- Goal: Turning your trailer into a short!
- 1. SETTING UP
- Creating A New Timeline
- Meeting The Requirements
- 2. EDITING THE CAPTIONS
- Rearranging
- Resizing
- Reviewing
- 3. EXPORTING & UPLOADING
- Exporting
- Uploading
Goal: Turning your trailer into a short!
What is needed for the short to do well
The best time to make your short is after you’ve finished editing as you’ll still have all the files!
(open on youtube for extra details in the description!)
1. SETTING UP
Creating A New Timeline
Start by opening the project you want to turn into a YouTube Short. Then, highlight and copy the trailer section of your edit. With everything copied, hit cmd+N (ctrl+N for windows) to create a new timeline in the project. Paste your copied trailer into this new timeline.
You can switch between timelines by using the toggle next to the timeline name.
Meeting The Requirements
Rather than immediately converting your video to a vertical resolution, which obscures the text you need to see to resize, open a 9:16 frame to act as your guidelines.
Now, before you start editing the captions, review the length of your trailer. If your trailer is longer than a minute, but less than 2 minutes, you’ll have to remove some clips/scenes. When trimming, aim to keep the most engaging parts of the trailer, but make sure the remaining scenes still make sense. Add in fade ins/outs if required to transition from “scenes”. For an example of trimming a longer trailer, click here.
For a trailer that is ~2 minutes long, you can make two trailers, but ensure the split between the trailers makes sense. Remember, when creating two shorts out of one trailer, the aim is to create shorts that make sense by themselves.
2. EDITING THE CAPTIONS
There are three stages in editing trailer captions to fit this new vertical frame: rearranging, resizing the revising.
Rearranging
The idea here is: Longer captions = smaller captions once resized = harder to read. To keep the size of your captions as big as possible, captions need to be rearranged to span vertically, rather than horizontally. Reduce the horizontal length that your captions take up by splitting them up to take up multiple lines. Generally, two/threes lines would be enough for most captions but you can decide on how many lines to go for, based on how much overhang (text outside the frame) is present.
After creating multiple lines where necessary, review the captions to ensure they are centred aligned as much as possible. On top of b-roll, the centre for 2 lines of default captions would be X=0 & Y = 55, -55.
Resizing
Now, with everything rearranged, the text can be turned into a compound clip. Generally, only one compound clip should be needed to and text can be resized in one go, however, in cases where captions are illustrative and/or vary in size, using multiple compound clips may be more suitable. If something looks off, e.g text size is changing every scene, it probably is—try to maintain consistency.
After you’ve created your compound clip/s, resize as required to fit into the frame—as long as the longest text fits, everything else should too. Though there aren’t any set minimums and maximums for zoom, around 0.700-0.500 seems to be a good range. However, you may find your text can go bigger or needs to be smaller.
Make sure the resized text doesn’t touch the frame: There should be sufficient space otherwise the text may be cut off on youtube even though it’s visible in the exported video.
Reviewing
At this point, the resizing of the caption work should be done. To check how the short will look as an actual vertical video, the output scaling can be changed:
- Click on settings in the bottom-right of your DR project
- On the Image Scaling tab (change tabs on the left), uncheck the “Match timeline settings” checkbox under Output Scaling
- Now, with the output resolution dropbox on “Custom”, change the numbers to be for a 1080 x 1920 processing
- Ensure the “Mismatched resolution files” dropbox is on “Scale full frame with crop”
- Save these changes
With your video now in a 1080x1920 resolution, rewatch, in full screen, to decide if any text needs to be resized, realigned or even rearranged. At this point, you also want to consider the footage: if its a broll, is the main subject of the video visible in this new frame? If not, could you add in a video pan to ensure everything is seen? If it’s pastor at the pulpit, is he as centred in the frame as possible?
Once you have made the necessary changes, add a fade out to ALL the captions, music and video at the end. You may choose to have some text stay on past the footage, if that is the case, ensure it eventually fades out along with the music (do not end the music before the captions).
Yay, you’re now ready to export!
Some General Rules:
- Sentences should not be over-rearranged to the point where there’s only one word per sentence.
- Do not resize captions outside of the compound clips, unless for an intended effect
- The logo video, that plays at the end of the trailer, should not be kept in the short
- Everything should fade out at the end of the short
3. EXPORTING & UPLOADING
Exporting
On the short’s timeline, ensure that the In and Out ranges are where the short begin and end. This is especially important if you’re working with two shorts on the same timeline. From there, it’s the same exporting process you’re used to—go to the deliver tab, name your video & choose it’s location. With the format set to mp4, you’re ready to export!
Uploading
Again, a familiar process.
- On your youtube account, as a Bethel BPC Editor, click the “Create” button. Then click on “Upload Video” to upload your Short.
- Change the details of the short, pick an engaging title and change the description to the original sermon’s description, without the question within the emojis.
- Then, under video elements, click the “Add” button for “Add related video”. Here you will find the sermon that your short’s trailer belongs to, to link the short to the video.
- Set the visibility of your short as “Private” and upload! Let the Video Editing GC know that you’ve uploaded a short, and its public upload will be scheduled
If you’re having trouble naming, please let us know on the group chat and the publishers will help give your short a title. Titles can be thought of as a mixture between subheadings and thumbnail quotes: they’re attention grabbing and personal, speaking to the viewer to pique their interest. You can always run your title by the group chat too for some feedback.
Congrats, you’re done! 🎊