Uploading video to Technique Forum

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#1

Hi, I am trying to upload a couple of playing videos to the Technique part of the forum and not having much luck.

The videos I have were taken from my iPhone and have a .MOV extension. Where is the option on the forum to upload the videos? I then tried adding a hyperlink to my private youtube account where I have saved the videos but not much luck there either.

Any help would be appreciated. I have searched forum for similar questions and couldn’t find any so apologies if this has been covered elsewhere.

Simon

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#2

Hey Simon, welcome to the forum and sorry for the confusion!

Indeed you can’t upload videos to the forum directly. Best way is to upload to YouTube, then paste in the link directly in the forum post (on its own line, with empty line before / after) and it will display nicely embedded here automatically. No need to hyperlink it, just paste the full video URL.

Note that can just mark the video “unlisted” when uploading if you don’t want it to be publicly discoverable on youtube.com. If it’s set to “private” no one else will be able to see it, so “unlisted” is what you want.

This has come up a couple times but I know it’s not super obvious; we’ll try to make this info easier to find!

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#3

Awesome, thanks Brendan for the help and prompt reply!

Cheers
Simon

#4

Hi,

Sorry if this has been answered somewhere else, but I’m at wit’s end here…

Can you please advise on how to upload from iPhone 6s to Youtube for proper technique review? The quality seems to degrade so much, no matter which way I do it… don’t want to post a ‘review my technique’ thing and just get complaints about the video quality. :slight_smile:
See here:

Thanks

#5

Hey! This looks fine at small size, but I notice when I click settings > quality the max resolution available is 480p. Seems it didn’t upload in HD…we just did some tests, and looks like 720p may be the max when uploading directly from the phone. And with vertical video, like this, 480p may be the max by default.

Honestly this is probably fine for #technique-critique, with clear angle and good lighting the resolution doesn’t matter so much. For higher quality uploads you’d probably want to try editing / uploading from iMovie — you may be able to rotate to avoid the vertical video, and possibly upload in higher resolution as well. Or from a computer if that’s an option.

Either way, make sure you film in slow-mo mode @ 120fps. Then when viewing the video, set the in and out points so that slow-mo playback starts say halfway through. I believe when you upload it should maintain those speed settings, and that way we can see it both regular speed and slow. (Alternative if you’re editing say in iMovie or FCPX is to duplicate so you have the full clip twice, regular speed + slow-mo.)

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#6

Do I understand this correctly, I can set in and out points for slowmotion when viewing the video on youtube?

#7

You set the in/out points when uploading the video, not while watching it.
At least I’m not aware of how to do it as a viewer.

#8

Hey @Gtrjunior, thanks for the quick answer. I’m sorry if I sound stupid, but how exactly do I set the in/out points?

#9

Sorry no I was referring to how when you shoot a slow-mo video on iPhone, when playing it on your phone you can adjust where the slow-mo starts and ends. See here for what that looks like:

https://help.apple.com/iphone/11/#/iph61f49e4bb

This app may be worth checking out as well, for a nicer interface for adjusting video playback speed:

As indicated here, it’s a bit tricky working with slow-mo video in editing software. Default behavior is different depending which app you’re in, but for FCPX for example (or iMovie I believe) on import it will default to playing back at regular speed, and you have to edit the slow-mo parts manually. I think it’s just on the iPhone itself and in the Photos app on Mac where it has the draggable handles to set in / out for slow-mo as in the link above.

So for upload to YouTube, you could try setting a portion of the video slow-mo on iPhone and uploading directly from the phone, or import to a computer and edit e.g. duplicating the clip so you have it play twice, regular and slow.

One more thing to note — it sounds like slow-mo may not work if uploaded via the YouTube app, instead you may have to share to YouTube directly from the iPhone camera roll (as described in this video)!

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How to post slow speed videos
#10

@Brendan has a much better explanation than I could have given you!!

#11

Hey @Brendan, Hey @Gtrjunior,

thanks four your responses. So it’s an iPhone thing… CtC is the one case where I wish I had an iPhone. Well, I’ll see if I find some other way of setting the in and out points. But until then: what is the preferred way to go, should I slow my videos down manually or should I just post them and let everybody who watches them adjust the playback speed however they want to?

