HOW TO MAKE A GOOD WHALETANK/BITSHARES INTRO/OUTRO?
There were a lot of people on officialfuzzy's posts that didn't understand what they should do and how should they do it. Also some people are not joining these contests because of their english. Don't be ashamed of your voice. New experience is new experience and skills like this are always worth a lot in life.
This is my fourth edit and fourth narration I have ever done. There are things that can be improved almost instantly in your edit, but there are also things that are not possible to improve very quickly - like your english. For some people this is the stumbling-block. However experiences that you earn are more than being ashamed about your english or voice. And I also think that there is no rule that you have to make the intro/outro in english. Maybe you can try it in your native language too! :)
About what contests I am talking about? Those are contests from officialfuzzy, founder of WhaleShares.
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@officialfuzzy/beyondbit-bounties-give-beyondbitcoin-whaletank-hangout-216-crowdsourced-intro-outro-contest-rewards-worth-600-sbd
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@officialfuzzy/beyondbit-bounties-bitshares-open-source-hangout-31-needs-crowdsourced-intro-outro-rewards-worth-600sbd
Have you never heard of WhaleShares community?
Check our discord!
https://discord.gg/zsdWYQX
These contests are about making your own and unique intro and outro for BeyondBitcoin and also WhaleTank hangouts. You can listen to them on soundcloud and on youtube. You can also find them on my blog. They are pretty good and also by participating in them, you can earn some tokens with a real value!
WHAT'S THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD DO?
It's not being scared of it! If you don't know some words that you have to read, you can put them in google translate and listen to the pronunciation. What is also a good tip from me is to write the text down somewhere so you don't forget what you have to say. Everything can be edited later in the audio software, but the most important thing is your own voice and your own narration.
WHAT'S THE SECOND THING YOU SHOULD DO?
You need some program that will record your voice. There is one that is like the best one ever. It's also free and it's called Audacity. Nothing can beat it. And it is not hard to use!
You can find the program here - http://www.audacityteam.org
What I like about this program is that even if you don't have professional microphone or whole studio for it, your voice from microphone just sounds and feel better than if you would use something like teamspeak for recording or any other free software.
When you have Audacity installed and you open it, you will see a GUI that you have never seen and that could maybe scare you, but you will not use almost 90% of these buttons and settings to be able to participate in the contest. However there is a lot of things you can do with Audacity. It's good to try it for yourself. :)
When you are ready you can click the red button and start recording. Maybe the sound will be too quiet. You can increase the volume in the audio track setting seen in the picture.
Will you be able to read only one sentence per recording? It's fine, because you can put it together later or do it like this with the button I highlighted for you.
If there are too big spaces between your recordings, you can just delete the empty space by the button I highlighted. You just choose what you want to delete and you press delete.
If you need to make some parts silent, because there is sounds you don't want to have in the recording, you can do it like I did it in the picture. Choose what you want to silent and then generate the silence.
WHAT'S THE THIRD THING YOU SHOULD DO?
Find a good music for your narration. If something can do a big thing with your recording - it's the music. There is a couple of youtube channels and also youtube's audio library that can help you with that.
Search some of the music. What are you looking for is music with creative commons licence or royalty free music. Listen to it and download it if you like it. Does it sound good? Isn't it little bit too fast for your narration? Or is the music too sad? Everything needs to be in synergy. However the music should be in the background. What I mean by that is that it shouldn't be louder than your voice. You can make it quiet as we make your voice louder previously.
When you donwload the music you can drag and drop it into audacity and work with it. You should do the same thing with the hangout itself.
These channels are just few of many, where you can get some nice music.
WHAT'S THE FOURTH THING YOU SHOULD DO?
Use everything you got and improve! Use fade-ins and fade-outs to make the music work with your narration. Silent the parts that you don't want in your narration. Make some parts faster and some slower. There so much thing you can do in the "effect" settings on Audacity! Try to play with it to see what all the effects do.
You need to export your file to .ogg or .mp3 file. For maximum quality you should use 320kbps.
The latest hangouts contests should be uploaded to youtube, not soundcloud. That means you have to somehow make a video out of your .ogg or mp3 audio file. If you have video editing software, make a Full HD video and have at least 320kbps audio.
If you don't have video editing software, there is possibility to use websites online. Check this video for more information.
If you use this website you will have to downsample the final audito to about 119kbps for you to get it down to the 50MB file size limit you have. Thanks steempowerpics54 for the information!
And I think that is it! If you guys have any more questions - don't forget to ask me. Hopefully there will be much more great intros/outros from you guys. The prizes are BeyondBit tokens and they are worth a lot!
Thank you!
My previous post:
https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@eirik/welcome-to-the-whaletank-edited-by-eirik
https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@eirik/my-whaletank-hangout-intro-outro
Or you can use ffmpeg and then filesize doesn't matter!
ffmpeg -loop 1 -r 2 -i image.jpg -i input.mp3 -vf scale=-1:380 -c:v libx264 -preset slow -tune stillimage -crf 18 -c:a copy -shortest -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 output.mkvhttp://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-ways-add-audio-podcast-youtube/
nice! :P
You can upload it straight to YouTube, it takes the audio and image and makes a video by looping the image.
You see that it doesn't alter the audio by
-c:a copyThe input can be any audio format,input.mp3is just an example.Hey Eirik, That was really good of you to create a tutorial to help people make the intro/outros. I was thinking about this the other day, so this is perfect.
-Maybe in that last section where you show the TunetoTubes video, let them know if they use that website they will have to downsample the final audio to about 119kbps to get it down to the 50MB file size limit they have.
Oh that is just horrible quality. :o But very easy way how to convert it to the video.
Yep, but he's not mastering this to a CD, so it's ok for the purpose of posting online. :-) But, that is why I am still posting a higher quality to soundcloud for fuzzy to grab if he likes it along with my youtube versions.
Upvoted. I'll be resteeming this now :)
Thank you puffy! :)