- In this video,
I'll show you how to make a professional
animated video intro for YouTube
like these ones,
fast and easy.
(soft music)
Hi, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you grow an audience and scale your revenue
with online video.
If you're seeing value in this video,
make sure you're giving it a thumbs up.
It really makes a huge difference.
And all the links to everything I mention in this video,
you can find the link in the description box below.
Let's jump into it.
Animated video intros are an easy way to boost
the professionalism and branding
across all of your online content.
Now while they might look hard to do,
they're actually quite easy with some of the latest tools.
So I'm gonna take you through the process
that we recommend to do it right now, end to end.
And once we're done,
I'm also gonna share with you the number one tip
that you need to know when using any video animation,
to make sure that you don't kill your video engagement
or watch time.
So there's actually lots of different ways
that you could approach this.
You could go out and learn software like Adobe After Effects
or Apple Motion, which are full-on motion graphics
and compositing software.
The learning is not going to be quick.
It's going to be complicated.
It's going to take a lot of time,
but you could end up with something
that you build out from scratch
that is totally custom and unique.
But realistically,
unless you wanna spend all those hours
mastering that software,
that time is probably better spent elsewhere.
And that's why the two methods
that I'm gonna take you through
in this video are gonna get you pretty much
the same result with far less time invested.
So option number one is to use a service called Placeit.
Now Placeit is so much more than just animated video intros.
You can do design, mockups, logos.
You can even create your YouTube thumbnails
and end cards and banners and everything in here as well.
But what I really like about Placeit
is how easy it makes the whole process.
You can literally do everything on their website.
You can select an amazing looking template
from their massive library,
and you can customize everything up
to match your brand,
your font and your image
all from their website
with no additional software required.
So let's go at the top here to videos,
and down here to intros.
You can see there's lots of other options in here as well.
And you can see if we just put our mouse cursor over these,
they'll start to play and show you what these templates are.
And again, all of these are fully customizable
on their website here.
So some of these will work
with video files in the background.
Others would just be photos or graphics,
but probably the hardest thing about this entire process
is trying to pick just one video template.
So for this tutorial here,
I'm gonna go ahead and select this one here.
So you can see at this point,
we're in here where we can customize everything up.
We haven't even had to create an account
or a login or anything yet.
So even if you just wanna experiment and play around,
I love Placeit for that.
All right, so let's come over here
and let's edit up this text.
Now in this case here,
it is giving us 20 characters.
Let's go make awesome videos.
You can see it's generating a preview here for us
with our new text.
We can customize up the font and everything in here as well.
Let's go through and pick a bold one like this.
Now we can customize up the actual logo animation
in here as well.
So it's giving you a little preview
of there's like a spiral animation.
We can choose which one of these we wanna have
for our logo to come on screen.
Let's go with this top one here.
And it's gonna give you a static image preview here
of the change that you just made.
So if we hit the X on this to close out of that preview,
we just come down here instead to update slide,
that's gonna generate a full video preview
for us to play back.
So we can see now it says, make awesome videos.
And it's got the logo animation that we picked.
Now, we haven't actually gone ahead
and uploaded our logo yet.
So we can come over here and hit upload image.
We're gonna go ahead and pick our Primal Video logo.
We can crop it down in here if we need to.
Let's go something like this, press crop.
And we get our a little preview image here
so we can see what that looks like.
If we close that preview and just hit update slide here,
let's take a look at what that looks like
with our logo in there.
All right, so that looks pretty good.
You can see how fast this is
to get something that looks pretty amazing.
And we've really done next to no customization here.
Now over on this side here,
we can change our background color.
We can use some of their background images
that are already in here,
or again, we can upload our own video or image
to be used as the background.
And you also have the ability up here
to turn on or off the included music track,
or you can hit edit
and select from one of the other tracks
that they have in there.
So I wanna leave that off here for now,
but the other thing that I wanna point out is over here,
you can choose playback speed.
You can see currently our template here.
Our video goes for 10 seconds.
You can actually slow that down by half,
or you can actually increase it to 1.5 speed.
