Amazon is getting into video and while there are so many articles and people
talking about how this is going to be a huge game-changer, the most important
thing for video creators like you and me is to know exactly how we can actually
get our videos on Amazon's new platform, Video Direct. So in this video I'm
gonna show you this step-by-step process that I've been using to upload as much
content to Amazon right now because if we can get our films and videos up there
before everyone else, we have a great chance of standing out, and having a ton of
success. So let's dive into uploading videos on Amazon Video direct. The first thing
you need to do is sign up for an account. Go to videodirect.amazon.com
create your free account and login with your Amazon credentials or create a new
account. Once you login you're going to go to your dashboard that looks like
this. It will seem like you don't have any videos or views because you don't
because you don't have any videos up. There are a couple tabs at the top and
so you're going to want to click your videos. Right now I have uploaded five
different videos. I'm seeing the different things that Amazon video direct
is looking at, different file types, different types of images, different
video description and exactly what works for getting your videos published to
Amazon. Right now you can see that one of my videos has been published on all of
these platforms: Japan, the UK, amazon.com, and Germany's Amazon. And so if you search
searcg for edit documentary, you can see the first result is my video how to edit a
documentary. How awesome is that? That's along with all the other results, the
books, the products, that
amazon has. So how do you upload your own video. Click Add title right here, From
here you're going to want to write in the title of your video choose a
category. For here they have a bunch of different categories. Just pick one of
these that works best for you and then choose your catalog listing language.
Then click Continue. You'll be taken to a page like this that has the catalog
listing. This is where you have the title of your video, the category which have
already been plugged in. Then you write out a synopsis which is a 400 character
description of your video. Below that you have your genres and so you can
choose up to five genres they have predetermined genres. Just start
typing in keywords that you think might be related to your video and then click
the category or genre that you think fits best. I would suggest using as many
of these as possible.
Below that you choose your rating if you have a an actual rating for your film.
Most of us for our videos if we're taking them from YouTube, just creating them
ourself, they will be not rated
Suggested ratin, you can choose what you think. Of course you want to be honest about
this because you don't want to have this negatively effect you if you have cussing
or something in your video you want to make sure that its age appropriate
rating. Then you choose the original language of your film and if you have an
original release date you can choose that. I've left that out for both of
these, for all my videos. Below are your graphic assets. So this is the key art
that will be shown in the search results and all sorts of places for your videos.
When people are searching for it. So you have a sixteen by nine title card and
what you need to do you can click on these little I buttons to get more
information,
this image is in 1920 by 1080 pixele file, jpg or png. This other image is 1200
by 1600 pixels and again jpg or png. Then here's a background image. So this can be
one that will show on the details screens of your when your search results
are showing up and it just gives the overall vibe for your your video. So to
create your title cards and images, use a program like Photoshop. You're going to
just have to create a new project with the correct width and height for both of
those. So for again the main key art it's 1920 by 1080, for the background detail
its 1920 by 1080, and then for that up and down key art, it's
by 1600. And you can see this key art right here. That's the one that's going to show up
on this page. So make sure that is relevant. If you can have text that
explains what your video is all about that will help as well. Use the same type
of techniques you use with your YouTube videos to create eye-catching thumbnails.
So once you have that art, click browse and that will take you to your file
uploader and choose your file and then click Save. It's going to take a few
moments to save and just wait until the catalog listing text up here becomes
green and then you want to move on to the next tabs. So cast and crew they're
looking at you as an actual video producer video creator. So if you just want to put
your name you can do that. I have a business so I put my business name
up here for studio creator and then down below I have my crew and cast which
again is just me so I put my name under crew, the role of producer and
again my name and since I'm an instructor in these videos, I put instructor. You can
add cast members and crew members by clicking the button and adding more. Then
click Save and move along to your next tab. So the mezzanine file, this is your
actual video. Now there are some rules and regulations for what quality you
have to upload but for now 1920 by 1080 P is the right format. It needs to be
that high quality to fulfill their publishing requirements and so that you
can get paid for it,
putting it on Amazon Prime or streaming it with ads. 4K and UltraHD
video is not accepted at this time and lower video 1280 by 720 is not either. So
once you click Browse there's a little language that will pop up so again
click the language of your video and then your captions... so you're going to
have to add captions for your video, that's one of the requirements that they
give you. I'm gonna show you an easy way to get your captions for your videos.
