Uploading

When your video is complete, you will probably want to share it with others. This page will show you the process.

Choose a method of sharing that meets your learning and audience objectives.

Sharing Files Directly

The most straightforward way to share a file is to give the file—or access to it—directly to the intended viewer. There are significant drawbacks to this method, but it can be appropriate in the right circumstances.

Video files are usually large. This makes sending a file as an email attachment challenging. Even if both the sender and receivers have good internet bandwidth, their email host may not allow attachments as large as a video file. Furthermore, mobile and rural recipients will have to use their limited data to download the file.

If the file is only a few MB, send it however you feel is best, but for larger files, consider using one of these options.

Upload the file to a service like Box or Google Docs and then share the link
Burn a DVD and mail the disc
Copy the file to a thumbdrive and send through the mail or courier service

People with UC ANR or UC Davis accounts have had good success using Box to share large video files.

It is possible to save files on a website directly, but the process tends to be slow for everyone and uses the site's bandwidth for large files. It's better to serve the file from a service that is designed for sharing whenever possible, especially if you expect much interest in the content. Include that link on your website instead of the file itself.

If you want to share a file directly, you may need to re-encode a version of lower quality to reduce file size.

Uploading to YouTube

Typically you will want to share your videos on a streaming service. YouTube is the most popular video hosting site so you will have more potential traffic there than other hosts.

Uploading to YouTube is simple, but the process is slightly different depending on whose account you would like to post to.

Posting to UC ANR's YouTube Channels

By posting your video on the official UC ANR YouTube channel, you will receive the most exposure for your work. Staff of Strategic Communications can also use your video in promotions and in other media if you post it through their content pipeline.

Videos on UC ANR's channel can show the breadth of our work, but should be of interest regionally or statewide. For example, videos on a widespread pest, healthy living, forestry, or crop science would be appropriate, but a video on Mammoth Lakes' water/sewer distribution system would not.

Although the requirement is not strict, videos should be between 3 and 15 minutes in length.

The videos do not have to be produced by a professional, but they will need to have a minimal level of quality. If you have followed this course, you will have no issues meeting that standard. Look over the production checklist to make sure you haven't forgotten anything important!

We highly recommend a self-check on style quality standards and accuracy. Please see the Quality Assurance page for some simple steps you can use to assess your video.

Videos can be uploaded to either the English- or Spanish-language channels managed by UC ANR. You can also post to established sub-channels such as UC IPM or UC Master Gardeners by contacting their staff directly. They will explain their process.

The submission process is simple. Here are the current instructions: UC ANR Video Pipeline (August 2020) The process was covered during the May Webinar if you want to watch that presentation.

April 2022 Update: videos for both the English and Spanish language UC ANR channels should be directed to Ricardo Vela.

Posting to Your Personal Channel

Sometimes it is more appropriate to post a video to your personal or local YouTube channels.

Situations where posting to a local or personal channel include:

The content is only of local interest
You want to keep a file unlisted but want to share the link, such as in an e-learning module
The video's final destination is a personal social media site like Facebook or Twitter, and the content and format suits that better than UC ANR's channel (although you can upload directly to those sites)
It might be interesting or useful but the format or quality is unsuitable for the official channel; ex: recorded lectures, quick clips of insects, Zoom recordings, shaky video.

These videos are considered Tier 3 in UC ANR's review scheme.

Adobe Premiere Elements can automate the uploading process to a local or personal YouTube page that you control.

Titles, Keywords, and More

To optimize discoverability of your video, you need to have a good title and provide keywords and a good description of the video so that search engines will find and recommend your content.

This site has a page with information about improving discoverability.

In addition to improving the discoverability of your video, you can enhance the probability of someone clicking on it by making it look more appealing. Here is how.

YouTube will come up with a "title" preview image for your video after uploading. In YouTube's video editor, you can select other choices for the preview image that come from still images in your video. It doesn't often give the best choices, so you may want to upload your own image. This is like a title slide in PowerPoint. 16:9 Ratio images in png or jpg format work well. If you send your video in to the UC ANR channel, they will handle this for you, but if you post on a local channel, you will be responsible.

