Hey, it's Mike here from musicradiocreative.com. In this video, we're gonna talk about creating YouTube intros and, as this is more of a visual topic including a few audio segments here and there, I wanted to bring in a special guest for you. His name is Nick Nimmin, he has an awesome channel, which you can check out, but right now, I'm gonna hand over this video to Nick so you can learn more about creating YouTube intros.
Nick, over to you.
Thanks for that intro, Mike. I have learned so much from you. It is an honor to be here on your channel. Thank you.
Now, when it comes to making intros, the very first thing that I want to mention is, you want to keep your intro to 3 to 5 seconds long. And the reason for that is, a lot of people, when they make intros for YouTube, will make them 5 to 10 seconds long, sometimes up to 20 seconds. And that can really hurt your channel. It might look cool, but that's not what your audience is there for. It can have a very negative impact on your overall audience retention, so remember to keep it to 3 to 5 seconds, whatever choice you end up making out of what we're gonna go through today.
Now, there's a few different types of intros: we have the graphic intro that we all know and love; the show intro where you have different segments of a bunch of different types of content that you do on your channel as all this stuff is flipping through all over the place; a real-life intro where you can get creative with your camera and music – and that's really easy and effective; and, of course, the verbal intro which is basically where you're telling people what your channel is about while something pops up on the screen.
So, let's say that you want a graphic intro but you're not an animator. What do you do in that case? You have three choices if you want to have something cool: #1 is to go through the process of learning how to make an intro from scratch, which nobody really wants to do that, especially if you're in a hurry to get your video up, #2 you can pay somebody else to do it, and if you're doing it from scratch that can end up getting pretty expensive, or #3 which is the winning idea, you can grab some templates, make a few adjustments, and then – bam! you've got an awesome intro.
Some amazing places that you can grab templates are:
- Renderforest has a lot of really cool options for you but, on the site, when you first land on it, they kind of sell it for free, but in reality, that free version is only gonna get you a 360p version instead of a full HD version. If you want full HD, you're gonna have to pay for it. But if they have something that you like, and you're, like, hey, yeah, this perfectly matches with what it is that I'm after, then you might want to go ahead and pay that fee, get it all worked out so you can go ahead and have something that you can use, something high-quality that you can use over and over and over again.
- Next up on the list is Videohive. Videohive is awesome, just like their audio platform, which we're gonna get into in a minute. They have some amazing designers over there – that makes them really just mind-blowing looking stuff. I'm talking high-level SuperPro looking options for you for really, really cheap.
Now, if you get one of these templates and you don't have the software to edit them to where you can get your name in there, you can get your pictures, and then your video clips in there, here's what you can do. Sometimes on Videohive, you can contact the designer and you can throw them a few bucks to actually make a few customizations for you and then send it over to your way. Or if with the template that you're using, if the designer doesn't offer that service, you can go ahead and download it, and then you can actually go to Fiverr and have somebody there customize everything for you.
Another really great option for intros is, let's say that you have multiple channels or let's say that you just want to experiment with a bunch of different templates so you can figure out what works best for you and what goes best with each particular video that you're trying to do, or something like that, a really great solution for you is Digital Asset Membership Sites. As an example, Digital Juice is amazing, they have some really great templates in there and video blocks is also another really great option to where, let's say that you get your template downloaded and you get all of your stuff in there, let's say you're doing it yourself or even you're having somebody else do it, but you get all of your stuff in there and you're thinking yourself, yeah, you know, what I thought before, that this was gonna be pretty cool but now, that all my stuff's in there, it's not really what I'm looking for. In that case, you just go into the digital asset membership site that you chose to become a member of, and you just download a new intro, and then, problem solved.
Now, once you get your intro template, one thing that I wanted to let you know about, just in case you don't know this already, is in your folder, where you keep all of your video files, if you put a video asset folder in there, with the actual project file of your intro, then, when you actually want to drop that intro into your video, you always have that same place, along with your lower third of your in screen and all that, contain one folder, where you can just go and drag them in or you can go the full template method, which we're gonna get into here in just a minute. But if the software that you're using does not allow you to pull in that template file, let's say that you are editing your videos in Sony Vegas but you got an intro that is After Effects, and it doesn't let you pull the two together, what you can do is you can render that video out of After Effects or you can have whoever makes that intro for you render it out of After Effects or whatever it's made in, as an MOV-file or as an uncompressed AVI file. That way, you can just grab it and pull it in. It doesn't matter what software you're using. It in even, if you have somebody else doing your video editing for you in the future, you can just send that file to them and they don't have to worry about project files and making sure they have all the right clips for your intro and all that stuff, because they have that final version to work with.
Now, if you really want to take it up a notch and you want to make just an awesome presentation, so when your video starts people are, like, oh my gosh, this is incredible, get a voice-over and add some music. Here are some resources for you.
For music, you can find audio that is completely safe to use without any copyright headaches inside of the YouTube Audio Library. Some of the songs require you to give credit, some of these songs do not require you to give credit, so you want to make sure that you are playing by the rules and you're giving credit where necessary. What you want to do is you want to look for the little icon that lets you know if attribution is required or not. If it is, then you want to make sure that you select the area and select the right text, that you drop in your description for that credit.
You can also use stock libraries like AudioBlocks which is awesome. You can use Epidemic Sound which is also awesome. You can even use AudioJungle which is absolutely incredible. All of those options have great high quality music that you can use for your intros and for your music in your videos as well.
For voice-overs, of course, Musicradiocreative.com is the place to go for voice-overs. In addition to mic, you also get the option of a bunch of really talented voice-over artists there. So, if you're gonna get a voice-over, you need to make sure that you do it at Musicradiocreative.com. I'm actually having them make some new things for me at the time of this recording.
Okay, in reference to what I was talking about earlier in terms of making your workflow faster, because who wants a slow workflow, once you get all of this stuff together, you get your intro, you get any music that you're going to be using, you get any voice-overs that you're gonna be using – once you compile all of these video graphics that gonna be using in all these audio, all this ear candy that you're gonna be using, it's a really good idea for your workflow to get a template together.
Here's what I mean. Start with one project file, whatever it is that you edit your videos in, open up a project file and go ahead and pull in your intro. Go ahead and pull in any music that you're gonna use, pull in your end card, pull in your lower thirds, pull in any other graphics that you use on a regular basis in your videos. It doesn't matter where you put them, you can put them at the end of the timeline, you can put them at the front of the timeline, you can just kind of have them where you think they might end up falling if you use a similar video structure every time. But the idea is to have one folder that you can copy and paste every single time you go to work on a new project. You rename the folder, you rename the file, and then you open it up, and inside of the file, you already have all of your video assets: you already have a stack of audio clips to choose from, all of the sound effects that you commonly use and things like that, so that you don't have to hunt the stuff down every time. It's already self-contained, it's already in there. All you have to do is open it, start dropping in your video files and scooting things around, and it really can help a lot with your workflow, which, of course, is gonna save you time which you can then later use to make more videos.
