMaker is bundled with your PC (and free to download)
Note: We don’t recommend Windows Movie maker. It’s limited, buggy, an can be frustrating to use. If you’d like to enjoy your video editing experience, and you are working on a PC computer, you might want to invest in a paid application like Filmora below.
iMovie is bundled with your Mac (and free to download)
You can find basic tutorials online (or try Youtube)
Free and Open Source: OpenShot (For Mac and PC)
An affordable alternative to the above:
Filmora Video Editor (About $50)
"Wondershare Filmora is simply elegant video editing software geared toward beginner, novice and casual users. Anyone can learn to use this software, regardless of their skill level, and the end results look and sound fantastic. It has everything you need to make high-quality videos but leaves out some of the advanced features."
Professional editing applications get expensive:
Apple’s Final Cut Pro is $300
And probably the most widely-used video editing platform, Adobe Premiere, is only available through an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription which will cost you $20/ month.
Here’s a good blog post that offers some additional suggestions for the best free and paid options in editing software:
Hosting and Sharing
Vimeo
Vimeo is a more intuitive, more professional service compared to YouTube. The free "Vimeo basic" accounts are typically enough for most needs. It’s tough to exceed the weekly upload limits. You can still embed any video you post into your website or email newsletters, and you can even password protect a video file if it’s only intended for a select audience. Your videos are Ad free.
YouTube
The go-to for video sharing is now in the hands of Google. If you have a Google account, you can easily set up a YouTube channel for your videos. There’s are no limits to file sizes or how much you upload in a given week. You can’t password protect a video, but you can list one as "private", which means that people need to have a special link to the video to view it. With YouTube, you have less control on how your videos are displayed on your channel , and when embedded in your website, your video may link to other "related" content that’s not yours.
Facebook
If you are already active with Facebook, its could be a good option for uploading and sharing your video - and it’s free. Here’s an article on the pros and cons of Facebook vs. YouTube:
A note about hosting your video on your blog:
generally this is not considered a good practice. It’s better in many ways to have your video actually reside on a video host (like Vimeo and YouTube) and then "embed" that video into your blog. Many blogging services won;t even let you upload a video to the site, but if you do, it may not play well for all visitors on all browsers. When you upload a video to a video host, they provide an embed code for that video which you can put into a blog post.
A note about music and copyright law:
Want to add your favorite Christian song to your amazing update video? Well, you should think twice about that. Technically, it’s unlawful. And there’s no easy way to get proper legal permission to add a copyrighted soundtrack to your personal video. It does not matter that you purchased the song. It does not matter that you credit the artist in your video. It’s still a violation of copyright law. Of course, you will see videos all over which do this, but that does not make it OK. So how do you get music into your video? Well, you might have to pay for royalty-free music, or you can find some free-use music. Here's some links that could help: