At last the audio swap facility is working on YouTube! Okay it is in test stages and beta, so some technical hitches may be expected. Other users I know had reported problems with either the sound in audio swap not working, when it had on previous occasions (so not an obvious browser problem); or just failing to add a soundtrack altogether. I tried about six times, and cleared the cache & cookies, only to get "audio swap failed". At last it has worked!
I recently updated the popular post Make a Slide Show Video of your Art for YouTube! You can now see an improved version of ACEOs by Naj, plus soundtrack, see "option 1". You can still see the original video ACEOs by Naj with a (different) soundtrack too! Just see "option 2".
Adding music to your already uploaded YouTube video (silent or not) should be straight forward. We shall have to see if this functionality continues, but if you would like to try, assuming you have already uploaded an Internet video to YouTube, all you need to do is make sure you are signed into YouTube then click My Account in the top right hand corner. Next select My Uploaded Videos from the Videos (Uploads, Favorites & Playlists) panel and simply click the replace audio button on the right-hand side of the corresponding video. You will then be taken to a list of music by different artists provided by YouTube: select the genre, artist and then track. Listen away, maybe try something else...its amazing the effect different tracks and genres can have on the same video! The downside is that you can't fade the music, so it needs to be chosen to fit sound-wise, i.e no sudden cuts. Once happy with your music track you just click the Publish Video button under the preview. It is worth remembering, once selected for publishing, a new track will permanently replace an old track. I can see this could be great promotion for up and coming musicians/artists if YouTube could get it functioning reliably!
For further reading see YouTube help center article How do I change the audio track in my video?
And We Have Youtube Sound!
Request an ACEO Painting
I was contacted on Ebay by an ACEO collector who said they liked my painting of a Robin, but they collected paintings of American Robins, would I be able to do one? I felt the subject was very likely to sell in any case, and had the time, so was happy to oblige with an auction listing. I e-mailed the buyer with the listing details and listed the item at a realistic price. To give the buyer a good chance of winning the item, I ran the auction for three days. The collector liked the painting and bought it! If they had not, they had the option not to bid.
I liked this arrangement and wish that more collectors would do the same. Sure, as every artist knows, there are people who are going to mess you around, but if the subject is a seller and I have the time, I'm usually happy to oblige.
Contact information on Mydepictions Links Page.
Make a Slide Show Video of your Art for Youtube!
This is a very basic tutorial to get you started with a simple slide show type movie you can post on youtube or other video hosting site. There may be other and better ways to this, but this worked for me.
This tutorial uses Windows Movie Maker which most people have on their PC. Windows Movie Maker has the advantage of being spyware free and WMV is a file format that is widely supported by the video hosting sites. Most people will find Windows Movie Maker on their PC by going to Start Menu>All Programs>Acessories>Entertainment>Windows Movie Maker.
A slide show video can be used to promote your art or craft, promote your website, to show the stages of a work in progress and to show or instruct on techniques.
Video files are recompressed and transcoded for video hosting sites. What you see on your PC will not be the file that is broadcast. There are always going to be limitations to quality for this reason. You may wish to test out videos by uploading them. Keep them for private viewing only until you have uploaded one you are satisfied with.
Before you begin you will need to consider your content, pictorial and written. Make sure you already have jpeg/png file format images of your work ready to include. For a first project and for visual effect, I think its best to keep it short and simple. Youtube recomends a 100 MB file size limit and a 10 minute duration limit - this is way too long for a slide show type presentation, most viewers would loose interest! Using your image editing software to save your images to a low resolution before you begin may help keep the overall file size of your movie down.
Go to start> All Programs> Windows Movie Maker
Click to open Windows Movie Maker.
Next you are going to select the images you may wish to include in your slide show. If the Movie Tasks pane is not open, open it by clicking the tasks icon in the main menu bar.
Select Import Pictures from 1. Capture Video menu in the Movie Tasks pane. A window will open prompting you to look in folders for images. Select each image from the relevant folder(s) that you wish to include. As they are added, each image will be visible as a clip in collections:
Simply click on an image and drag it into the large storyboard box (below collections). Repeat for each of the images you wish to include, and in the order you would like them to appear. (You can easily remove an image from the storyboard, or from your collections: right click> delete.)
Once you are done adding your images click view video transitions under 2. Edit movie in the Movie Tasks pane.
Select a transition to use between the images - I prefer a simple fade. Click on the transition then drag to the smaller boxes between the images on the storyboard. You can play your movie to see how the transition looks. If you want to remove a transition you can right click on it and select delete from the pop-up menu.
Next you will need to add titles to you movie. Click on the first image in the storyboard then click Make titles or credits under 2. Edit Movies in the Movie Tasks Pane. Follow the prompts for adding a titles at the start/end and so on with other images if you like. You can change the background colour and the fonts. I found that a simple font worked best once the video has been uploaded.
