In my earlier post, A New(-ish) Way to Plug, I said I was making some short teaser videos featuring excerpts from some of my short stories, and my initial idea was to throw these on Twitter or use them to make Facebook ads.
Well, I've completed a few of them, and here's what I've learned:
1) Facebook (and Instagram) ads want videos and pictures in three different aspect ratios: 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16. Some ad types require pictures, so make sure to have a good screenshot or something for those types of ads, otherwise the ad manager thingy will yell at you.
I managed to put together a fairly efficient workflow to convert my initial 16:9 videos into the other two aspect ratios after I learned this. I'm using OpenShot Video Editor and Vidiot, which are both free and have enough oomph to do what I need.
2) Twitter allows free accounts to post 90 second videos. However, I had the idea that I might want to post those videos to YouTube as well, and learned that Shorts are specifically limited to 60 seconds, not 90.
Dammit.
Also, Shorts wants the 9:16 versions.
3) YouTube also wants you to either scan your ID or wait ~2 months to post hyperlinks in video descriptions. However, you can add URLs without the https:// part. They're not clickable, but that's fine for now.
To deal with this ~2 month wait, I'm going to trickle out the 16:9 videos as regular YT videos until that threshold is met.
4) The rules for links in Shorts are even more stringent (still need to do more research), so I need to consider carefully how to set up YT Shorts if/when I create even shorter teasers for that platform.
All in all, this has been quite a learning experience, and there's still more to do. Today I hacked at the scripts for the 90 videos and cut four of them down below 60 seconds. Another question I'm thinking about now is what those Shorts should point to, if they ever get produced. Apparently, you can only link to other YT content, so I'll have to think about that.
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