Boo YouTube

I said I would blog about the experience of using prerecorded TV from home at our apartment in Siracusa – and I will. But first, still on the subject of video, a bitch session about YouTube.

I shot a video tour of the apartment to send friends and family back home, using the Flip Video Ultra camera I’ve mentioned before. Making the movie was fun and easy. Posting it to YouTube as a private video, only to be viewed by designated friends, ultimately defeated me.

First, I edited the clips together and added titles using the FlipShare software that comes with the camera. That took a couple of minutes. Then I opened the resulting file in Adobe Premiere Elements 7, the dumbed-down consumer version of Adobe’s professional video editing software.

In Premiere, I added narration. It’s very, very easy to do: you click Add Narration, make sure your microphone is set up properly – I used the built-in mic in my laptop – and hit Record. As you record, the video plays. I did it in one take, which no doubt viewers of the video will tell you is all too obvious.

Adding background music was almost as easy, though I had to relearn how you mix sound in Premiere to ensure the music doesn’t drown out the narration. In fact, the whole process took a little longer than expected because I hadn’t used Premiere for a few years and had to get back up to speed.

I’m a YouTube newbie, but I thought it was the logical place to post the final product, which was almost five minutes long and 50 MB in the first version I rendered. YouTube has a generous file size limit of 1GB and length limit of 10 minutes. I would have posted at Flickr, which I use for stills, but it limits video length to 90 seconds.

In fairness, YouTube is set up for people who want to post videos for the world to see. I couldn’t do that because I don’t really have my landlord’s permission to expose his property to every break and enter artist in Italy. But it is theoretically possible to post videos that only designated friends can view.

Also in fairness, I’m impatient and don’t much like to read instructions. Still, YouTube makes it absurdly difficult to figure out how to post private videos and add authorized viewers. It also appears that viewers must join YouTube to be able to see the videos. After a few hours, off and on, of trying to make it work, I gave up and posted to my Facebook page instead.

YouTube. Bah. Humbug.