Music from your PC can be added (please respect copyright!) as a clip to collections in a similar way as images (select Import audio or music from Movie Tasks). To add it to your movie you will need to change the storyboard view to timeline, by clicking show timeline.
You can then click on your music clip and drag it onto the timeline. You can use the timeline view to alter the length of clips, transitions, and music clips, by clicking and dragging in the section you wish to alter. If you right click on a music clip in the timeline, you can select fade in and fade out.
There are lots of different edits you can do once you grasp the basic idea, just have a play around to see what works best for you. By experimenting, you may learn that you want your images to all be a similar/particular size before including them in a movie - you will need to do this in your image editing software.
Once you have played your movie and got it how you want, you will need to save it. Go to file in the main menu bar select save project - this will save your movie for future editing, not for uploading. To be saved for uploading, your file will need to be compressed. Through testing, I have found that option 1 works best in terms of quality, although option 2 is also acceptable - I have included comparisons so you can see. The option 2 video was the one people grabbed hold of and rated etc. Unfortunately it can't be replaced with the better quality one and still retain its ratings, comments etc., so I have left it in place...let this be a lesson in keeping your video for private viewing only until you are certain of aspects like quality!
To save in a file format on your PC suitable for uploading to a video hosting site:
Option 1:
Select file>save movie file select My computer, hit the next button. Name your file and select the folder where you wish to save the file e.g. Video, hit next. For the movie setting, select other and then select Video for Broadband (512 kbps) from the drop down list.
Aceos by Naj saved this way.
Select save movie file select The Web as location, give your movie a name, select other on movie settings and high quality (Large) or high quality (small) from the drop down list. You may get a warning saying movie maker could not download the latest information from your video hosting provider - just ignore and click the save on my PC link.
Aceo's by Naj saved this way.
You now have a slide show movie in WMV file format ready to upload to youtube or other video hosting site. One advantage of youtube is that the you can upload and see the results pretty instantaneously, add the music once uploaded, and, off course, it is hugely popular (one disadvantage being they have distribution and other rights to your video to promote the youtube site once it is uploaded...so shop around!) With Youtube, the image at the centre point of the timeline in your video will be that displayed for your movie on the site, so something you may wish to consider when editing. Video quality may vary on different video hosting sites. Here's a selection of some video hosting sites to try out:
Vimeo
Blip.tv
Dailymotion
Revver
Youtube
Google Video UK
Also see And We have YouTube Sound! for adding sound to a video already uploaded to YouTube, Add Youtube Videos to your Blog, Website or Ebay for embedding videos, How to get full screen images in Movie Maker for some basics on elimating black space around images, plus Original Art by Naj on Youtube.
Original Art by Naj on Youtube
I have posted a short slide show movie of some of my ACEOs on youtube. You are welcome to visit the site and rate the video or post a comment.
If you just want to see the movie....
See also: Make a Slide Show Video of Your Art & And We have Youtube Sound
The All Important Title Tag
If you are new to building web pages or a web site, don't overlook the importance of the page's <title> tag. (That's the part displayed in the blue bar when the page is opened in the browser. It's also displayed underlined in blue in search engine results pages and in bookmarks.) In the HTML code it sits in the <head> section as shown below.
<head>
<title>Mydepictions Ebay Art Listings Gallery</title>
</head>
I discovered the importance of this tag by happy accident with my first ever attempt at a web site. The site was pretty much unoptimized, did not have much written content, did not have any inbound links, and was not manually submitted to any search engines. (I should add the site was mainly a web-building exercise!) It was hosted on the free pages of AOL hometown, which was most likely the only way it was known to any search engine. However, with very little effort, one page ranked number one in AOL search results for a specific relevant search term. One of the main factors was the uniqueness of the search term, but another important factor that could be attributed to this result was the content of the <title> tag. The page title simply spelled out the content of the page, not a personal/company/organisation name, not a website name and, not homepage or index or that dreaded page number e.g. page04! (This is just a bad way to communicate with visitors and does nothing to convey the page's content.)
All search engines give great importance to the <title> tag. Each web page should have its own unique title, containing choice keywords relevant to that page's content. In fact, Google officially state that, among other things, you should
make sure each page has a unique title tag....that aptly describes the page.(Official Google Webmaster Central Blog 12/02/2007)
A widely recommended character length (inclusive of spaces) for the contents of the tag is about 60 characters. A long title will be cropped in the search engine results pages and bookmarks, for example. If you haven't already, and you can, do optimize your page titles, it may work wonders for your position in the search engine results pages! And you wouldn't want your webpage to appear like this lot of page04 's in the results pages either:
Read the W3 Recomendation on the title tag or google "title tag" for more information and discussion on this topic.
Mydepictions Free Web design Resources Page