Most of you will be taking videos
that you've already published on YouTube and putting them on Amazon Video Direct.
YouTube has a captioning system that tries to add automatic closed captions
to your videos, so if you go to one of videos after you've uploaded it, and it might take a
little while to actually produce these subtitles. But go to your video
information page or the video editor and click this subtitles and closed captions
button. You see here that it has an English automatic subtitle added. So click that.
To the right you can see that it has this actions. Click actions and download one of
these versions. I would suggest choosing the .srt version. That will download this
closed captioning that YouTube has automatically created, and you want to
download it because not only are going to have to upload it to Amazon but
you're going to want to edit it because these closed captions aren't perfect and
Amazon is looking for great perfect closed captioning. I'm on a Mac and you
can see here that I've download this captions.srt file. If I want to edit
these I can go right click open with other and then I can choose just
something as simple as my text editor, TextEdit. If you are on windows you're going to
have to use whatever the internal Windows text editor is. From here you can
see that it's this file that has a bunch of numbers and
and text. You can kind of see how it works.
Each of these blocks is a different block of closed captioning text that
appears on your screen. So what I would do is just go through these and type in
the right words if things are misspelled, add punctuation where you need it, and then
once you are done you can just say save and it's going to save it as that
captions.srt file. So once you have downloaded your closed captioning
and edited them, go back to your Amazon upload page and click the Browse button
and add those captions. You are going to choose the frame rate and the language.
So YouTube videos are 29.97 frames per second, so choose that and
language of course you want to choose whatever language you have. If you have a
trailer you can upload that as well but you don't need to. For a lot of us we're not
going to have trailers for our videos that we put on YouTube, but if you do have a film, a
short film, a longer film, you can add that as well.
Click Save and then move on to availability. So most of us we want to
put this worldwide so you can choose worldwide. If you only want it to be in
specific countries, you can do that. Then how will Amazon customers watch this
video? That's the next option. So you have the option to include it with Amazon
Prime so anyone that has an Amazon Prime membership can watch it, or you can make
it free with pre-roll ads. And this is in the USA and this is great for short-form
titles because no one's gonna want to rent or buy your two-minute YouTube video for
the prices that it costs, unless you have a huge following and you think that
people will actually pay a few bucks for your video, then I wouldn't do this rent or buy
option right now. If you have a longer film or a short film, yeah maybe
this is a good option, but for those of us just taking your YouTube videos and
putting them on Amazon just include them with prime and use this free with pre
roll ad which is similar to how it works on YouTube.
But if you do want to choose rent, you can choose the option whether you want the
base price or value price. They have to tiers, and then same with the buy
price, you have the base in the value. The last option is when should this video be
available. You should click as soon as possible, unless you want to publish it
at a later date. Right now Amazon will do its best to honor the request
that future start date. But for most of us we're just going to publish it as soon
as possible. Then click Save, and once all these things are green this little
publish button up here on the top right
will appear and you can click that. I forgot to mention though once you have
your video assets page all set up and you click save, it will upload your videos
so it will take a few minutes or however long depending on how long your video is.
So after you do that, everything is green. Hit the publish button, and you're good
to go. You can go back to your videos page. For me I've come into a couple of
errors that I'm trying to figure out why a certain video was accepted, why acertain
video was not. It will show you the details if you click to view details.
If it hasn't been accepted. For example this video has an error because it's a
.MOV file but apparently it wasn't ProRes 422 HQ video codec. So I'm gonna have to go
back and re-export my videos with that code. So we're still kind of figuring
out how this is going to work, but hopefully this has helped you. And again
it's amazing how relatively quickly my videos are showing up in the results for
Amazon so get to it. I would honestly spend the next few days or a little bit
of time each day uploading videos to Amazon Video direct. Because if we can be
at the start of this huge movement towards putting videos on Amazon, we
could have a lot of success and ultimately make a lot of money. Amazon tends
do things the right way, and I'm sure that this is going to be huge for video
creators as well. Thanks for watching and if you have any questions let me know
otherwise, we'll
I'll see you in another video.