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Donald Feury
Donald Feury

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at blog.feurious.com

Watch How I Create a YouTube Video and Thumbnail!

Follow me on YouTube and Twitter for more video editing tricks with ffmpeg and a little python now!

Even though I'm only about one month into my YouTube channel, I thought some people might interested about how I go about creating and uploading the videos and thumbnails.

To summarize the video above, the process goes like this:

  1. Record the video using OBS, usually only involves one file but there are a few times I needed to start and stop again.

  2. If multiple recordings were done, concat them together using the demuxer concat method.

  3. Find the timestamp in seconds in my video for the plug. (a.k.a like, sub, blah blah)

  4. Run the video through my finalize video script to add in the fade in and out, overlay the sub animation, and append the outro.

  5. While its processing, take dumb snapshot with webcam.

  6. Edit snapshot in Gimp

    • Do a little color correction and probably brighten the image.
    • Crop it down to 1280x720, keeping my face to the right side of the image.
    • Add text to the left side of the image, usually some variant of the video title.
    • Put a box behind the text to give them some contrast.
    • Apply an images if applicable. (ex. ffmpeg logo, YouTube logo)
    • ... Thats it, usually takes like five minutes.
  7. Quickly check over video once its done processing.

  8. Upload if it looks good.

  9. Do the usual SEO stuff (tags, description, title)

  10. Add thumbnail exported from Gimp

  11. Once the video is processed on YouTube, add the end screen where the fade in starts.

  12. Add any cards if applicable, such as references to other videos. I always add the relevant playlist to the start of the video.

  13. Content!

Thats it for now. Once I get consistent lighting in my office, I'm gonna add proper color correcting to the finalization script.

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