Tips for Making Fun Vine Videos

OK, I admit, I’m sold on this Vine nonsense. Being a video dork, I like to experiment with new video apps to see how they might be useful or make my life more interesting. Vine delivers on that. For the uninitiated, Vine is an iOS app that enables you to record 6 second looping videos with your iPhone. Sounds stupid, I know, but read on.

Stop Motion

This my favorite thing about Vine. You can easily hammer out a stop motion video by simply tapping the screen during the record process. Just a quick tap to capture a single frame a time. Combine this with a tripod and you’ll a master animator in no time. Ian Padgham has created some great examples.

 

Fade-in Trick

This is a simple, yet effective trick to fade into a scene from blank white. When you’re ready to record, put your hand over the lens for a few seconds then take it away and start recording at the same time. Your iPhone will auto adjust its iris to accommodate for the current amount of light which has just changed from not much to a lot. This results in a fade from white to your scene.

 

Looping

All Vines are loops, keep that in mind when coming up with ideas. Try ending a sequence so your last frame or clip makes a logical connection to the start of your sequence.

Audio

You’re always recording audio. Take advantage of capturing snippets of sound in the same way you are capturing snippets of video. Combine the two for extra epicness!

Hastags

Hashtags are a great way for people to discover your stuff, especially if you use ones listed on the Explore page, but do keep them relevant. No one wants to see your cat drop a load in her litter box when they click #travel. Try to limit yourself to three. No one likes a hashtag whore.

Upload elsewhere

Vine saves your movies as Quicktime .mov files in your camera roll. You can upload those directly to other places like YouTube, Facebook, Path or Socialcam. Yes, the videos will only play out once, but sometimes that’s good enough. Experiment. Better yet, string them all together into one video, like this from my last 2 weeks of using Vine.

If you like what you see, feel free to add me on Vine or find me on Twitter.

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Video Discovery Now More Fun

I’ve had the pleasure of beta testing a couple new video services that launched this week. Both make Internet video discovery, viewing, collecting and sharing a lot more fun.

Showyou: Watch videos from your friends

Today, Showyou hits the app store for iPhone and iPad. Showyou is an app that helps you discover videos that your friends and followers on social networks are sharing. That in itself isn’t anything new, the magic is the user experience. On an iPad, you can easily just kick back and glide across a matrix of nothing but videos from your social networks, currently Twitter, Facebook and Vodpod. When you’ve watched a video you like, you can share it with other Showyou users or comment on it within Showyou or on Twitter and Facebook where you may have first found it. There’s also a send “thanks” button, which is sort of similar to “liking” a video by notifying the originator that they’re awesome.

The creators of Showyou is Remixation, the same fine people behind Vodpod, the video collection & sharing service that up until now, was all web and widget based (see mine to the right of this post). One other really cool thing about Showyou is that if you have an Apple TV, you can send the videos that you find straight to your TV over AirPlay. This essentially turns your iPhone/iPad into a very pleasing remote control (who the hell needs 90 buttons anyway?)

On Monday, VHX launched their public beta. VHX is also a video discovery, viewing, collecting and sharing service but fundamentally different in a few ways from Showyou. VHX is all about the lean-back uninterrupted experience in your web browser (for now). As soon as you log into VHX, a video starts playing. So does the next one and the next one and so on. VHX creates a full-screen, TV like experience in your browser from videos shared by you and your friends. You can add videos to your VHX queue with bookmarklets. You see something you like while trolling the net, simply share it or save it for later viewing. Right now, only YouTube and Vimeo videos are supported, but expect that to change as VHX evolves through their beta. VHX comes from the creative minds of Jamie Wilkinson, formerly of Know Your Meme and Rocketboom and Casey Pugh, formerly of Vimeo and Boxee.