Video Signal for December 26th, 2022.
Subscribe to the newsletter with all the links here.
Video Signal for December 26th, 2022.
Subscribe to the newsletter with all the links here.
Welcome to the December 26, 2022 edition of Video Signals. Twice a week, I send out an email with 5 links, 3 tools, and 1 tactic to help business owners and marketers level up their video marketing skills. I'm Joey Daoud, media producer and creator of New Territory Media. This is the first audio and video edition of this newsletter. So let's try it out and see how it goes. You can find it on whatever your podcast app of choice is and/or our YouTube channel. So I'm going to run through today's edition of the newsletter, and I might riff a little bit more than is actually in the newsletter. So let's jump into it. So first up, we've got our 5 links. Looking for some free to use movies, books, and characters? Here's a list of notable work that's about to enter the public domain on January 1st. Of note, the sci-fi masterpiece, Metropolis; The Jazz Singer, which was the first talkie film; the first Hardy Boys book; and the final book that Sherlock Holmes appears in. It's a fun list, but get ready for 2024 when the first appearance of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse and Steamboat Willie will enter the public domain. All right. Next story. We got a link to the top 3 trends that TikTok says they're going to see or we're going to see in 2023. I wouldn't say these are specific trends. These are more like categories of content, actionable entertainment, which I think is a really good description for being entertaining but providing value for things that people can do and take action on, making space for joy and community-built ideals. Community is probably going to continue to be a hot trend in 2023. So we got a link. You could check out the full article on TikTok's trend report, and it goes into much more detail of what those 3 trends mean and examples. Third link. The most popular genre of music for YouTube creators to use was classical. According to an Epidemic Sound report, the use of classical rose by over 90% in the last year. As one creator puts it,"Trends move incredibly fast, and sometimes, they only stay for as short as a week." But I foresee classical music being here to stay for a while." So there's a great infographic on this link for the Epidemic Sound, where you can check out a bunch of other breakdowns of what kind of music they found people were using in YouTube videos, and also by geography. Fourth link. TikTok is testing horizontal videos, aka regular videos. The idea is possibly going to go after YouTube's longer-form videos. If you remember, a few months back, TikTok upped the runtime limit from 3 minutes a video to 10 minutes a video. So that was also a hint that they're going after this longer-form content. I'm, like,skeptical of that will actually work. I feel, like,TikTok has conditioned everyone to keep scrolling and flicking through videos. That's something that made it very appealing and also something that clearly works in every other platform. Instagram and YouTube has duplicated or copied that feature. but I don't think it, easy enough to go the other way. I think it's easy for YouTube to add a shorts feature. I don't think it's easy for a shorts platform to try to change people's habits to watching horizontal, longer videos. They don't have to rotate their phone. and Instagram tried this with IGTV, did not really work. So I would be hesitant to see vertical or horizontal videos playing out on TikTok. But then again, maybe not. So still something to keep an eye on. I've seen it in my feed where I can click on a button and have the video rotate if it's a horizontal video. Overall, I would say don't start putting horizontal videos on TikTok at this point. Stick with vertical. And then last link. on Buffer Blog, there is a, short interesting report of a first-person case study on how they built out their TikTok account to get 1 million impressions and 13,000 followers in just a few months. A few of the takeaways that I found interesting was they created a schedule, not just a schedule for, like,posting but a schedule of, like, one day of the week, they're going to brainstorm; one day of the week, they're just going to film everything. They kept the production simple by using a green screen so they could just have one setup, film a bunch of videos, and they were posting 3 videos a day. So the production was very low key, relatively easy to do. But by posting 3 videos a day, they were able to learn much more quickly what worked, what didn't work, and iterate on that with their weekly cadence. So a few interesting takeaways and a pretty simple format that you'd easily do. All right, so that's the 5 links. Let's check out the 3 tools. First tool, Exploding Topics. This is a free email. I get this email, and it's got really good just insight of, like, rising trends. Either they're rising from, like, search queries or rising for them, or subreddit growth is rising for them. But they don't just tell you what the trend is. They give you a good breakdown of, like, why it's rising some key players in that space, like,what you could possibly do to capitalize on that space. So if you're looking for like, ideas of what content or videos to make based on a rising trend or, like, possibly a new audience to target or, like, a new business category to enter, it's a really useful newsletter that I find interesting getting it every week. But they also sell a pro account where you can have, like, searchable database and search all their trends and get extra trend reports and stuff. So that's an extra pro level subscription to pay for if you want to just search through database. Next tool, we've got Skool. That's Skool with a K. I have dabbled around with this, and I've joined a couple communities on