This popular video site sharing website has been around for over 10 years now, and gone from short crappy quality clips of pets & people doing the sort of stuff you’d see on You’ve Been Framed, to High quality HD footage of the same stuff + even people having a crack at doing their own “Online TV Shows”.
These range from things like Tech Reviews to DIY Electronics + Prank Shows, some of which are better than mainstream shows like Beadle’s About or Candid Camera managed to pull off.
There seems to be more & more people wanting to have a crack at it (not just because you can earn money online by Youtubing), but not quite sure how to get started, so lets see what I can do to help……….
The first thing you’ll need is a camera. It doesn’t have to be anything too special, but basically helps if you use pretty much any camera made in the last 7yrs or so that’s capable of recording in 720p or 1080p High Definition (HD).
A Digital SLR Camera (DSLR) or a “Bridge” camera is likely to be too big & heavy to lug around if vLogging (video blogging) on the move like Roman Atwood (and others) do on a regular basis, and you’re best off with either a Digital Compact camera, or a small handheld video camera such as from the Sony Bloggie range, and their equivalents from other manufacturers such as Panasonic.
A proper camcorder such as my Panasonic is acceptable and not too bad to carry around with you all day too (and the quality is quite stunning).
My long time favourite for digital compact cameras is Fujifilm, but last time I looked it appeared they’d slimmed their range down to a selection of “Bridge” cameras + some very expensive compact system cameras with interchangable lenses. They’ve got exceedingly good colour reproduction qualities though.
Most the top Youtubers appear to be using Canon + Sony Digital Compacts at the moment, and GoPro cameras for when things get a bit more sweat inducing, such as ziplining or messing about in water.
The next stage (assuming you’ve already set-up your youtube account), is to shoot some video…. that’s easy enough, just point the camera at want you want to film, and press the record button, etc.
After that, you’ll probably want to edit the video, and for that you’ll need video editing software. Some of this you can get for free (e.g. Windows Movie Maker), other higher end software can end up costing you as much as the camera did. If you’re a Mac user, you’ll probably be using iMovie. For Windows users like myself, my current personal favourite is Corel VideoStudio Pro X5, which has been succeeded by a number of newer versions, it’s up to VideoStudio Pro X8 now I think. You can buy it either as a standalone product, or bundled together with my favourite photo editing software Corel Paintshop Pro X*.
Editing isn’t really too complicated if you’ve never done it before, it’s basically just a matter of dropping the video file onto the timeline at the bottom of the software, and adding the various bits & bobs like captions as and where needed.
When you’ve finished editing, you’ll need to save the finished video file, then wait for it to start rendering. This may take a while, and it helps if you’ve got a fair bit of RAM installed in your computer….. it’ll do it, but very slowly if you’ve got the minimum 2GB of RAM needed to run Windows… and it’s best to have at least 4GB of RAM installed, and perhaps even make use of Windows ReadyBoost.
Once done, you can then start uploading the video to Youtube. This also takes what feels like forever. While that’s in progress you can add a video title, keyword tags, opt to monetise the vid (if you’ve enabled that) + put a place tag on a map to show where you shot it (though you may want to give that a miss in some circumstances).
And that’s got you started Youtubing, I hope.
Though there’s still more to do yet… you may want to gain followers & views on Youtube by promoting your video via other Social Media outlets such as Twitter + Facebook + Instagram (among others), and collaborations with other Youtubers via sites such as ChannelPages, and checking your Video Stats via Youtube + elsewhere.
Check out our favourite Youtube Vids, or read our free guide on how to start blogging for money that could help you earn extra money online in addition to posting stuff on Youtube.
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