‘Serial Navigation’ in YouTube

As many will be interested in the process and technique  I used to build my YouTube Resume with Navigation, I am creating a static page here to detail some of the challenges I overcame and a little bit of insight into the technique used. The nice thing about creating a YouTube video with “serial navigation” is, if your cusotmer just want’s to view the while thing from start to finish like a regular YouTube video, they can just let it play without using navigation buttons. If you want to create a site like Boone Oakely‘s (awsome … check it out if you have not already. It is amazing and fun!), their site structure is using a Tree Structure for navigation.

UPDATE: YouTube linked annotations use Flash so they do not work on an iPAD or iPhone. Maybe someday either Apple will support Flash or YouTube will change their linked navigation to be HTML 5 driven.

For those wanting to do a video resume with no experience with video editing, this is quite advanced and I’d highly recommend you look into video editing training for your chosen editing software (I like Lynda.com training). I have Camtasia and the PiP feature was pretty easy for me to figure out using the help, but I’d had previous video editing training on Adobe Premiere so editing concepts were already familiar.

I spent about 60 hours solving problems like this:

• Video lighting was bad (bouncing a halogen light off ceiling helped)
• Too much camera noise when recording (bought a corded lapel mic to plug into camera)
• Mono sound is in left channel only after using mono lapel mic (post production on sound file once Picture in Picture video was complete … using audio production tools I had)
• Practicing and trying Video takes without a teleprompter was taking way too many tries and too much video editing
• Found free teleprompter software (Prompt!)
• Had to figure out how to set up laptop with teleprompter so it looked like I was looking into the camera (harder than it sounds … there are some tips online … and still it took some trial and error. You’d laugh if you saw my final setup with laptop set up on my conga drum w/stand directly behind the camera … but it was what I had on hand that was just the right height)
• Figuring out all dimensions for YouTube and PiP before starting design or video editing
• Testing if VP6 format (.flv file) worked well for uploading video to YouTube (it does).
• Had to figure out Picture in Picture (PiP) video editing feature in Camtasia
• Making slides in PPT for PiP transitions (not hard)
• Making Photoshop file with all the buttons and layers (not hard for me … but still it took some time. Someone could do a much simpler version in Powerpoint.)
• Solving many YouTube problems mostly by trial and error (I tried about 5 variations on a YouTube annotation linking strategy before I found one that worked with “serial navigation”). I spent a couple days on solving these problems.
• Lots of testing. I think I’d logged almost 70 YouTube plays myself testing and tweaking navigation link points before I ever made it public (each button click increases the play count on one of the videos by 1)
• Making a list of all cue points in the videos (note … there is actually more than one video) helped reduce YouTube annotation editing.
• I decided to create the microsite as a blog so someone might actually download my resume if they were interested in making an interview appointment. You can’t build a link in the YouTube video to download a PDF resume. You can only link from one YouTube to another YouTube

Having gone through all this, if I were to start another from scratch, it would probably take me about 8-12  hours. Keep in mind though, that I’ve had hundreds of hours in training and experience using many graphics, video and sound editing programs. Another simpler approach to doing a video resume is to create a blog-based microsite resume with short video clips. You could use free blog sites like WordPress.com, Blogger.com, or Typepad.com.  In WordPress.com, once you have one site done you can “clone it”. For example, I created a unique video resume blog site for one specific job I was targeting and only sent the link info to the hiring company.  Check my blog  page (later … follow me on twitter), I’ll do a separate post on this topic.

If you have experience with video editing and want to know the annotation trick:

The main trick to doing a YouTube video with serial navigation is to actually produce 2 videos that look the same (but one has to be slightly different, YouTube won’t let you upload the same video twice). For serial navigation, when adding linked annotations to your 2 YouTube videos, think of it as an A B video edit. Annotations in Video A link to Video B cue points. Annotations in Video B link to Video A cue points. Another thing about annotation linking is that the ‘link to” spot in Youtube is not exact if you are trying to link to a specific minute and/or second. If you place the finished YouTube on your web page, don’t make it embedded. Make it “look embedded” but actually have it be a picture that links to your video. Why? You want to launch as stand alone YouTube in a new window. If you ran it as embedded in your web page or blog, the 1st use of a  navigation button would launch the second video and you’d have 2 videos running at the same time at different points in the video.

If you use this last tip and make a lot of money doing YouTube video production for pay, a paypal donation to peter.huboi (@)  gmail.com would be appreciated. After all , I just probably saved you 10 hours of trial and error on the YouTube annotation editing that I went through to create a YouTube video with serial Navigation.

If you a have existing videos that you have used in Flash and want me to quote you on what would it cost for me to transform them into “YouTube only format with serial navigation”, you can also contact me at peter.huboi (@)  gmail.com. Or if you had some “Tree structure” type YouTube sites in mind, I have some friends that are award winning graphics designers and web page designers I can work with.

Copyright 2009 Peter Huboi