Pretending that I’m some great expert who has all the answers, maybe I should just start sharing some tips and insights from the bottomless treasure chest of my wisdom?
Here’s a preliminary list of topics that I’d have a few words to say about, some more might pop up as we go along:
- thumbnails
- that magical moment
- long term goals
- zooming in
- capturing footage
- tracking shots
- synchronized multi camera edits
- fixing lag
But we have to start at some point, so:
THUMBNAILS
The exclamation marks are there to show you that this is important. This is a little thing that you can add to your video that, in my humble opinion, makes a huge difference. Here’s two of my old videos. You don’t need to watch them. You may, if you want to. The important question right now is, which one looks more interesting:
Don’t answer that, it was a rhetorical question. The first one looks more interesting because it has a carefully selected thumbnail, and with the second one I had simply forgotten this crucial little step in video editing. That’s why it looks like ass. Which annoys me to this day because that second video actually marks an important milestone in my editing adventures. It was my first synchronized multi camera edit, the video for which I switched to Shotcut, which I’m still using today. And I fully intend to talk about these multi camera edits at length, further down the road.
Thumbnail may not be the technically correct term, we’ll use it for the image that represents a video in the forum, before you click on it. And the way this forum works, that image will be the first frame of your video. Or one of the first few frames, I never bothered to determine that exactly.
Your typical sexy video begins before the action on screen gets really juicy, so unless you do anything about it, the first few frames of your video, and thereby your thumbnail, will be comparatively boring
So how do you give your video a nice thumbnail? I usually just put a really nice split second snippet of video footage at the very beginning of my video, and I’ll adjust the framing of that, meaning I’ll zoom in on a part of the full screen of the original VHTV video, to give it a pleasing image composition. I do that with almost all my footage, but that’ll be another lesson.
If I want to be very precise with that thumbnail, if I want it to be one specific frame of the source material, I’ll first modify that small video snippet to be played at slow, slow motion, which will make that snippet so much longer. But from that I can now select a smaller snippet again, mabe a 5th of a second, and all of that snippet will be showing that very same frame of the original video that I want as my thumbnail. I’ll also remove the sound from that snippet, so my video won’t start with a strange noise blip that doesn’t belong there.
I guess you could also design a beautiful poster in Photoshop, load that into your editing software and use it for a thumbnail. I’ve never done that, but it should be no problem.
How you select your thumbnail is up to you. You want clickbait, so it better be sexy. And give the audience an idea what the video is going to be like, what’s going to be the highlight. You might want a frame with very little motion blur. Do you want her eyes open or closed? How deep inside her should his cock be? What’s her best orgasm face? And so on, and so on. Oh, and mind that there’ll be a play button in the middle of your thumbnail, would be a shame if that ended up in the middle of her face. Ask me how I know. You might want to work around that button, or you might use it playfully. I one placed it right on a girl’s butthole.
Anyway, I think you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a good thumbnail. It makes your video pop out from the rest of the forum. It makes the difference of whether or not people click on it. It can make or break a video. It can be done very quickly and make a big difference. You can also waste lots of time on it when you’re obsessing about finding that one very best frame of footage. So remember that the second best thumbnail is still much better than no thumbnail at all.
Class is over, now do your homework.