here. it is an online community platform. This one's relatively new. It's simple, but it's got some couple effective features. It's got your, like, main feed like a Facebook group, but it also has a classroom feature. So, like, you can upload online classes and have a learning platform built into your community platform. It has a calendar. You can schedule events, and have live streams. And then it also has a leaderboard, which is interesting built-in thing for engagement, where you can create different levels for people, like the more they engage and do certain tasks, then the more levels they unlock. So they got a lot of clever things going on here. And the other thing that makes it a little bit different is it's just one flat rate for a community. Right now it's like$99 a month for a community. Unlike other communities that have, like, limits on the size or different tiers for the size of your community or they take a cut of the payment if you run any transactions. This one's just one flat fee, and you do whatever you want with it. And then third tool, Shutter Encoder. So this one's really handy for video stuff if you need to convert a video file from one format to another, or you need to compress it, so, like, you got a really big file and you want to, like, shrink it down to something a little bit smaller or change the size of it. And if you want to do other things like crop the video or add a watermark to it, there are really good paid tools to do this like Apple Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder. But if you check out Shutter Encoder, this one's a totally free tool that does a lot of these things for you. And so you just download it if you need a good handy video compressor. And then lastly, our 1 tactic. So this one is about video editing. I've edited hundreds, I've probably gone through hundreds of hours of documentary of interview footage, built out multi-doc part documentary series as a video editor, stuff for Netflix, stuff for Spike TV of when they existed, a lot of stuff. And so when you're dealing with massive projects, but even on a smaller scale, it can drive you a little bit crazy, just a little bit of, like, trying to get some perspective, like, when you're focusing, like,on little details and trying to get some perspective on the big picture. So how do you, edit video, especially when it's, big involved stories that make it more straightforward to easier to edit without driving yourself crazy. So I'd like to think of it as in three parts when you're building out the edit. And those three structures are structure, pacing, and polish. So first one, structure. Thinking of big chunks, this is really just focusing on the audio, running through all these interviews, possibly writing your own additional voiceover to fill in gaps, and just really building out the spine of the story with, like, audio-only clips, either from your interviews, from source footage, from things, people you're just building out. Sometimes it's called radio edit, other times it's called a paper edit because you might just be doing this with transcripts only and building out a paper edit just by going through your interview transcripts and assembling them. We've been doing this more, and there are a lot of tools that make this a lot easier, especially tools that I've mentioned in previous signals like Descript and like Simon Says. So those tools make it really easy where you can assemble chunks from interviews and then export it to your video editing program of choice. So this one is just really, like, big picture, getting that rough flow of the story down using your audio, focusing on the audio from what people said. Next step would be pacing. So this is where you're doing some more fine cuts with the audio, but you also want to add visuals. Like This is a visual medium. You want to show, not tell. So trying to add, as much your stock footage, your B-roll, whatever, B-roll you shot, archival photographs, archival films, all the extra visual stuff. Start adding it in. Start trying to build out scenes, music, sound effects, all that stuff. Start adding into the pacing, but also at a level where you add and you can kind of see if it's working, not working. So you can make those decisions earlier on if you need to cut stuff or rearrange stuff. And then lastly, polish. This is where we're, like, fine-tuning the cuts, the edits, J and L cuts, which, if you check out the newsletter, there's a link to what that means. And then, just really, like, adding that final polish to make the video flow and feel really good. But the point is you want to do that polish towards the end so you're not, like, wasting time polishing a scene that ultimately doesn't work in your entire video. So the idea is you want to try to identify structural problems earlier in the first stage so you can cut it out or rearrange it before you go down the line and fine-tune stuff and polish it. And then you're like, oh, this doesn't work in this video, I gotta cut it, but I just spent, like, 5 hours tweaking this one edit, then now it's going to get deleted. That said, that doesn't happen all the time. So just come prepared that, like, yes, you may spend a lot of time polishing something to ultimately make the tough choice where it doesn't work for the greater good of the video, and you got to cut it. So yeah, that is the newsletter in a nutshell. I tried to do this in under 10 minutes. So let me know what you thought about this either in the YouTube comments or on Twitter. I am c47 on Twitter. And if you want to subscribe to the newsletter or to the podcast version, or the YouTube version of it, just head over to newterritory.media/subscribe and that will have all the links for whatever medium you would like to hear this or watch this or read this of your choice. Thanks for listening, watching. I'll see you in the next edition.