Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am feeling somewhat adventurous and I am ready to plunge into what for me are untested
waters.
Today, we are going to take a look at posting videos to Instagram on DottoTech.
I turn to one person for all of my Instagram inspiration.
Sue Zimmerman is a friend of mine and she is kind of the queen of Instagram.
She’s always bugging me, telling me, “Steve, you have to get more involved in Instagram”
and she’s right.
Instagram is a very nice social network.
I like a lot of what happens on Instagram but I’m a video guy.
I live in a video world.
Now Instagram has added the ability to be able to post videos to Instagram.
Now you are limited in a variety of ways.
Most importantly on Instagram, you are limited by aspect ratio.
It has to be square.
It has to be 400 by 400 pixels or 800 by 800 pixels and video is of course not typically
shot in a square format.
So that is one issue that we have.
The second issue is there’s no obvious way to edit and create videos in a traditional
metaphor and then import them into Instagram.
Instagram allows you to create instant videos on your smartphone and upload them right away
to Instagram and they limit them to 15 seconds.
So Instagram kind of is looking for instant video, the ability to create something on
the fly and just send it up.
But to be honest, that really limits what you can do with a video because you don’t
have a chance to edit ita.
You don’t have chance to compose it.
You don’t have a chance to do anything, fixing it up-wise at all.
So I thought wouldn’t it be cool if I could create some screencasts, if I could use this
technique that we use here to create these videos and post those to Instagram?
Then suddenly Instagram becomes a distribution and marketing medium to allow us to promote
more things and to be able to engage with that community in a slightly different way.
Challenge accepted, said Steve, and I decided to try and create videos on my computer and
then upload them to Instagram.
I came up with a style.
It’s a bit of cludge [phonetic 00:02:13] to be perfectly honest but it works.
So here is the process.
I have recorded a little promo video for Instagram.
Actually, it’s about this video so it’s going to be the promotion for this particular
video that I’m doing right now but I’ve already recorded that in Screenflow, using
the screen capture tool or the screen recording tool and screen casting tool that I like to
use.
So let’s jump into that and let me show you how we create and prepare the video so
that it will appear in Instagram.
The number one challenge for us right out of the gate is we need to reformat our video
output to square format because Instagram is all about symmetry, 2 inches by 2 inches,
3 inches by 3 inches or 200 pixels by 200 pixels.
Everything has to be square in Instagram and as you see this video here is anything but
square.
So what I’m going to do is in ScreenFlow, I actually have the ability here, which is
a very cool feature in ScreenFlow to resize not just the video but the entire canvas.
So I’m going to make the entire canvas which means the entire area that I’m working with
800 by 800 pixels.
When I apply that, it creates this square format that we see here.
So this white area is going to be my video output area.
Now I’m going to quickly adjust my video output here and I’m just going to go through
and I’m going to edit it to help it.
Now you can add graphics and things like that.
I’m just going to scale my video up a little bit here.
I’m going to add a little bit of a green screen effect so that I can lose the background
and make it a nice, clean white background.
But basically anything that I could create in my normal flow of creating a screencast,
I can do in this format here, the one caveat being that of course we’ve got a very small
screen.
So if we’re going to be showing anything going on in the computer screen, menus or
that kind of demo, we don’t have much real estate to do it with, A), and the second issue
we have here is we don’t have much time.
We’ve only got 15 seconds.
Now this video as it sits right now is just under 14 seconds so I’m going to trim down
the video and I’m going to show it to you.
Now I’m not going to go through it.
What I will do is I’ll actually add a little bit of text and other things to this video
and maybe a graphic or two to make it work better.
But let’s just have a quick boo at the video itself that we’re going to be posting, the
raw form.
“Did you know that you could record a video on your desktop or notebook computer and post
it to Instagram?
And it’s not really all that hard.
Indeed, it’s true.
I will show you how.
There’s a link in my bio.”
Okay, so that’s the video.
Before I actually post this, I will go through and I will make some changes to it.
I will add a little bit of text and that sort of stuff but right now, let’s say that I’ve
done that.
So now what I want to do is I want to export that just to my desktop.
I just want to export it in full video format, 800 by 800 because Instagram will scale it
but it won’t change the aspect ratio.
So we want it a square and I’ll just call it the Instagram Post Promo and I’m just
going to export it now.
Now what happens is ScreenFlow, my software, is exporting this as a video.
Remember how I said this was a little bit of a cludge?
What I have to do now is I have to email this video to myself in order to get the video
into my smartphone.
Now from what I understand, if you’re doing an android version of this, if you’re using
an android phone, you can directly connect Instagram to your Dropbox account and to some
of the other cloud-sharing accounts.
On iOS, which I have here, I have an iPhone 6+, you don’t have the ability here to be
able to access resources from Instagram that are in Dropbox or any other of the cloud services.
You could only access the library of photos that are on the iPhone or create new graphics
on the iPhone itself.
So I’m not going to be able to use Dropbox in this particular case.
What I did in order to create my first demo of this is I emailed it to myself and then
I just saved that video into my photo library.
Actually, here is the first video that I did to test this whole process out.
There it is.
There’s the video right there.
Actually, I loaded it in twice.
So what we do is we go into Instagram and just like anything, you create a brand new
post.
You go and you start and you create a new post.
Then you select your library and you select a video from your library.
Then you go through and you follow through and you just basically complete the steps
of the post.
When that’s all said and done, let’s just go into it.
Let’s just go back into my Instagram account here.
When that’s all said and done, you should be able to check out your feed and see a video
that plays back in Instagram.
As I said, it’s a little bit of a cludge.
It’s not necessarily the easiest process to do but it works.
Once again the steps: record the video on your desktop, concert the video into a square
format, export the video to your computer, email the video to yourself, save the video
into your own library on your smartphone, open Instagram, create a post, resource the
video that you’ve just saved from the email and post that.
Then you have packaged, produced video playing on Instagram.
Of course, you’re still limited to 15 seconds but it’s going to way better than any video
that you’re going to shoot by hand yourself because you have the ability to edit it.
I hope this was clear.
I hope you understand it and I hope if you’re an Instagram fan that we’ve opened your
eyes to some new ways of doing things in Instagram.
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I can tell that 100%.
That’s all the time I have for today.
Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!