The Sewing Mom

WOW!  What a day we had yesterday!  My daughter and I took it upon ourselves to figure out how to upload video to YouTube.  This was a huge challenge for us, we are not too tech savvy. 

I have two computers, a desktop that I inherited from my Dad a couple of years ago and my laptop which is about the same age.  I also own a nice Sony HDD Handycam which my daughter has become quite good at using, she is able to quickly upload video from the camera to the desktop computer which is the computer that has the camera software loaded on it.  Unfortunately, the camera software doesn’t allow for much editing and the video files are too large to be uploaded to the internet or email.  So, we had to find a different way.

 I had heard that Windows Movie Maker was a free, easy way to get video to the web.  So, a couple of weeks ago I had made sure that it was installed on the desktop computer.  Yesterday we decided to give it a try.  My daughter uploaded the video we had made to the computer and then we attempted to open Movie Maker.  Bad news, every time we tried to open the program it said there was an error.  I have no idea what the error is and don’t have a clue how to fix it.  Maybe I need to uninstall it and then reinstall it, that might be the easiest.

In the mean time, I discovered that I have Windows Movie Maker on my laptop as well, and, the program would open successfully.  Now, how to get the video onto the laptop.  I plugged the camera directly into a USB port on the laptop and opened Movie Maker.  However, the program kept telling me that it couldn’t download the file because the correct “codec” was missing.  Okay, for someone like me, wth is a codec?

After several hours of different attempts, I finally clicked help on the Movie Maker program and did a search on codec.  I discovered that a specific box needed to be checked in the program file and it would then automatically update for any needed codec.  Okay then, now we’re getting somewhere!  I checked the box and had to reboot my laptop, twice, but finally, amazingly, my video suddenly appeared in Movie Maker!  I about fell off the sofa, I was so excited! 

Okay, now it’s there, what do I do with it?  Well, Movie Maker insisted that I edit in some form, so I added a Title shot and then a credits shot.  Then I clicked upload to the web.  I thought I was doing great, until it said I needed to register with a webhosting site (and YouTube was not one of their choices).  So, I selected on of the two choices given, registered for my free trial, and then uploaded.  YAY!  It worked. So I thought.  Now it was uploaded to a site I’d never heard of and I really wanted it to be on YouTube.  In the mean time, I disconnected the camera from the computer (thinking it was all saved) and went about trying to learn more.

First thing I discovered was that it had not saved the file to my computer, rather it was using my camera’s file.  So, when I disconnected the camera, the video went away.  OMG!  I wanted to scream.  We’re now in the 6th hour of trying to figure this out.  My daughter is feeling sick, she’s coughing and needs to go to bed.  I get her settled in for the night and I return to the demon video files.

After almost another hour, I finally get the file reloaded into Movie Maker and then I notice the option “save to computer”.  I thought maybe I should give this a shot so I did.  It worked!  Now I was able to go directly to YouTube and upload the saved file and within a half hour after that , it went live!  My first ever video on YouTube!  We had succeeded!  Now I need to write down what I did so I will be able to do it again, quicker!

By the way, the video is in my previous post if you want to take a look!