4. Publishing and sharing

4.2. Recommendations for publishing and sharing

Today, publishing and sharing videos shot with digital cameras is essential for online communication.

Thanks to Internet platforms such as YouTube or TikTok, anyone can create and share high quality images with a global audience.

This democratisation of the user allows videos to be used to entertain, inform or sell products, making them a very powerful global communication tool.

Here are some tips on how to effectively publish and share your content online.

  1. Save the video thinking that it has to be viewed on a website. If the idea is for the final product to be viewed on the Internet, it is important to take into account the need for proper compression, since videos that were recorded in HD often look pixelated due to inadequate compression. In this regard, we should note that there are different file formats and video codecs, as can be seen in section 3 of this guide. However, for publishing online, the variations are straightforward. Firstly, for most videos it is recommended to export at 1280 × 720 (720p), even though this is not the largest size. Vimeo and YouTube convert videos to this size, so if this is done before uploading to these platforms, this will save on file size. To upload videos to the Internet, there are a variety of file types: mp4, mov, AVI, flv, etc. to name a few. The first three use the H.264 codec, which offers compression that provides good image quality.

If the video was recorded in HD, save it in 720p. The video must be compressed to mp4, mov or AVI using H.264 before uploading.

  1. The title of the video should be meaningful. It is advisable to use keywords at the beginning.
  2. Be clear about how you want to share the video and set it up appropriately:
  • Public (any user can search and view it).
  • Private (only the people you choose can see the video).
  • Hidden (any user who has the link to the video can see it).
  1. Select the best thumbnail possible. The thumbnail is the still image that is displayed when the video first loads, before it starts playing. It is the cover that the video will have, so it is important to choose it well. Most programmes offer some by default, extracted from the video prepared. We recommend choosing the best image available. For example, YouTube gives us different options to choose from; on the other hand, Vimeo invites us to upload our own image directly.

Canva and Adobe Express offer free options to create thumbnails for videos that can be uploaded to all video playback platforms.

  1. Use of metadata. A common mistake – even made by companies and the media – is to forget about metadata, overlooking the description, categories and hashtags of the video. This is an important issue if our goal is to have our work well positioned on the web. If we don’t do this, a video file is practically invisible to search engines. Therefore, the metadata is the only thing that identifies a video on the Internet.
  2. Description. It is also important that you make use of the description to explain what the video actually is, and that you do not limit yourself to keyword tagging only.

Make sure that all videos have detailed descriptions (transcripts, if necessary), including the hashtags, taking into account the existing ones, in case any of them can be useful to position our video.

  1. Categories. Don’t forget to select the appropriate category depending on the content of the video.
  2. Permissions for use. It is important that you make it clear how you wish to share the audiovisual production that you post on the web. In this sense, you can use Creative Commons licences to decide on permissions for use and for sharing. If you have used resources from other people (music, images, etc.) you should be careful and make sure that these resources have the relevant permissions for use.