Video Content Resizing For Social Media

When you're creating video content, your message is obviously very important. The technology is the part that throws people off their game. Sheryl Plouffe here, video strategist. In this video, I'm going to dive into one of my favorite tools for those of you who are DIYing this, right? You're doing it yourself. You're taking your video content and you want to find a tool that's going to allow you to turn that into the different sizes that you need. And size does matter, uh, in this case because we need to take that content and maximize it. We want to put it on as many social platforms as we can, but they all require different sizes. So what do you do? Let's go over to the computer and I'll show you how I would suggest that you approach this if you are DIYing it. And before we get into it, if you know what NPG stands for, you get extra points. Let me know in the comments. Okay, let's go. So if you want to extend your reach and really have true omnipresence online, you want to be thinking about your content in different sizes because you want to be able to post and publish your content on different platforms in the size and aspect ratio and format that is best suited to that platform. So I'm giving you an example here on the screen. This is just a screenshot of really an example of some of the assets that we produce for clients in our done-for-you service. But I want you to be looking at the top 3, right? We have our square on the left, we have our horizontal or landscape version in the middle, and then we have our vertical on the right. So on the left, the square could be used on a variety of different platforms. In many cases, one could argue that these are the best to use for mobile devices. When people are scrolling through on their smartphone, these square videos actually take up more real estate on the screen than the one in the middle, which is the horizontal or landscape version. This is the one that you see often on YouTube, for example. And then the one on the left is more of your vertical style for IGTV, as an example. So I'm just showing you kind of the, the different sizes that we're talking about here. Now, we provide services that do this, but if you are looking at doing this as a DIY project, what I would recommend is using a tool like ClipScribe. And I'm just going to show you a quick example of how this would work and how you could create this video content and take one piece of content, turn it into different sizes for social media. So let me just give you an example. And by the way, you can find the links to this below the video. I want to find something fairly short here. So just for demonstration purposes, otherwise these videos will take a long time to load. So I'm just going to choose— I'll just choose this 11-second one here. Okay. So I'm uploading this 11-second video. And when I'm doing that, I could choose a title. I'm just going to call this you know, test video for now. And, and it says here, was your video shot horizontally or vertically? Well, in this case it is a horizontal one, so I'm choosing and highlighting the horizontal. If the video file itself was shot vertically, then I would choose the one on the right, but in this case it's the one on the left, and I'm going to submit that into ClipScribe. So again, this is the DIY, this is the doing-it-yourself version of of the process. Okay, so I love ClipScribe. I think it's a great program in order to help you to do this. So let's just wait for this movie to upload. You can also see here on the left there that you can load, as I am doing, from my device. You also have a Dropbox option. You also have a Drive, a Google Drive option. And here it tells you, wait, the robots are working their magic, and we'll let you know when it's ready. So I'm just going to X out on that. This is a short video, 11 seconds long. Your video may well be longer. In fact, I would suspect it would be. So it's going to take a lot longer for it to upload. It could take upwards of, again, you know, 5 to 10 minutes. As we can see here in the jobs section, that video is uploading and it says making titles. So it's not ready for me to use yet. I need to wait for it to read like this: titles ready for design. Title's ready for design. So I'm just going to pause here and then once this is ready, we're going to come right back. Okay, so that 11-second video took approximately 3 minutes for us to get to the point where it says it's ready for us to design. So I'm going to click on the little plus sign. And here is what I want to draw your attention to at the top. We can choose a layout in ClipScribe. And as you can see, as I scroll through these from left to right, underneath each of these different layouts are little icons for the social media platforms. So ClipScribe even goes so far as to tell you what this format is conducive to— Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And what we're looking at here, the white portion is the actual video file, the horizontal video, the file that we've uploaded. The 1:1 represents the totality of the gray and the white altogether. In other words, the entire square. So 1:1 ratio means that it's as wide as it is tall. So as we scroll through these, you'll see that this is 9:16, meaning that it's 9 wide and 16 tall. And the actual video is embedded right in the middle, the white portion here, conducive for are conducive or really ideal for Facebook and IGTV. That's the symbol for IGTV. And as we go through here, we can see the different layouts, the different aspect ratios that we can use in this particular tool. So it's, it's great because it shows you what the different platforms are. And this is where you get to choose what layout you want. So for example, You might say, well, I just want this entire video to be wrapped up into a square format for Instagram. The only thing I would caution you, though, is if you're going to be using that on your Instagram feed, the video itself, you would ideally want this video to be less than a minute. If the video is longer than a minute, then, and you want to put it on Instagram, then you're likely going to have to start going over into more of the IGTV because the videos here need to be over a minute long in order to be posted there. So There's more that we can get into regarding that, but that's basically how this would work. So this is where you would choose and you go, okay, well, let's say, for example, I like— let's just try— let's do the IGTV. So it's going to say great. That's the one we've chosen. I can— I do have, as you can see here, a variety of different templates that I've created with logos and colors for a variety of clients of ours. And even for myself, but you might want to start a new design. So we're going to choose new design. Okay. And here is where you start getting— you know, you really can start having fun with this. We can alter the top bar design into whatever color we want. Maybe our color is an orange. We can change the bottom bar design. Maybe we want this to be white. And the text we want to be orange, right? So that is how we can start to manipulate and really start to brand this whole thing. Um, there's the video in question and we can start playing around with this. Just to give you an idea, we can add our logos in here. Um, we can also add our closed captioning. Right. Well, the closed captioning is actually done for you, but you're going to want to go through this with a fine-tooth comb and review all of your captions because it isn't 100% correct. But it does a great job of starting it off for you. So I do recommend that you or someone on your team go through these captions. I know that when we are reviewing captions for clients in our Done For You service, we look at it through a 3-step process, like 3 times we go through it to make sure it's right. So there are, you know, captions here. You can even upload your own SRT file if you have maybe sent your video to Rev.com and have that have, you know, garnered or have obtained the SRT file from a third-party service like Rev. You could upload your SRT file here. There is a whole section here on how to, you know, adding headlines. So if I want to add a headline in here, I want to add another headline in here. Um, I can start changing the font to this. I could turn the color to white. I could also go in here and turn that into, um, some type of a square with a shadow. I mean, the, the options are really limitless and you can just have some fun in here and turn this into whatever you want. Add your logo down here, over here in the logo section, add an emoji, adding headlines, closed captions. These are timers. So I'll show you what this will do. Um, bars rather, progress bars. So if I wanted to add a progress bar, I could do that. Um, let's see, I'm going to add this one. There it is at the top. So you can see now I can even move this if I would rather have my progress bar at the bottom of the video. You know, different colors, blocks. So if I wanted to put, let's say, let's say this, and I wanted this to be, uh, let's say in here for some reason. I don't know if I can make that much smaller. Whoops, there we go. Something like that. Now this is an interesting one where it goes all the way around. The whole video. I'll show you, this goes around the whole video. So you can have a lot of fun with this and create these different sized videos. This is just showing you the one size, but you could go through the same process to do a square, you could go through the same process to do a horizontal video. And you can even change up each one to look different. So This is the DIY version of creating video content in different sizes for social media. Again, the DIY side, this might be the side, this might be where you're at in that you have to do this yourself at this moment in time. If you are in a position where you might like to explore having this all done for you, these, those are services that we provide and you can get in touch with us and we'd be happy to walk you through what that looks like. And staying on the subject of ClipScribe, this next video is how you can add subtitles and an in-depth description of how to do that on YouTube videos using ClipScribe. So I'll see you there.