AMPband - Including Video Snippets on Your Website

Tips for Adding Videos to Your Website

Using Videos On Your Website

Adding videos on your website is a great way to show potential clients what you can do as a band. Here's some tips:

  1. Whilst the videos you show don't have to be of BBC quality they do need to be entertaining and 'watchable'.
  2. As well as showing off the band, include some footage of the audience enjoying the performance and interaction with the crowd.
  3. Make sure that the sound quality is good.
  4. Keep videos short (you don't need a full song) or make up a montage using snippets of different songs.
  5. Upload them to YouTube - this is a powerful & popular search engine in its own right (plus it reduces the bandwidth on your own server).
The one drawback of including videos, or links to your YouTube channel, is that it slows down your site loading time for visitors, especially when using a mobile phone.

An option here is to use 'Lazy Load'. This will place a selected image on your site with a play button and the video is only downloaded if the visitor wants to watch it.

Including the option improved our 'Mobile Speed' score from 64/100 to 96/100 for this page. You can see how we did it by viewing the source code on this page (right click with your mouse and click 'View Page Source'). The CSS starts at line 23, the image is at line 155 and the javascript starts at line 341. Do a search for 'YouTube Lazy Load' and you'll soon find all the necessary steps to install this clever code on your own site.

Google uses download speed as one of its ranking indicators so it's worth improving this. To check out the speed of your own site go to:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Your videos will need editing so, to get you started, here is a list of some of the best free video editing programs available.

DaVinci Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/
This program has probably the best features for any free editor. It is easy to add transitions and filters from an extensive library. It’s not the easiest program to master, but the results will speak for themselves.

Lightworks https://www.lwks.com/
Also available as a pro version but at a cost.The free version has all the features you’re likely to need. It accepts most video formats but the limitation is that it only exports as MP4 t 720 resolution.

OpenShot https://www.openshot.org/
Great for beginners and easy to get to grips with. It even has in-built animations which are great for creating interesting titles. Unlike Lightworks, it has many export options and resolutions to choose from.

Shotcut https://shotcut.org/
It is easy to use and includes colour correction, a large choice of transitions and useful filters. Just drag your clips onto a multiple track timeline.

Hitfilm Express https://fxhome.com/express
It has over 400 effects and presets. It’s not so easy to get started as the others but the audio/visual features are well worth the effort.


Here are some others that are worth a look….
Apple iMovie https://www.apple.com/imovie/
Avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
Blender https://www.blender.org/
Kdenlive https://www.kdenlive.org/
VSDC http://www.videosoftdev.com/

For advice on making your website mobile friendly look here.

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