I uploaded my third Youtube short today. While by no means ambitious, it was by far the most ambitious of the three. Whereas the previous two are simply excerpts from Kodsnack episodes, this one actually had a script written. And, of course, a good number of cuts to get it down under the 60 second limit for Youtube shorts.
I was cutting out plenty of little pauses, and that was even before I discovered that Youtube adds a second to the duration calculation, meaning a 60 second video counts as 61 seconds and thus not a valid short. Cutting out that last second took a lot of scanning the waveform for hidden little pauses.
I even threw in a little stock music behind it all.
How did I edit? Imovie. I remember when doing anything with video felt like a heavy operation. These days, not so much for a miniature project like this.
The one trick to discover was how and when Imovie would let you create a vertical video project. The secret is to make the project an "App preview", and then the first piece of visual material you drag onto the timeline will define the dimensions.
Could they have hidden that possibility more? Perhaps, but surely not by much.
Cortex has told enough stories about how strange Youtube's publishing interface can be that it actually feels pretty simple to deal with now that I see it in real life. My one real point of confusion was my short not getting detected as one and discovering that added second. Which, well, sure, that is strange enough for most books come to think of it.
Apart from Youtube, I have also put the shorts on Instagram and, of all places, Tiktok. Stats have been interesting, but I should probably let them build up a while longer before drawing any kind of conclusions from them.
In any case, it is fun to play around with video.