- Hey guys, what is going on? In this video, we're
talking about how you make an awesome intro to your YouTube videos. (lively electronic music) So, this goes beyond just
YouTube videos in general. This is how to create an
introduction to your videos. For YouTube specifically, this is a topic that I wanted to cover because
as soon as I started putting these kind of introductions on my videos, my subscriber count started going up and also my audience retention. Because you're putting this introduction on the front end of your video, it makes it look more professional and people are more engaged
and wanna continue watching. So, the basic idea is
that you have a hook. At the beginning of your
video, you'll have something that draws your audience in. For the first, like, five to
maybe 20 seconds at the most and then you have this introduction. And, what this introduction
does is it gives your audience a view into who you
are and what this video is gonna be about. So, you make your introduction
very targeted to your style, your brand, and then people
get a sense of who you are and they'll wanna continue
watching or they'll click off, but you'll get a higher audience retention because people have a very
clear idea of who you are. So, for my introduction,
I wanted to show travel, I wanted to show adventure, and
I wanted to show filmmaking. So, I found different shots
that basically encompass that and I put those together with some effects to basically build my intro. So, the elements that
go into making an intro, and I'm gonna go step by
step, we're gonna go through a screen record where I build
this intro from scratch, but basically the elements that you have is first your music, second your footage, third some visual effects
that go on top of the footage, and then some way to display your title. And, the way that I create
all these effects on top is through two things. One is lens flares and I'll get into that. I'll show you what a
lens flare is or bokeh. It's something that you
lay over your footage. And the the second is motion graphics. And, all of these are
pre-built from motionVFX. It's an awesome company
that basically pre-builds motion graphics for Final Cut
and you just drag and drop and do some setting changes
and then the graphics are automatically moving
and you don't have to do a ton of work. And, for music, I get all
my music from Artlist.io. It's an amazing music service
that basically gives you the ability to use their entire library for any of your videos either on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or for any of your professional clients. And, basically what you're getting is an entire music library that
you can use for everything. I really like using their services because I never have issues with rights. And, that's a big thing
when it comes to YouTube and a huge thing when
it's coming to my clients. Before I started using
Artlist, I was paying upwards of 50 to $100 per track. Now, I just have an entire
library at my disposal. All right, guys, so we're
gonna get into a screen record and let's build this from scratch. But, if you're interested
in any of the tools that I'm using to build this introduction, go down into the
description, I'll put links to everything that I
use to get this going. All right, so this is how
you build an introduction. So, now we're in Final Cut. And, the first thing that I'm gonna do is figure out what music I'm gonna use and that's because I always cut to music. And, it's kind of my driving force when it comes to creating
anything that has lots of action, lots of movement. I like to drive my editing from the music. My intro is 10 seconds. So, what I wanna do is
basically use potentially an eight count to have
underneath my intro. So, you wanna have
basically a phrase of music. And, you want something
that kind of wraps up and goes into your introduction. (lively electronic music) One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So, that's an eight count. And, an eight count is
roughly eight seconds to that's gonna work great
for a 10-second intro. The issue is at the end
of this eight count, it just keeps going into
the rest of the song. So, you need to find a
wrap up that's gonna go into the rest of your video. The best way to do this is
look at the end of the song and listen to the last beat that hits. (lively electronic music) - Boom, and it's a trail off. So, find that last beat
on your eight count and what we're gonna do
is replace that last beat with the final beat of the song. What I did is I dropped
part of the song underneath on the bottom layer and
I've blended it slightly just using your fade in
and out from each side. Quick way to just blend some music. Also one thing to look at in music
(lively electronic music) is look how high it is. So, if you go onto, you see how it's hitting it at zero. Well, if your vocals on your video are hitting between negative
12 and negative six, your music is gonna blast. So, you wanna bring your
music down so it's hitting between negative six and negative 12. I like to have mine around negative 12. So, you're not killing someone's ears right as it goes into the intro. And, that's kind of a big
thing that makes you stand out is making sure you audio's mixed properly. So, for mine, I used the
same eight count phrase, but I blended it around this
6th count and I brought it in a few beats from the end so you kinda have that natural progression to
the last beat and it fades out. 10 seconds, boom, I just
pulled a section of the song using an eight count. The next step is use some footage and that's the most important part. If you're doing 10 seconds, find 10 shots 'cause you want it to
be pretty rapid fire. You want things to move in an intro. So, here's the 10 shots I've used. I pulled a second from each
of parts that I thought were good moments to use. I chose a shot where I'm
falling into the water and then when my first beat hits, it goes right into the
rest of the footage. (lively electronic music)
Boom. So, basically, I'm cutting to the beat. It's every beat I'm cutting, boom. Boom, boom, boom,
(lively electronic music) boom, boom, boom. And, then I've let the last two shots trail off a little bit longer. - And, on that last beat
something's gonna happen but we're not there yet. Okay, so I've got my basic intro cut, but you want more than that. You want that pizzazz,
