Creating, publishing, and embedding your songwriter performance video to YouTube.

If you’ve followed along on our last three lessons on capturing, splitting, and then editing and adding an intro plate plus some overlays and titles, we are ready to produce our movie, upload it to YouTube, and then embed it in your website.

Here is the timeline for a video of my song South To Mexico from my September 27th performance at Cave Creek Coffee Company.

click image for larger version

In the timeline, you see all the elements we have discussed:

The intro plate, the video with effects, the MTV style overlay on it’s own timeline – at both the start and the end – and the Title at the end, on the same timeline as the video.

Creating The Video:
From the File Menu, select, Save Movie File.  You will be presented with the following window.

I select the My Computer option because I want the highest quality for my original movie file.  Other options, particularly email and web will produce a smaller movie.  When we upload to YouTube, the movie will be rendered by YouTube for distribution on their network.

Having the original file in a higher quality also means we can use it later for a DVD or other distribution option.

Next, name your file and select where Movie Maker should save it.

I named my file, 20080927_C4_SouthToMexico – to help me easily know, by looking at it, the date_venue_song.  Naming files in general using this method helps you sort them in a list.

Press Next and you will be asked about the file quality.  I am selecting the default – Best quality for payback on my computer.

Select Next and the movie will be created.

Uploading to YouTube:
We are going to upload the video to YouTube – although, the process is basically the same for all video upload services.  If you do not have a YouTube account, you will have to create that.  It is simple and I will not cover that here.

Logon to your YouTube account.  In the main page,  your account page, there is an Upload button.  Select Upload.

You will be presented with the following screen

click image for larger version

I put the song title and that it is an original song by Matthew Moran.

In the description, I put the lyrics and copyright information.  At the top of the lyrics I also have the text, “Recorded at Cave Creek Coffee Company, Cave Creek, Arizona”.

The video category is Music and in the tags I placed, “americana, acoustic, love song”.  I don’t really know where my music is categorized but this seems to be what other songwriters tell me I am. 

Date and Map Options:
To get to the date and map options, which further let us identify when the video was shot and where, we will select the choose options link on the Date and Map Options section.

This gives you the following fields.

I input the date and the city, state then press Search which brings up the map, as shown.

There are other options on YouTube for comments, sharing, etc. – I typically keep all the defaults.  Then press, Upload a Video.

You are presented with the following screen.

Browse for your video, select the file, and then press Upload Video.

Then wait…..  The screen will show the progress.  DO NOT LEAVE THE SCREEN.  LET THE UPLOAD FINISH FIRST.

When it finishes uploading, YouTube must then process the video – which basically means converting it to a flash movie and embedding their logo on it.

When it finishes uploading but before YouTube processes it, you will be presented with the code you can use to embed the video.  This will be important but you can always get to it later.  Here is what that looks like:

If you embed and publish the video before it is done processing – converting to flash – anyone visiting your website or blog will get a message that the video is not ready or available.

My advice, don’t publish the link or embed it until it finishes processing.  Processing can take anywhere from 4-5 minutes to 30+ minutes – I would imagine based on how many videos are being uploaded to YouTube.

If you select the My Videos link above or select My Videos under Account in the YouTube navigation, you will see your uploaded videos and the most recent will show as processing.  See image below:

From this screen, you can edit the video options (the description, title, date and map, broadcast, comments, etc.

When it is done processing, you can also select which plate shows in the YouTube preview of your video.  They don’t offer many options – just 3 -and it is a random sampling from somewhere in your video.

Once it is done processing, you can get the link and the embed code by simply clicking on the video and playing it.

To the right of the video, you will see the following:

The URL is the direct link.  The Embed is the code to embed it in your website or blog.

Embedding Your YouTube Video
I use LiveWriter to write this and other blogs.  It makes embedding videos from YouTube and other services simple.

In LiveWriter, I select, Insert Video. The following screen appears:

Copy the Embed code from the YouTube window and paste it into Video URL or Embed box at the top of the above window.  Press Insert and the video will be embedded into your LiveWriter blog post – just like it is below…

I also copy the direct link (URL) and make the title above my video open my YouTube page.

If you do not use Livewriter and edit your HTML on  your website directly.  Simply copy the Embed code into a section of HTML on your website.  You can place it between <p></p> paragraph tags or between <div></div> tags to allow you greater control over how it aligns on the page.   Or simply give your web designer the Embed code and let them do it.

Also, if you are creating pages or blog post directly in a web-based editor like Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, or others – there is usually an option for embedding video or for editing HTML (source) directly.

If you run into a problem or have a question, just ask in the comments.

I hope you found this tutorial and the entire series helpful.  Let me know.