A final step in uploading is to review all the options for your video. These include language, recording date, comments, ratings, and other options. One important option you will need to select is whether the video is intended for youth as a primary audience.

If your video has any restricted audio content such as copyrighted music, you will be notified after processing. YouTube will explain your options at that time. (Using audio from YouTube's Audio Library will avoid this issue.)

Other Online Destinations

YouTube videos are the main focus of this course, but there are other destinations for your videos. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all popular places for posting how-to videos.

The type of video that works best on these other social media sites, is not the same as YouTube.

Here are some links to other sites with information on best practices for other social media videos.

Facebook:

Twitter:

https://business.twitter.com/en/blog/7-articles-to-craft-video-strategy.html

Instagram:

Embedding Videos in Web Pages, Blogs, or Online Articles

Posting to YouTube, especially on UC ANR's channel is the best way for a video to be "discovered" by potential viewers through search or video recommendations. If your primary purpose is to host the video that will be embedded, there are other options available such as Vimeo, many of which charge. An advantage of these services is they do not have advertisements.

Examples of using embedded videos would be to host the content on an online learning platform such as Moodle on extension.org or for a page on a course you're teaching. In these cases the audience is a defined group that you are sharing the content with, not the larger world.

Currently the simplest option for uploading content that will be to use YouTube. Mark it as Unlisted during upload. (Not Private.) You can then copy the embedding codes from the Share button underneath the video. Videos can be embedded whether they are set to unlisted or public.

Some content platforms will handle all the embedding for you simply by provding the URL to the video on YouTube. There will usually be a video icon of some sort on the tool bar for this purpose. If this is available, use this method as your video is less likely to break or be badly formatted in the future.

You will likely get more views on Facebook pages by directly posting the video on the platform rather than posting a link to YouTube as your post.

Accessibility Considerations

Videos posted as part of your job, which thereby represent UC, need to be accessible for the hearing impaired.

All videos should be closed captioned or use subtitles. (Closed captioning text can be turned off and is supplemental to the video itself; subtitles are intrinsically part of the video itself and cannot be turned off.) Closed captions are easier to implement and are a better option.

YouTube will automatically generate closed captions for your videos based on its understanding of your text. If you have clear, native diction and are the only speaker, the generated videos will be very good with a few caveats.

While transcripts simply provide the verbatim words spoken on the video, captions have text synchronized with time stamps that correspond to the speech on the video. These can be challenging to create.

Generated captions will lack some grammatical conventions such as punctuation and capitalization, but should capture the text well. They will not show indications of environmental sounds, music, or lyrics that may be essential to the content. They also fail to distinguish between speakers.

An easy way to generate captions is to upload a video to your channel, allow YouTube to generate the captioning, and then edit it. You can download the edited, time-encoded transcript and include it with you submission to the UC ANR channel. (If the video is meant for UC ANR's channel, upload it as unlisted and delete it after you finish.)

You can use YouTube's built-in captioning editor, or follow this process: Easy Captioning of Videos (Example of result.)

Short, simple videos with only one speaker take about as long to edit captioning as it takes to play back the entire video length. As length and complexity of the video increases, the time to fix captioning increases exponentially.

No matter what method you choose to manage captioning, there will need to be some edits or review.

Other Sites

Even without UC's requirement for accessibility, most social media sites recommend as a best practice that videos work without the viewer being able to hear any sound. Closed captioning may not even be an option if hosted on other platforms than YouTube.

Instead of captioning, most other sites recommend the use of subtitles. These are more complicated to produce as they are encoded in the video itself.

In Adobe Premiere Elements, the only way to create subtitles is to manually put text clips on the video timeline during editing. This makes it tedious and impractical for anything but the shortest videos.

There is software that is designed for subtitling, but is beyond the scope of our course.