#6. Internet Tools

Today we’re gonna talk about… yes you guessed it, internet tools!! Internet tools are basically software that help you “navigate” the Internet, so to speak, and enhances the experience of using it to communicate, entertain yourself online, etc.

One of my favourite Internet tools is Youtube. Many hours of my life have been spent sitting at Youtube, clicking on related link after link and just watching videos. I’m especially grateful for Youtube because it allows me to catch up with my variety shows as well as my favourite artists’ music performances and exclusive behind-the-scenes from official channels. I also enjoy watching vlogs.

However, watching videos on Youtube is simply one aspect of the Youtube experience; to watch is to be a viewer. On the other hand, one can become an uploader as well, uploading their own videos onto their own channel for viewers to watch.

For example, today I uploaded this video:

“How did you do that????” It’s very simple, my friend. You simply need to get up at the crack of dawn in order to travel an hour to a shopping mall to squeeze with the horde in sweaty temperatures of about 37 degrees Celsius for roughly 3 hours. Easy, no??

Alright, in all seriousness, the process of creating, editing, and uploading a video to Youtube is indeed very simple. To start off with, you need a recording device to gather your footage!! Mine is my trusty Samsung Galaxy S3 – takes quite good videos (clear and HQ) and is very sexy.

The next thing you’ll need is an editing program; if you want your video to seem more professional/put-together/less draggy, it’s best to use such programs so you can either cut out extra/unnecessary footage or polish your video by adding effects such as background music and credits. For example, you’ll notice in my video that I edited most of video to exclude the screaming and inserted music in its place, and only left the actual recorded audio for the end because it was when the celebrities were speaking and I wanted them to be heard. My preferred choice of program is iMovie, although those who use Windows tend to prefer using Windows Movie Maker.

As you can see from the screenshot provided above, using iMovie is actually quite simple. First, I import the relevant videos, which then appear in the green area in the bottom half of the shot. This part is helpful especially if you have multiple clips that you want to put together (like mine was), because you can actually have them all in one place and just select the parts of the clips accordingly. After that, you drag the parts you want to the area in the top left, arranging them in the order you prefer. That is more or less done if you just simply want to cut and edit specific parts of your footage; however, you’ll see from my screenshot that I dragged in an audio file and timed it according to where I wanted the music to start (at the beginning of my video) and also added a watermark that indicated my Youtube channel username and set it to last throughout the entire clip. After you’ve finished editing to your heart’s desire, you can then go on to export and save the file in whatever resolution you like.

Moving on from editing programs, the next step is to upload your video onto Youtube. This might take a while depending on the size of your video file! The higher the resolution, the bigger your file will be and the more time it’ll take. This one video took me about an hour :/.

When your video is finally uploaded (or even when it’s in the process of uploading), you can go on to fill in details such as the title of the video, a description if you wish to add one, and even tags so that others who are interested can find your videos much more easily.

That’s more or less you done with your video! You can take it one step higher, however. Recently, Youtube’s introduced an option called captions. There are two kinds of captions – one’s the automatic kind where they automatically translate it if the audio is in a foreign language, usually with disastrous and rather comical results. The other kind is where you type out your own captions/subtitles with the according timings in a .txt document, convert it into a captions document, and then upload it onto Youtube to the corresponding video. When you watch that video again in the future with the CC option on, you’ll see your captions showing up as the video is playing.

Annnnd finished, ta-da! I do hope that this was helpful and made sense. Personally I feel that it is a simple enough process to upload your videos online, not to mention that it can both serve as a way of sharing your videos with other Youtube users out there as well as can be a “place” where you can keep your videos for memories’ sake. This is why I like to upload the fancams I take at various events.