If you've recorded or edited gameplay videos
and want to share them, there's no easier way to do it than posting it
on YouTube. Here, we'll give you a few tips so that you know what to
keep in mind to appeal to viewers when uploading videos on YouTube.
Preparation: setting up your YouTube account and channel
To make your YouTube video public, you have to
set up a YouTube account
by creating a Google account (you'll already have an account if you use
Gmail). Once you've done this, access YouTube and log in with your
Google Account, if it doesn't do so automatically. Click on the
cog icon in the top right corner of the screen and select
YouTube settings.
You should now be on the overview page of your YouTube profile. Click on
Create a Channel. Make sure to create a channel with a relevant name so that your videos will be well-organized in YouTube.
Now comes the exciting part: uploading your videos.
Uploading videos
To upload a video, click
Upload and select your file. Alternatively, drag the file to the upload button in your browser.
While the video's uploading, you can fill in the
title,
description and
tags, select your
privacy settings, and choose an appropriate
category.
The title and description fields will help attract viewers to your video. some important tips about this:
- Choose a title that's attractive, but accurate.
Don't lie, and don't just think about search engines or keywords that
will get you a good ranking in YouTube.
- Give the video a good description which is search engine friendly. The field should coherently answer the question of why the video is useful.
- Adds links to your website in the description, if available. Also
link sources that you've used in the video. This particularly applies to
music. Your viewers will ask you about songs, and its good to answer in
advance and express yourself as briefly as possible in the description.
- Choose a good thumbnail. After uploading, YouTube
suggests three different snapshots from the video. Make sure you don't
use any ambiguous images, otherwise you might mislead the user and end
up with something that has nothing to do with your video. Good and bad
thumbnails have an impact on your long-term positioning in YouTube.
Other things to consider are
tags and
categories, which help make your video accessible to the right audience.
Entertainment, for example, is more appropriate than
Travel and Events for
gameplay videos. Tags are short keywords that help make it easier to
search for videos. Here, the name of the video game and the subject of
your video are good options.
Post-processing on YouTube
At this point, you're pretty much done, but there are a few tricks
that you can use to engage even more users. After videos have been made
public, YouTube offers options to enhance videos with effects.
Annotations are particularly effective.
In YouTube, open the video manager (accessible
here). The video manager will give you an overview of all uploaded videos. Click on the arrow pointing down next to
Edit, and select
Annotations.
The window that appears is similar to that of a simple editing program.
Move the marker on the timeline to the desired position and click
Add annotation.
You can lay text over the video and add links to it, a practical way
to link to more of your videos once your archive has grown. Annotations
are also a good way of
referring users to channels with similar content or themes.
A word of warning: annotations are a great way of keeping users on
your own channel for longer, but too many boxes can be annoying and may
cause irritated viewers to leave the page.
Quality is key
Nobody wants to see pixilated videos that are poor quality and have
lots of background noise, so don't upload badly made videos. During
recording, make sure you use HD resolution (1280 x 720 pixels or 1920 x
1080 pixels) and ensure that you don't lose any of the quality during
post-processing.
Here, we explain how to edit videos using
Free Video Dub without losing quality, and with FileLab Video Editor,
a free web app, you can export your video with 1280 x 720 pixels. If
you do need to render the video again, choose the highly efficient Codec
H.264.
Customizing your channel
If you gradually fill your channel with videos, you should also
customize it a bit as well. You can give your channel a personal touch
by adding your own background image, a matching channel description, and
links to your social network. This helps your viewers better recognize
your brand.
Watch out for legal pitfalls
YouTube is especially handy for sharing gameplay videos: uploading is
simple, there are millions of game fans already using it to search for
gameplay videos, and videos can easily be shared with anyone. One thing
you should note when uploading gameplay videos, however, is that you
will be working with copyrighted material. Make sure that you credit all
of your videos back to the original game source.
Make sure to check out our article on how to edit gameplay videos using Free Video Dub.