So if you want it to play back faster
and take up less time,
then you have that ability here as well.
Now, once you've done customizing everything up,
you can come up here and you can save your draft.
You can save it as a favorite.
You will need to create an account to log in,
to be able to save it.
And there's a download your video intro.
It says that you need to play all of your slides
before downloading.
So to play them,
you need to come down the bottom here,
hit play.
So then it's gonna go through,
it's gonna process your video.
Now this really doesn't take too long.
It says here it may take a quick minute or two.
In my experience, it's pretty fast.
Definitely much much faster
than creating something from scratch.
And you can see that our video preview here now
is down to six seconds
'cause we're playing it back at 1.5 speed.
If we hit replay here, we can play this through.
See what it's going to look like
and we have a button here to download.
Now, there is a watermark on this video here.
It says, made with Placeit.
So you can download it for free with the watermark.
So it's not gonna cost you anything.
But if you go ahead and press this download button here,
this is where you get your options.
So if you just wanna download that free version
with the watermark, which I wouldn't recommend,
it doesn't look great.
But the button to do that is down the bottom here,
get the free watermark low res video
or to remove that watermark
and purchase the high quality version
of your new video intro
you can just buy it outright for $9.95 U.S.
Which is incredibly cheap
considering what this looks like
and how much time you've just saved.
Or there is also an unlimited subscription option
giving you access to all of their templates to use
as many as you would like
and access to all the other mockups, design,
video and logo templates in there as well,
starting at 14.95 per month,
or there's an annual option for 89.69 per year.
So again, I think this is an amazing service.
And even if you're just buying the one template
for $9.95 that matches your brand
has your logo and everything in it,
it's amazing how fast you can create
and customize up one of these templates using Placeit.
Now, as you just saw with Placeit in this template,
there is a fair bit that you can customize up,
but you can't adjust everything.
So this is a great, simple,
fast way to create a custom intro.
If you're someone who wants more customization
and more control,
but still doesn't wanna start again from scratch,
then that's where our option number two comes in.
So option number two then is VideoHive.
Now VideoHive and Placeit are actually both owned
by the same company, Envato.
Now the biggest difference here
with VideoHive versus Placeit is that
VideoHive has so many more templates.
So it's got lots of general motion graphics templates
and things that will work
in pretty much any video editing software
or where it gets really powerful
is it's actually got specific templates
for video editing software like DaVinci Resolve,
Apple Motion, Adobe Premiere,
and Adobe After Effects.
So VideoHive doesn't have the capability
for you to customize and edit these live on their website
that's where it takes you over to Placeit to do that.
But here in VideoHive,
you're able to purchase templates
that you can take into your editing software
or into Apple Motion or After Effects
to be able to customize these up in there.
So let's come up here to DaVinci Resolve.
Let's come down to openers.
Now, DaVinci Resolve,
if you're not aware is an amazing
free video editing application
that works on both Mac and PC.
So if you don't have After Effects, Premier, Apple Motion,
any of the paid stuff, you could actually come in here,
purchase your template, put it into DaVinci Resolve,
which is free and customize it up the way that you'd like.
So again, you have a lot of different options in here
for amazing looking templates.
You've got a lot more in here than you do in Placeit.
I'm looking at the prices.
You can see we've got $16, $17, 20, 22.
So none of these are ridiculously expensive either.
All right, so I'm just gonna go ahead
and pick this one here.
I'm going to go ahead and purchase it,
download it to my computer.
Now these normally download as a zip file.
So once it's saved on your computer, you want to unzip it.
So that's it here now.
When you open this up is gonna look a little different
depending on which template you've purchased.
But usually you'll have
the actual template files themselves,
which are these two here.
And in this case, we've also got a help file as well.
So you normally get some sort of instructions
whether it's text or whether it's a video
like we've got here,
taking us through how to install
and how to use that specific template.
Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead now and open up DaVinci Resolve.
And when you get to this project window here,
you wanna right click on it
and choose restore project archive
and navigate through
to where you've got your template file
and select the folder and go open.
And we can see we've got our template here now.
So we double click on this to open up that project.