you want that excitement. And so, what I like to use is lens flares. And, if you guys don't
know what lens flares are, they are basically effects
that you can drop on top of your footage. So, you could see, it's just a flare and it's over black. And, these are pre-made. I'll put a link in the
description to a series of these lens flares
that I really like using. All of them are a little
bit different and they have, you know, different
colors, different effects. And, when you drop 'em on your footage, you basically have it over black. You're gonna use your blend mode up here and you're gonna do a color dodge. And, that's basically
gonna pull out the black and now you have just the blue over top. (lively electronic music) When I put it over the footage, it starts having a flare effect. I grabbed two different flares here. I grabbed the teal one
and I grabbed this one called natural light
which does a big flash. So, the reason for this is, on my intro when I have that first beat, I want it to be exciting and boom. So, I'm gonna have that flash
hit right on the first beat, fade into it, boom, right
into the second shot. It feels more dramatic when you have some sort of light effect flash over while beats are hitting. And, if we turn on the
music, you can hear it. (upbeat electronic music) It makes that first beat really hit. When it comes to just
adding some more flare over, I added just this flare. Gives it just a little bit
more of a dynamic feel. And then at the end, I'm
gonna use another one of these flashes to flash into the footage of me or whatever it is that
I'm shooting at the time. So, that's a great transition. Basically using flashes
is a great transition to get in and out of different sequences. Okay, so we've got light effects, we've got footage, we've got music, but there's lots of motion
graphics going on the top. We're gonna pull up a
set of effects called mPointer from motionVFX
and these are really cool. And, I'll just play 'em for
you so you can see what it is. It basically just pops up on the screen and it has some sort of effect. So, you got like crosshairs,
you got pointers. And, it doesn't seem like
anything that exciting when you just put this on,
'cause that's gonna look really boring just over the footage. A weird little pointer. The beauty of these effects
is that they already have the movement and they're ready to go. So, what I do is I grab
one of these crosshairs, I'm gonna pull out the text. I just want the visual of the crosshair. And I might bump up the line
width a little bit, crosswidth. You can see how easy it is to just adjust using settings that motionVFX
has provided for you. Now, this is effect right in the middle. That's cool but that's
not what we're going for. We want something that's kind of overlaid that just gives you the
feeling of adventure and gives you the feeling of
like maybe a map or something. So, I'm gonna make this huge
and I'm gonna put it somewhere like in the corner. And then on top of it,
I wanna speed this up. Let's have this start right when we see this second bit of footage. Boom! It's a little bit too white,
so I'm gonna bring down the opacity so it's overlaid. So, now we have one effect on. Well, we're gonna do this again. So, let's grab another crosshair and then you're just gonna
keep building on this more and more. So, here is my finished introduction. I have one, two, three, four crosshairs and then I have three white effects. I have the music and I have my footage. So, let's play this back real
quick without the title yet. (upbeat electronic music) That's the basic introduction. And, the last bit of the
puzzle is adding on your title. I'm gonna use another pre-set pack from motionVFX called Titles. I'm gonna pick this
title because I like it. And so, I have my title in there. It's a pre-built effect. I did a little tweaks to
the actual visuals of it, but as I overlay this
on top of everything, it just ties in the entire introduction and gives you the title of what
it is that you're watching, but also underneath it, you
have that visual effects and you have everything that signifies who's making this video
and what type of video they're gonna be making. And, that's the complete
breakdown of my introduction. (upbeat electronic music) It's actually way easier to
put one of these introductions together than you think. And, what's cool about
it is that it just looks so professional and it
just gives your videos a polished look. Guys, if you use my
techniques and my methods to build an introduction,
I would love to see what you guys come up with. So, please shoot me a link,
put it in the comments below. Gimme some feedback on your thoughts on how I created my introduction and some things that maybe
you might do differently to make your introduction unique. One other thing is that I
don't use the same introduction for every video. So, this one's a standard that I built just for general photography
video introduction. But, when I'm doing something specific and I wanna title it out, sometimes I'll switch out
the footage or the graphics, play around with it a little bit, and then add a different
intro on the end of it. Now, I keep my music and I
keep some of the style the same so that it feels like
the rest of my videos and that's a key. You wanna make sure that
you have a consistent style across all your videos so that if someone's
consistently watching your videos and watching everything, they just feel like they're in your world. So, you basically create
your look, your idea, your main introduction,
and then from there when you build other introductions, you basically use that as a template and then repurpose some of it, change some of it out, give
it a little unique flare. That's how you get people
to get excited about a video and keep that audience retention up. All right, guys, that is it. If you liked this video, make sure you hit that subscribe button. And, guys, make sure you
turn on those notifications because you're not gonna see all my videos if your notifications aren't turned on. Also, come find me on
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. I'm on all the social networks. I'd love to hear some feedback from you. And I'm happy to help you out with any of your filmmaking questions or just if you just wanna
chat and have a conversation. All right, guys, I will
see you on the next one.
