Travel bloggers guide to YouTube and video editing

Who here loves YouTube? I certainly do and it’s been especially great during the lockdown! But I don’t just love watching videos, I also love making them! If you haven’t already, make sure you check out my channel and subscribe. With that little bit of harmless self-promotion out of the way, let’s get into the actual content. This is my guide to YouTube and video editing for travel bloggers.

Why should I get YouTube as a travel blogger?

To be honest with you, I actually had a YouTube for travel videos before I had a blog! So for me, it was a no-brainer to change the name and keep making cool videos. I personally love creating videos to go with my blog posts, because I think they give a much better visual representation of a place than just writing with a few pictures. As a reader, I also find videos helpful to gain a greater understanding of what I will experience at a certain destination.

Let me give you an example. In university, I had a field course where we spent a week at Idalia National Park (ie the literal middle of nowhere). We would have had no idea what to expect when we got there, if it weren’t for a YouTube video that one of the students had created a few years earlier. When I watched the video, I noticed it was SUPER rocky and uneven, meaning I’d probably need good quality boots with ankle support. I didn’t own any at the time so my mum and I immediately went out and bought some!

After the trip, my friend and I put together our own video of the trip. Each and every year, the view count increases around the time of the field trip and it’s my most-viewed video! Long story short, creating a video can help your audience to plan and prepare for their own trip.

What cameras do I use?

To be honest, you don’t need any fancy equipment to get started. In fact, quite a few of my most recent videos were just shot on my iPhone SE! I also have a GoPro Hero 4 to take underwater shots and a Sony point and shoot camera (Cyber-shot DSC-HX90V). There are a couple of things that I think could make my videos better if I had better equipment. I would love to have a tripod and a gimbal to take less shaky videos. I also would kind of love a drone! But equally, I’m pretty sure a lot of the places I visit drones are not allowed so I’ll pass for now.

Video editing: what software to choose and pro tips!

This is probably the most important part of my guide to YouTube and video editing for travel bloggers. Choosing a video editing software has been a real sticking point for me because most people either seem to use Adobe Premiere Pro or iMovie. I can’t afford Adobe and I don’t have a mac.

I tried quite a few video editing software programs…

In the past, I made most of my videos with Windows Movie Maker, but it doesn’t exist anymore! How rude! To make things even worse, they replaced it with Movie Maker 10 – Free. Which is awful. Let’s just say it was so bad, I chose to open up my ancient, unbelievably slow laptop to use Windows Movie Maker instead. And it was FASTER. Openshot was also recommended to me, but I had a similar experience with this program to Movie Maker 10 – Free. It was slightly better, but I still didn’t manage to put together a whole video in it.

I have also tried Adobe Premiere Rush (free trial) – I used this for my Coolangatta video. Whilst it was a little complicated for me, it did make a really nice video. However, I used all three of my exports on the one video because I accidentally exported twice… Then changed the name of my blog! It was only a short-term fix anyway because, as I mentioned above, I’m never going to be able to afford Adobe.

In the end, I settled on Movavi video editing software!

My favourite travel vloggers are Steven and Jess from Flying the Nest and over the lockdown, I watched a heap of their videos! While I was researching video editing software, I stumbled across a video they made about Movavi. It looked super easy to use and created a nice looking video! When I looked it up, it said it had a free trial so I figured I might as well give it a go. And I loved it! The first video I made with Movavi was about the Southern Gold Coast, and I’ve created all my other videos with it since.

The only downside to Movavi was that I couldn’t actually export my beautiful video in the free version! I felt pretty ripped off, to be honest, because it didn’t say that in the comparison table! But I bought the full version anyway because I did really enjoy the video editing experience and loved the video I created. It only cost me about $40 AUD and that’s for lifetime use! Not bad at all and definitely worth paying for.

What I love about editing in Movavi

As I mentioned above, Movavi is super easy to use and you can create some pretty cool and professional effects in it which I never achieved in Movie Maker! You can speed up or slow down your videos, as well as stabilising them if you’re hopeless like me and always take shaky videos. There are more complex effects too, such as blurring the video. I use this one when I have vertical videos I want to include. Simply layer the same video on two tracks, make the bottom one landscape by cropping then blur. I’m not sure if that makes any sense, so I’ll include a picture below or you can see it in action in my China and Singapore video and Brisbane video.

You can also put effects onto your audio to make it sound different. I’ve always thought it was cool in videos where the music was muffled for underwater shots and I can do that in Movavi! Just split the music track where you want the effect to start and end, then apply the sound effect you want. You can hear me use this effect in my video about New Caledonia and Vanuatu.

The title options are limited unless you pay for additional packages however there are some good ones on there. My favourite is “Clean Line” which I use at the start of all my videos. I also use “Lower Third” for my ending page. I don’t like that you can’t change the border colour of this title and it is a bit of a weird shape. But it fits well with the YouTube ending links so I will keep using it for now.

Music for your travel video

This is something I’m still trying to work out to be honest, but I wanted to include it in my travel bloggers YouTube guide anyway. A good video needs great music, after all! In July 2020, I subscribed for a free trial of Musicbed. Flying the Nest, use music from here so I wanted to check it out. Unfortunately, it costs about $200 AUD per year, which I just can’t afford. However, if I ever end up making money off this blog, I’d love to go back to them because the music is such great quality! My favourite pieces were from “UTAH” so definitely go check them out.

For most of my other videos, I have used music from Incompetech.com by Kevin MacLeod. All of the music is royalty free so you can use it in any video. Because it’s royalty free, the quality isn’t as good and there isn’t as much variety. But I have gotten a few good pieces from there so if you’re looking for something free, I’d recommend it. All downloads are free, all you have to do is put the appropriate credit in the video description.

If you have any suggestions for good free music sites, let me know in the comments below! I’d love to try out some different options.

YouTube tips: verifying your account and video thumbnails

I thought I’d better finish my guide to YouTube for travel bloggers with a tip specific to YouTube… Adding a thumbnail to your YouTube videos is a great way to make your channel look amazing. See my video thumbnails below for proof. But I haven’t always had these thumbnails; I used to just use whatever YouTube suggested. I was told (admittedly about 4 years ago) that you either had to have a significant amount of subscribers or a verified account to have thumbnails on your YouTube videos. But this isn’t true at all!

Well, technically it is, but verifying your account is unbelievably easy and takes all of 30 seconds. All you have to do is click “verify account”, put in your phone number, enter the code they text you and voila! Your account is verified!

Now, you can upload your own thumbnails to each of your videos, which is great as it makes them look a bit more pretty and you can have a title on each and every one (which I never used to have because it wouldn’t pick the title screen…). I make my thumbnails in Canva, which I’ve talked about before. You can read about using Canva in my post about social media for bloggers.

I hope any of you travel bloggers out there found this guide to YouTube and video editing helpful! If you’re looking at starting a travel blog or have recently began blogging, you can check out my other posts by clicking here. I have also written about starting my blog, social media, Instagram and writing great blog posts. Also make sure to get in touch in the comments below, or via social media! I’d love to hear from you.

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