I’ve tried putting a podcast episode on YouTube before. I figured, “It can’t hurt, and it might get more listeners who stumble across it on there based on keywords.” I’ve seen it done before, and thought “How hard can it be?”
Our Freedom Feens podcast is audio only. You can’t put an audio-only file on YouTube. It has to be a video file. And it can’t be a blank audio-only video file. It has to be a video file with at least a still image throughout the whole thing.
I tried doing this once, using our podcast logo as the image, and Adobe Premiere as the editor. I’ve edited a feature-length high-def movie on Premiere, I’m a pretty decent editor, and a very computer-savvy guy. I’m the guy my computer-smart friends call when they have a computer problem.
So I figured I could do this in my sleep: pull a WAV file of a podcast episode into the Premiere timeline, drag in our logo, stretch it to the length of the audio, set the In and Out points, and render. I tried it a dozen times with a dozen output settings and every time it crashed about halfway through. It was like voodoo.
Tonight I thought of trying something else, using a MUCH simpler program, Windows Live Movie Maker.
Adobe Premiere suite costs thousands of dollars, is incredibly complex, and is used to edit a lot of what you see on TV, Windows Movie Maker comes installed free on every computer running Windows, is so simple a retarded monkey could use it, and it is made for editing video slideshows for your grandma.
To open Movie Maker, type Windows Live Movie Maker Into your RUN bar:
^type Windows Live Movie Maker in your Start Bar
Open the Movie Maker program.
^Windows Live Movie Maker
Click on “Home” near the top left of the program.
Click on “Add Videos and Photos”, and add your still image
.
Click “Add Music” to add your audio (it doesn’t have to be music, ours is talking. It just has to be an audio file.)
Click on “Project” near the middle top of the program, pick Widescreen or Standard. (I picked Standard.)
Click “Fit to Music.” (Important.)
Go to the little down arrow above “Audio Mix” and click it. Click “Save Project As.” Save your movie as what your want your YouTube video to be named.
Go to the little down arrow above “Audio Mix” and click it. Click “Save Movie” and then “Windows Phone Small.” Click “Save” on the box that pops up.
Your movie will render, quickly. It took about ten minutes to render my 106-minute podcast “movie.” The file size was 148 megs, and the audio quality was pretty stunning. Very little loss.
Upload this file to YouTube. Be sure to tag with good, pertinent keywords, and provide a link to your podcast site.
Enjoy!
Michael W. Dean,
Freedom Feens podcast
Check out my final result, here:
