YouTube Tests Higher Bitrate Videos and Audio Dubbing

Don't want to read? Listen to the audio.

Happy February 24th. That’s right - new season of Drive to Survive just dropped.

Now let’s get you looking like a bunch of rockstars with today’s signals.

Joey

📺 Here’s a 3-for-1 roundup of some YouTube updates. They’re experimenting with a higher bitrate display of 1080p videos for Premium subscribers. They’re also testing the option to add alternate language audio tracks on your videos to reach a bigger audience. This is already big business for major YouTubers, who have completely separate channels with their videos dubbed in other languages. And podcasts will officially be supported on YouTube music. This is on top of the other podcasting features we mentioned in the last signal.

🎛️ If you do a lot of live events or streaming, Blackmagic just announced a nice update to their pro-level mixers. It’s the ATEM Television Studio HD8 - basically, a large, pro-level mixer that’s a jumbo version of their popular ATEM Mini devices. Has a built-in encoder for live streaming and a new audio adapter accessory to feed 4 different XLR inputs into a device and run it over long distances via an ethernet cable. And they announced a new version of their TV studio camera, a 6K Studio Camera.

Speculating here, but being that they announced these products without much fanfare and just 2 months before NAB, I’d guess they’re clearing the way for new cinema camera and editing announcements at the conference.

📙 Iconik released their State of MAM (Media Asset Management) report. They’ve seen an 82% year-over-year growth. 67% of the media they manage is stored in the cloud and 33% is stored on-premise.

📒 MailerLite released an industry benchmark report of open and click-thru rates of emails across various industries. Average across everything: 37.65% open rate, 8.93% CTR. Check the full report for each industry and more numbers.

✂️ LumaFusion, the most powerful video editing app (multi-track editing, VFX, green screen, etc) specifically built for the iPad, has now rolled out Android and ChromeOS support so you can use it on more devices.

🧳 ClusterAI: Feed it your raw keyword research outputs, it bunches them together to create a content plan

🗓️ Forekast: Useful for finding out made-up holidays and important cultural days (like that Drive to Survive is coming out today) to stay ahead of trends when making content.

✍️ Otter.ai: Transcription tool designed for meetings, it has a really large monthly quota so I’ve found it to be extremely economical when transcribing large batches of files.

3 Ways That Writing For Video is Different than Writing for Print (or web)

I’m a big fan of repurposing content, especially converting blogs to videos.

But writing style-wise, there are a few things to keep in mind.

1️⃣ Keep it conversational (and human).

We speak differently than we write. Shorter sentences, more casual, less formal.

One hack I do sometimes is speak out what I’m trying to explain from the blog post and record it in Otter (mentioned above). Otter transcribes my speech, I then use that as a rough draft to edit into the script.

2️⃣ Condense the info. 

We average speaking at 125 WPM. If you read out a 2000 word blog post, that’d be 16 minutes. So keep things shorter or split a post up into multiple videos or a series.

3️⃣ Think visually. 

Blog posts are predominantly text (duh) with a few visuals sprinkled in. Flip that for video - what else can you show on screen so it’s not just a talking head? This past signal also goes into pattern interrupts to keep attention.

8 iPhone Tools for Video Production

I just reviewed 8 iPhone tools I’ve been using to record videos. Find out which are worth the purchase and which you should avoid.

Reply with your thoughts and questions.

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