So you wanna make sure you're over on the edit tab
and then when you come up to the top left here,
we can see how they've broken this project down.
As you already you can see in here
we have a folder called Edit.
We have another one Other and one Final.
So if we go into the edit area here,
this is where we can edit the text and edit the images.
So we gonna go through first in adding our videos
or our images into this template.
So we're gonna go to image one,
just double click on that to open that up.
I'm just gonna navigate through on my computer
to find some images that I have saved here.
Let's pick this one here
and let's drag that down onto that timeline.
So we've got one image in.
Let's go and add another one here under image two.
And again, you're not just limited to images.
You could add videos in here as well.
Let's add this one here
and drag that down into our timeline.
So once all of those are in,
we wanna come over here and add in our logo
in this one as well.
So again, I'll navigate through on our computer
to find where that logo is,
drag that down into the timeline.
And now if we go back over here to the folder Final,
then here we've got our primary timeline.
So we open this up here.
In our case here it's called Render.
It might also be called Final,
but it's the one master timeline
with all of this stuff in it.
So if we scrubbed through this,
now you can start to get an idea of what it looks like.
It's got text in there.
It's moving those photos around.
It's transitioning between the different photos,
all of this really quick to get to this point.
Now, in terms of editing the text,
we can come back over here to text
and we have text boxes here
for each of those texts elements.
So if we wanna customize up text one,
and this is the one to go over this first scene,
we could double click on this,
double click on the text layer here
to make sure it's selected.
Then over here on the side,
we can type in whatever we'd like.
Let's go Primal Video.
We could even change the font.
Let's go with Oswald Stencil.
Let's even maybe change the color
to be our Primal Video blue.
Now let's edit up text number two
and we can go create videos.
Again, we could customize all of this up.
Text three and say make an impact.
And let's just go back to that primary one.
Now, if we go to Final, open up Render,
I'm not gonna go through and customize all of this up,
but you get the idea.
We've now got Primal Video written there,
create videos,
make an impact
and then the rest of our template here as well.
And then with our logo here shown on this final scene.
So all of this, now we can either copy and paste
if we're gonna be editing in DaVinci Resolve
into our editing project.
Obviously after we've customized it up,
however we'd like it,
or we could just export this video file as it is
and use it in any video editing software.
Now, if you do wanna learn DaVinci Resolve,
we have a complete beginners tutorial.
I will link that up in the cards
and below in the description.
But really quickly to save this out,
we just come down here to deliver.
Then we go YouTube.
1920x1080.
I'm gonna go add to render queue.
I'm gonna hit render all.
That's gonna go ahead and save out our video.
And this is what it looks like.
So this second method with VideoHive
and using software like DaVinci Resolve is definitely
a lot more advanced,
but you can see how much more control
and customizability you have in here.
But for me personally,
I just love the simplicity of Placeit.
Unless I'm really needing to dive in
and customize everything up.
Placeit is going to be more than enough.
But depending on what you're after
both of these are solid options.
Now, earlier in this video,
I said I'd also share with you,
my number one tip to not kill your video engagement
and watch time
if you're going to be using an intro video.
And that tip is to not put your shiny new intro
at the very start of your video.
Your goal with YouTube,
or really with any video content
is to hook your viewer in first.
To let them know that they're in the right place,
let them know what the content is going to be about.
That is so much more important
than your fancy new intro.
So just for an example,
if we rewind this video back to the start,
this is what I said,
in this video, I'll show you how to make
a professional animated video intro for YouTube
like these ones fast and easy.
I gave a really quick teaser to what the video is about
before I introduced any text title, animations, or graphics.
This way I'm able to let people know what the video content
is about and why they should stick around
instead of them just clicking on the video
and then seeing some fancy animation.
People's attention spans are short,
and they want you to get to the point quick.
So lead with your hook and then use your fancy new intro.
This is gonna stop you potentially driving people away
before they've got to the content of your video.
So now that you've got your video intro sorted,
if you're wondering the best places
to get royalty free stock music for your videos
or for your live streams,
then check out the video linked on screen
for our top recommendations.
I'll see you in the next video.