#12

Yes, it is an editing function in the iPhone.
Is your mobile phone capable of filming in slo-mo? If so I would think you should be able to do it.
On the iPhone, there is an “edit” button at the bottom of the video playback screen. Once you click it, it lets you set where the slo-mo begins/ends.

#13

Not sure what slow-mo capabilities other phones have, you’ll have to do some experimenting / research what’s possible with your device. But assuming your phone indeed can shoot high framerate video (e.g. 120fps), the best way to go is probably to use editing software to export a clip with both regular speed and slow versions sequentially.

YouTube can’t handle actual 120fps video so if you upload a clip shot in slow-mo mode but without the slow-mo actually baked in, YouTube’s built-in speed controls won’t give you actual smooth slow-mo. But, using editing software, you can take a clip shot at 120fps, stretch it out 400%, and end up with something you can export at standard 30fps but with 4x slow-down factor.

Writing it out…it is indeed a lot to wrap your head around given all the variables at different parts of the process (filming, playback, editing, upload)! You might see what you can find googling “how to upload slow-mo video from [phone]” or something for a more specific tutorial. At some point we may try to put together a quick video overview on this too.

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#14

Thanks again for the detailed answer. Yeah, this is getting a bit technical here :slight_smile:

I have a Fairphone and did a bit of research to find out that the camera is capable of filming at 60fps. I installed an app that determines the actual frame rate and indeed something around 60fps were detected. However, when I film, the videos come out with a frame rate of 30fps. I have not yet found out why that is.

I can use my wife’s phone, which does record videos with 60fps. So that’s already better. Right now I have a GoPro here, that a friend was nice enough to give me for a while. That records 11MP with 120fps. When I play those videos back on my computer using quicktime or vlc, I get a lot of frame skipping. Apparently that is too much to handle. Playing those clips in slowmotion works fine, though.

So I guess I would have to somehow render the non-slow-motion down to a lower frame rate and keep the high frame rate for the slowmp parts.

Who would have thought that practising guitar requires all that:)

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#15

Ahh, technology. Isn’t it wonderful!!

#16

Gotcha. Yeah not all apps / services can handle high framerate video; 30fps is pretty much the standard for any sort of digital video so often comes out that way from export. It’s possible your phone is recording in 60fps but it’s somehow getting converted to 30.

GoPro in 120fps mode should work well, you’ll probably just want to find some decent video editing software. Typically what you do is:

  • Configure the video timeline as 30fps, so that’s what you ultimately export / upload
  • Import the video shot at 120fps, then cut just the parts you want in slow-mo so you have those as separate clips in the timeline
  • Then you can adjust the speed to 25%, so those parts will render at 30fps along with the rest of the timeline, but at 4x slow-mo

You can do the exact same process with 60fps video but note that in that case if you “stretch” 60fps video by a factor of 4 (25% speed) you still end up exporting 30fps video as per the timeline setting, but since you have only 15 actual frames of video data per second, each frame displays twice, giving you decent but less-smooth slow-mo.

Crosspicking Wildwood Flower (kind of)
#17

Hey @Brendan,

thanks so much, that was really helpful. So, just to be sure, when you do that thing with the iPhone app, it’s not that the youtube player somehow know when to change the speed. What’s actually happening is that you export a video (probably with 30fps), where some portion of the video is played in slow motion. Because it was filmed with 120fps, the slowed down parts actually play with 30fps. The non-slow-motion parts will also only play with 30fps, which means you loose frames here, but that doesn’t really matter. Am I correct?

#18

No prob! Yep, I’m not 100% sure how the iPhone handles it internally, but that sounds about right. When uploading to YouTube it will essentially take your slow-mo in/out settings and use that to “render” out as 30fps video for sharing. (And yeah the speed controls in the YouTube player are a totally separate thing not related to the framerate you originally shot at.) When editing the raw files directly in e.g. Final Cut or iMovie you’re doing something similar but with more control to specify exactly what speed adjustments you want, before you bake 'em in by exporting the video file.