Adobe Elements - Video Track
How to Make a YouTube Video

I use Adobe Elements for my video editing - it's functional and it's inexpensive. It even has a 'capture' mode which will let you suck in video from many USB-connected video devices, meaning you don't need extra software to work with in order to bring in your video.

Start up a new project. A project is a collection of video and audio that you are compiling into a DVD or MPG project. Click on the film category to start working with a film clip. Browse your hard drive to find the video file that you have on your drive, and bring that into your current project.

The video is now available to your project - and it's time to put it on the actual timeline of your movie. Drag the video clip down to your timeline in the lower part of the screen. You can see visually how much time in minutes this video clip will take up. If you point and hold at the beginning of the clip, you can now "crop" off the first few minutes of the clip if you wish. For example if the video starts with 10 seconds of black, just hold and drag to the right to remove that black part.

You can have multiple video tracks, which can be useful for fading video in and out of each other if you are working with different clips. You can also just put video clips one after another on the same timeline for a more straightforward video feed.

Cropping works on the end of a clip too. Just click and hold on the end of your clip, then drag left in order to cut off unwanted ending footage.

When you have the video part of your project looking reasonably good, it's time to start playing with the audio track.

NOTE: YouTube and other public video locations will NOT let you use copyrighted material. Do not include music videos, movies or other copyrighted material if you intend for the project to be displayed publicly.

How to Make a YouTube Video
Genealogy Article Index