My First Web Video . . .

If you’ve been following some of my emails, you know the arrival of our new baby is imminent — she’s due on Dec 19, which is less than a week away!

The last two pregnancies all went over the deadline, but my wife is REALLY hoping that doesn’t happen this time. And I have to admit, I’m anxious to greet the little one too.

Okay now let’s get down to business . . .

I’ve created some “screen capture” videos before, but yesterday I created what I consider to be my first “real” video. It’s got motion and the last half even has a soundtrack! I think the first part is actually a bit cheesy, but it’s all tongue in cheek and I had a fun time making it.

Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyfIcaBewHM

Obviously the video is promoting the “Underground” seminar, but the biggest reason I created this video was to get familiar with the process. And I learned a lot. This video took me several hours to create, but the next one should take me half the time or less.

Here’s the tools I used to create this . . .

To create the movie, I used “Adobe Premiere Elements” software. Now keep in mind that Windows XP comes with “Movie Maker” which includes lots of neat transitions (different screen wipes between scenes) — but I believe the Adobe software gives you greater control over the various elements, such as volume fading.

For the narrative during the first half of the movie, I used Audacity from Sourceforge.Net.

I simply recorded myself reading the script (which I had previously written down) and then changed the pitch of my voice to make it sound “masked”. I was then able to remove all the extraneous sounds (my breathing, sniffing my nose, etc). Audacity is great (I hadn’t used it much prior to this), and I’m once again amazed at the quality of software you can get for free these days.

For the background music (last half of the movie) I used music from “SmartSound.com” — I bought their “Theatrical Impact” CD.

Note that thesse CDs don’t contain standard audio files — you can’t play them in your CD player or even with your media player on your computer. They are in “smartsound” format and require smartsound-capable software. I believe there is a plugin for Adobe Premiere that will allow it to use SmartSound files directly, but I used the software provided by SmartSound (it was free with my CD purchase).

The nice thing about smartsound music is that each piece contain separate tracks — so if you want to change just the “drums” track, you can do that — they are designed specifically with modification in mind.

The little “encrypted message” sequence was done using some Javascript I had saved from who knows what/when — I think it was something I had planned on using for Yanik’s first “Underground” seminar. It was based on the free random text script you can get from Jeffrey Sanders.

I got the “Underground Agents” pictures from Yanik’s past sales pages (cropped them all to be the same size using Paint Shop Pro). The three video sequences (black-masked guy, moving people/landscape, and falling money) and all of the other people pictures were purchased from iStockPhoto.

Getting the content together actually took more time than anything else . . . there were a total of 54 images, plus the video clips.

Once you have all your content, it’s just a matter of dragging/dropping things on a timeline and adding the text elements — not hard, but it does take time to get everything lined up (especially when you’re trying to sync pictures to a music beat).

It was actually a lot of fun . . .

Take a look at the video and let me know what you think!

Paul

P.S. And by all means — if you’re thinking about going to the Underground Online Seminar, use my affiliate link at http://www.covertmoneysecrets.com/ !!!