July 2009 Please note that some links may have expired due to the ever-changing nature of the Internet. Let us know if you find anything unexpected or offensive so we can remove or change a link. Youthwork magazine and CCP ltd are not responsible for the content of external sites accessed from youthwork.co.uk Video enhancement Finding clips to serve every illustration has never been easier. But it gets better - add captions, subtitles, speech balloons and more. John Allan guides you through the top 25 YouTube tools to save you time. What did we do before YouTube? 100 million video clips served up every day. Fifteen hours of new video added every minute. Watching everything there today would take you 412 years and 4 months. In Japan (where it isn't even the biggest video site) people spend an average of three hours monthly watching YouTube. And each day, all over the Western world, Christian youth workers glue their eyes to their monitors, searching for that perfect worship clip or that hilarious cartoon that makes a powerful spiritual point... You'll remember that we debated the ethics of downloading from YouTube a while ago, and concluded that the moral position was difficult to establish. Now nobody seems to be worried – even YouTube themselves, who quietly began in January to put a ‘Click here to download’ link under some videos. Now they're experimenting with paid-for downloads, and working with three American universities to offer free downloadable lectures. It looks as if they've accepted the reality: people are going to download from YouTube, contributors seem not to mind, and surprisingly little of it (4.7%, in fact) is commercially copyrighted material. So YouTube downloading, it would appear, is now respectable, with most of your youth group busily using their iPods to speed it along. OK; this month, just for once, we'll devote the column exclusively to 25 top YouTube tools, which can give you hours of fun and pleasure – or more importantly, save you lots of time for the real youth work you're supposed to be doing! First, you need to find the clips to use – a job which can take hours (especially if you keep getting distracted by fascinating videos that weren't quite what you were looking for, but still...) It can be helpful to know which are the most popular around the world, so keep an eye on WorldTV Internet Charts (which surveys other sites as well as YouTube), Viral Video Chart and Vidspedia, all of which regularly locate some real crackers. Best of YouTube is a blog which suggests clips you might have missed, and SearchTheTube is a streamlined, ultra-fast search engine (I put in ‘youth work’ and had 99 results in less than a second, none of which I'd ever seen before). YouTube's own search engine is second-biggest in the world, but SearchTheTube moves at the speed of light. But you can do more. If you want to compare lots of clips as you go, with several movies open simultaneously, iDekstop.tv makes that very easy indeed. Once you've found them, you need to download them, and probably change them into a useful format. (YouTube videos are FLV, but you need AVI or MPG if you want to use them in Powerpoint.) There are literally hundreds of ways to do this. You could have Orbit Downloader on your Windows desktop – it captures and converts anything, even streaming video, so YouTube clips are simple – or TVTube if you use a Mac. You could use online services like Zamzar, Vixy, KeepVid or Media Converter SA; there's a list of 23 at Mashable. If you're non-technical, don't worry; it's as easy as it could be. At Zamzar, for example, you simply type in the YouTube address of the clip you want; they convert it then send you an e-mail with a download link. Very civilized. If you use Firefox as your browser, there are plugins to make the job simple; try DownloadHelper, GetVideo, or the curiously named Ook? Video Ook! (I am not making this up). But once you've got your clips the fun really starts. You want to show just a section, not the whole thing? TubeChop or Splicd will cut it precisely to size for you. You want to add captions, subtitles, speech balloons? Play around with Overlay, Subyo or CaptionTube. Kicklight will add a special bar below the video where you can add commentaries, messages. Logos, anything you choose. Tubepopper, a similar service, has a ‘Best of Tubepopper’ section where you can gain inspiration from what others have done. And so it goes on... Tubadora will play an endless stream of YouTube clips on any subject (if you want to set a reverent atmosphere before a meeting, type in ‘worship’ and leave it playing); Memories on Web will take your own pictures and turn them instantly into a YouTube slideshow, so that your youth group can be watching them and downloading them in minutes. YouTube, it seems, is here to stay. So if you're going to use it, use it properly and get the most out of it! John Allan is based at Belmont Chapel, Exeter, UK, and is a regular contributor to Youthwork magazine. Back to main page