Started uploading videos to Youtube recently. By no means are these viral videos or even professional videos, they’re merely unboxing videos I record as evidence in case something goes wrong. Does this still make me a Youtuber though??
In the past when shopping online, I’ve had the wrong products shipped, damaged merchandise, missing goods… just to name a few. In most cases I’ve had luck resolving the issue with the retailer but the experience of one or two disputes with customer service not going smoothly left me feeling not my best. With these videos there’s no debate as to whether I opened a working product and then later claimed it was damaged as some sellers alleged. I used to just delete the videos after confirming there was nothing wrong with the shipment and only save the ones that needed disputing.
So why am I uploading these videos to Youtube now? Why not? Much like this blog I don’t expect many to see, but it’ll serve as a record of what I bought, and when I bought it… Who knows? Maybe a video or two will end up helping someone. I do sometimes share the videos on forums or facebook to which some people do watch. There’s something about unboxing videos that pique people’s curiosity I suppose.
Most of the videos are single take and uncut thus far, shot on my phone which I then upload directly to Youtube… until today. I just uploaded a video of a belt I unboxed which I had to edit. The first clip was the belt unboxing itself and the second video was installing the belt into a buckle I had from an old belt that was pretty broken.
Originally I thought I could just use something simple like VLC to join the two MP4 files together but VLC 3.0.12 doesn’t seem to support joining videos anymore. I messed around with Video Editor that came installed with Windows 10 and while that did the job, the quality was pretty horrendous, with tons of artifacts. Youtube didn’t have a way to join two videos together despite the myriad of other online editing it allows you to do like blurring parts of the video, adding sound track, and overlaying links/cards. Finally gave Microsoft Movie Maker a shot.
Microsoft Movie Maker
I gave this a try cuz I wanted something simple to test out. Definitely not about to spend coin on Adobe Premiere and didn’t really want to install anything significant or invest in hardware to simply join two video files together.
The upside is that it works. I managed to join the two videos together, even cropped out the first few seconds where my address was showing on the package. Also managed to add a card in the middle of the two videos with text about adding the buckle. Using this allows me to skip questionable websites that join video files for free online. While using those would definitely have been quite simple, an IT security session I attended previously about Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) clued me in to the hidden/implied user agreement and privacy concerns about using free websites to do file conversions and the sort.
The downside to Movie Maker is that the free version only outputs to 720p… it didn’t seem to let me choose the animation/transition of the credit screen I added for the “add buckle” text. (Granted, that was designed to be a credit screen.) Hence, the scrolling text. *Cringe* And even at 720p output, the visual quality wasn’t quite the same as the original videos.
All in all though, I spent probably less than 10 minutes downloading/installing and editing the video so I can’t ask for much. There is probably a feature somewhere to do the text card probably that I missed, or maybe it’s a paid feature. Much like exporting to 1080p or 4K is a paid feature. It did the job this time but I’ll probably keep looking.
Next steps
This did get me interested in researching other video editors, probably open source ones. Will I end up editing the heck out of my videos like a proper Youtuber? Probably not.
A quick google search introduced me to OpenShot. I’ll probably take a look at a few more in my spare time.
Here’s the video I uploaded if you’re interested: