How to make a vlog.

Star in Your Own Video.
Giga Girls guide to Vlogging.

 

Want to get yourself on YouTube but don't know how? Annabel Crerar tells you what's involved in getting your video online.

 

 

Have you been to a video website like YouTube or Google Video and wished you could put a video up there yourself? If you're serious about doing it, you need to make a vlog, or video log. A vlog is like having your own TV show on the internet - well they're probably not going to give you one on actual television. And who would want one, when you can say whatever you want, whenever you want, to anyone in the world who cares to tune in to your video blog? Vlogging (pronounced 'vlog', not vee-log) isn't quite as simple to get started with as blogging, but it can be a lot of fun.

 

First, you need to make a digital video. If you're like most of us, the closest thing to a digital video camera you've got is the video function on your digital camera. That's okay. You probably won't be able to film more than a minute or so at a time, but that's going to make it easy to take a variety of close-up and further-away clips to edit together.

 

You can also save video clips from your webcam. Bob the Vlog has a free, simple tool called Vlogger that helps you do that. Stickam is another great tool. It captures video from your webcam, and can also stream your webcam broadcast live. You can easily embed a Stickam player in a blog entry, your MySpace page or even in a TradeMe auction, by simply copying and pasting a line of code that Stickam supplies.

 

Editing your video

 

Once you get the hang of vlogging and you're world-famous on the internet, you might want to beg or borrow a proper digital video camera. The best choice is a MiniDV camera. These are the most popular digital video cameras and the cheapest. They record onto small tapes, but instead of playing the tapes back in a VCR (they're not that sort of tape), you just plug the camera into your PC to copy the video over to your computer.

 

There are a lot of complicated programs that do this for you, but you've already got a good one on your computer. If your computer is using Windows XP, you've got Windows Movie Maker. If you've got a Mac, you've got iMovie. If you don't like your pre-installed video editor, you could try Avid Free DV, a free, easy-to-use program.

 

Video editing can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. It's best to start small (try beeping out some words, like when people swear on the news) before you start work on your first feature film. The clever folk at the How Stuff Works website have put together a tutorial called 'How video editing works'. The tutorial uses fancy Adobe Premiere software, but the basic concepts are the same for Windows Movie Maker and iMovie.

 

If you don't mind paying for software, Vlog It! (US$50 - download the free trial to try it out first) can help you make a vlog that looks just like a professional news programme or documentary. You can even film yourself standing in front of a 'green screen' (a green sheet, really), and use the program to replace the green colour with a fake background.

 

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