I am creating a bunch of custom "how-to-do-it" style video clips on my niche topic. The videos would be fairly short, one minute or less, and would accompany my blog posts when appropriate. I would prefer to host them on my own server rather than upload to YouTube or another service. My initial reason for doing this was to keep as much revenue as possible within my own site rather than allowing YouTube or another service to get income off of my product. YouTube automatically adjusts and compresses video when you upload it to them, but since I am going to be doing it all on my own I wanted to ask a few questions: 1) what software would you suggest to edit and compress the video? 2) what settings should be used to minimize the file size as much as possible? 3) Can you think of any reasons (other than bandwidth) that I should just go ahead and use YouTube as a host for the videos rather than hosting them directly from my web site?
1. Window's Movie Maker is a pretty useful tool and it costs nothing. It's great for basic needs. 2. A good video editing program will help you choose the right format. 3. No
If you are making your own, then by all means, you have the right idea, but I would still upload them to You Tube, to get some additional exposure to your blog.