Hey there, all you budding online teachers and music students!
Earlier in the semester, I posted with some basic advice for navigating the world of making live performance videos. In that essay, I discussed appearance, controlling for sound variables, and gave a quick review of equipment; you can read it here.
Today I'd like to cover what happens after you make your video--namely, editing, converting files to different formats, and uploading to platforms. We're requiring our woodwind juries here at University of Wyoming to be recorded and uploaded for faculty comment this semester, and I imagine a lot of other schools around the country are doing something similar.
Editing:
Tom's Guide shared a review of his favorites earlier this year, which you can find here. I can say that I find VSDC (available for Windows only) to be pretty intuitive and quick to navigate.
As always, check to see if each program is compatible with your OS.
Converting Files:
This can be done in your editing program (and you don't actually have to edit anything first--just upload your file and convert). But if you aren't using editing software, there are also multiple free, online programs that allow you to upload both audio and video files and convert formats. Just remember that you can't convert from a compressed format to an expanded one; you cannot add information you didn't originally include in your recording. So, this is really for compressing HD video, WAV (lossless) audio files, etc. that are just too large to upload onto your platform. The have really original names like
Online Video Converter: https://convert-video-online.com/
Cloud Convert: https://cloudconvert.com/mp4-converter
Video to Edit: https://www.video2edit.com/convert-to-mp4
Simply upload, choose your preferred format (mp4 is a pretty safe way to go when in doubt), and then download your new, lightweight video when finished. Depending on the size of your original file, it's a pretty fast and painless process.
Uploading to Platforms:
YouTube might be the most ubiquitous platform for performing and teaching videos. It's clunky and slow, and they can throw in advertising wherever they want afterwards, but everyone knows it exists. You can also choose to make your video public or unlisted, which only allows users who have the link to watch. There is some light editing software in the Beta stage currently built in to this platform as well. Here's how to get started.
Google Drive also works reasonably well for sharing videos to specific people, and you can set various levels of permissions to allow editors, viewers, or simply invite people upload without viewing anything else in the file. Here's how to get started.
Finally, people are still using Dropbox, which means you may be required to use it yourself someday. Think academic interviews, ensemble auditions, etc. Free storage is somewhat limited and upload times are slower than G-Drive, but it was pretty popular in the early 00s, so... Here's how to get started.
And by the way, please notice that I have largely aggregated links here for you; if you don't find what you need here, I strongly encourage you to simply do a search on what you need to do. You, too, can be a graduate of Google University with very little effort.
; )
Best of luck to everyone on their final performances for the semester, and kudos to all of you creating fresh new material to share with the community!
Comments
Post a Comment