Are You Intimidated By The Techie Side of Publishing Video?

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Are intimidation and technical fears keeping your home videos stuck on your point and shoot or handycam?

Well now you have extra motivation.

There are CONTESTS to be WON!!! Ladies, seriously… you need to pick up your camera and start shooting.

Not only will you have the fun of sharing your life in action with friends and family over YouTube and other video sharing sites, you’ll be able to enter fabulous contests such as the SanDisk Point and Shoot video contest and our own spin-off video contest.

The submission deadline for our contest is Friday, October 17th and we’ll have 20 winners. 10 of those will be randomly drawn, so even if your video is truly awful, you could still win. LOL

There is also another fantastic contest from Dial Complete that Janice just wrote about the other day.

Video contests have so many fewer entries than photo, essay or comment contests, that your chance of winning these incredibly exciting contests is VERY high. With such odds, it really is worth grabbing your camera and your kids and making some quick videos.

If you are intimidated or just too busy — we understand!

Janice and I have let our home videos rot on our camcorders and hard drives, never being seen by anyone. We’re too busy to upload any fun baby footage or anything.

But then SanDisk asked us to tell you all about their YouTube video contest. Even though we weren’t able to enter the contest, Janice and I wanted to put up a little video of our own to get you all in the YouTube mood.

We had to put up a quick video that had no editing and was shot on a point and shoot. So we did it. And it was easy. Sure, the video wasn’t anything spectacular, but it helped us move past the fear that we had to learn everything before we did anything.

Here’s all we did:

1. Record the kids on a Sony Cybershot.
2. Import the video files from the camera to Windows Movie Maker.
3. Use the split button to trim the video.
4. Publish the video to a .wmv file.
5. Upload the .wmv to YouTube.
6. Embed the video code here in a post.

The funny thing is some of those words sound intimidating: import, publish, upload, embed. Those sound like complicated steps, but each really is just a mouse click.

Windows Movie Maker is free software you’ll find on any PC.
I am NO EXPERT at all… obviously… but I just opened the program and did the following steps and it seemed to work well enough.

1. Use the “Import Media” tool.
2. Watch your video to figure out if you want to cut it down.
3. Click on the split button if you want to trim the beginning or end from your video clip.
4. Drag the image of your clip to the Storyboard.
5. Click “Publish Movie”
6. On the “Choose the settings for your movie”, select “More Settings” and then from the drop down list select “Windows Media Portable Device 1.0 Mbps”
7. Press “Publish”

It worked for me. Here’s the little video we uploaded to YouTube.

So, quick, grab your point and shoot, get your kids to do something funny and go win $10,000!!!

Or at least win a SanDisk Ultra® II 4GB2 SDHC™ card from us.

For Dial’s Clean Hands Campaign, Jackson and I shot the video below.

Jackson totally cracks me up, so I just had to share it with you here again. Not only did we have so much fun making the video, but it encouraged Jackson to see himself as a hand washing “expert,” which translates into better everyday hand washing.

Ladies — if you want to win some SERIOUS cash, enter BOTH of these contests!

With SanDisk you can win THOUSANDS of dollars with their Point and Shoot You Tube contest and win a SanDisk Ultra® II 4GB2 SDHC™ card from us.

And with Dial, you can win a thousand dollars and a trip to Washington DC.

Okay – now – go grab your camera, (for the SanDisk contest, your video must be shot on a point and shoot camera,) grab your kids and have some video fun. THEN, upload and enter. You REALLY might win!!!