Traveling is an amazing experience, especially if you’re going somewhere off the beaten track or a country that you’ve never been for the first time. And one of the biggest joys of traveling lies in recording the dribs and drabs of the journey to keep the memories of your travels intact or share them with your family and friends. But if you haven’t made any video editing before sharing, you could fail and mess up the 4K or HD videos of your trip. Here are a few tips on how to edit and compress your travel videos for sharing them later on the internet.
Get to Know the Basic Info of Your Travel Video
The first thing you need to take care of is the basics of your travel videos. Nowadays, travel enthusiasts prefer to capture clearer moments at 30fps or 60fps in 1080p HD and even 4K UHD with different equipment like smartphones, cameras, DSLR, and camcorders. Usually, videos recorded by these devices are clearer and crisper with high quality. However, this also means you’ll have to deal with larger files.
One minute of iPhone video is about 135MB for 1080p HD at 30 fps, 200MB for 1080p HD at 60fps, and 375MB for 4K at 30 fps. Moreover, due to the different gadgets you might be recording with, your travel video will be produced in various video format and file type, not just the MP4 H.264, but also the rising HEVC codec MP4, a variation of MOV with Canon DSLRs, AVI format video shot by Nikon and Olympus cameras etc.
Know the Video Upload Requirements of YouTube and Vimeo
Although some like to upload travel videos to other video sharing sites, vlogs, WhatsApp or emails, the most common platforms for sharing video are Vimeo and Youtube.
YouTube recommends MP4 video encoded with H.264 and AAC-LC in 1080p. And even though 3840×2160 pixels 4K video is also accepted, you can only upload videos that are up to 15 minutes long by default (the latest version allows 128GB, 12 hours max).
Meanwhile, Vimeo provides a certain sum of free storage space each week for video uploading: 500MB for a Basic account, 5GB for Plus members and 50GB for Pro account.
When your large-sized travel video with different formats met the limited YouTube and Vimeo compression requirements, video uploading will not go smoothly. Thus editing the travel video and reducing its video size with no visually quality loss is key.
What Video Editing Software to Use?
There is no definite answer to this question. A great choice is MacX Video Converter Pro. As all you need is to make your travel video compatible with YouTube, and get it smaller without blurry images and dropped frames, this tool’s magic resides on its editing features such as transcoding video to YouTube supported formats, compressing video file size up to 90%, lowering the resolution, adjusting video parameters like codec, frame rate, bit rate, aspect ratio etc., trimming the length of video, splitting video into segments, and more.
Besides, with this video editing software, you won’t be depressed by 4K video editing issue if your graphic card is built with hardware acceleration. Being the only Level 3 hardware acceleration capable processing tool by far, MacX Video Converter Pro achieves 4K UHD video processing at No.1 fast speed, up to 5 times faster than its competitors, as the Intel QSV/Nvidia/AMD GPU takes care of the whole process of hardware decoding, processing, and encoding.
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How to edit 4K video fast? First things first
Before beginning your video editing work, we recommend you to import and organize all your footage in chronological order on your laptop. That way, you’ll see how much footage and which scenes you are dealing with. And you can start sorting that footage out: deleting, optimizing or retaining it as you please.
Make it compatible with YouTube, Vimeo etc
Though there is no mandatory provision to convert your travel video to a specific format, you need to ensure it’s acceptable for YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Facebook or the platform of your choice. For a better compatibility, we suggest transcoding your video to H.264 MP4.
If you are using MacX Video Converter Pro on your desktop, drag and drop your video or click on + Video button to add the target video to the program. Once done, a window with dozens of preset profiles, including general-purpose video formats, latest gadgets of iOS, Android smartphones and tablets, game consoles etc. pops up automatically. Go General Profiles > MP4 Video > Done, you’ve set your travel video to MP4 in H.264 and AAC codec. Alternatively, you can also scroll down to Web Video Profile to choose the specific YouTube, Vimeo, or Facebook profiles for your video.
Compress to the best quality for most people
You can upload your travel videos in 4K UHD to YouTube or Vimeo, but sometimes you’ll come across a blurry 4K video after uploading it. That’s mainly because YouTube or Vimeo does its own compression, your device is not adequate for watching 4K, and the video is scaled down to match the viewers’ internet connection speed. In that case, why not compress 4K to 1080p/720p, and adjust the parameters to keep the best video quality for most people?
Moving on, after tackling this video compatibility issue, click on the gear-shaped button to adjust parameters like resolution, frame rate, bit rate, aspect ratio, etc. We suggest you keep the original frame rate to ensure the fluency of the video, down-scale the resolution at one or two notches like 4K to 1080p, 4K to 720p to keep a high quality without loss, change aspect ratio on the basis of the requirement of the video sharing sites, and adjust the bit rate in accordance to the resolution you’ve selected. Usually, the bit rate is set with the range: 5-10Mbps for 720p, 10-20Mbps for 1080p, 30-60Mbps for 4K.
Shorter is sweeter
Attention span was never shorter and no one has the patience to sit around and watch your endless videos. For engaging results, cut out the least interesting parts, split the video into segments, trim the length of the video and join the highlights into one – short but sweet – clip.
To do that, tap on the scissors-shaped edit button, choose Trim and tick Enable Trimming. Here you’re able to slide the arrows on the timeline or type in the accurate start and end time to trim your travel video length. If you want to split the video into clips, repeat the process. You can joint them into one after you reload the split video clips, by sliding the Merge on.
With all these done, click on the RUN button and let the video process do its magic. It will be done within a few minutes, depending on your video length and computer configuration. If your Intel/Nvidia/AMD GPU is built with hardware acceleration technology, you’ll do it way faster.
Well, with this basic travel video editing, you’d able to upload and share your videos on Youtube and beyond. However, if you’re not content with that and still want to customize your video further to tell a vivid travel story, you can continue the 4K video processing with advanced editing tools like iMovie, Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas and the like.
Mix up your shoot
The combination of long shots, medium shots, and close-ups works wonders to tell a story. For example, a long shot of a subject walking towards a building, following by a medium shot of the same person purchasing a ticket and a close up of a performance schedule, will show that your subject is going to a concert.
Talking heads
Consider adding graphics over to further explain the story instead of running a voice over the whole video. It will make it easier for the people watching it to understand what’s going on! Especially, if you change locations frequently.
Add music
A right tune can turn a scene from dull to mind-blowing. It sets a pace to the video and helps to hold the viewers’ attention. A great place to look for music files is the same YouTube audio library as it’s copyright free. That will allow you to upload it later to YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo without the video being taken down for copyright infringement.
Lastly, do not forget to export your video and share it away. Don’t let it sit on your hard drive forever!