My YouTube channel has over 5,000 O Bar videos and nearly 21,000 followers. I primarily upload full recordings of the various O Bar performances and sometimes make the effort to re-cut some of the funnier moments into YouTube Shorts. I mainly record videos in landscape, so I'm not great with vertical content.
In contrast, my TikTok account is largely one I use for viewing stuff, apart from a few isolated experiments with meme content just to get a better feel for the platform for work. I did say that I don't take a lot of vertical video, and I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to doing so. So what I end up posting there are mostly clips of the O Ledge dancers because I snap quick videos sometimes, outside the confines of the main show. The only other regular vertical content I occasionally post involves stuff that happens in-between the show sets at O Bar - usually speeches from people given awards by the bar or stuff of a similar nature.
It feels almost like a waste not to make greater use of TikTok, despite how many people have various concerns with the platform. My working life has shown me that the platform isn't really one you can ignore, and I already get a crazy number of followers just by posting videos of the ledge.
I don't have the patience (yet?) to re-cut my O Bar videos for TikTok. It's already a struggle to do so for YouTube Shorts since the "action" of any number doesn't always stay within a vertical slice of the video. Plus, the copyrighted music that is a part of all those videos means posting it on other platforms can be a pain. For example, Facebook is a lot stricter when it comes to flagging music versus YouTube - at least YouTube lets me share it online; the platform just won't let me monetize most of those videos, which is fine. I make just enough money to pay for my Google One subscription, which I need to continue to store all the photos and videos that I take at the bar.
So the potential low-hanging fruit I'm considering is using templates to create quick videos using a lot of the static photo content I still have. Whenever I take video, I'm also snapping quick shorts at the same time, partly because I'm hoping to get a good image to use as a thumbnail for the YouTube video, but also because it ties back to how I started all this. In my early O Bar days, I largely took photos throughout the night, later resorting to taking burst shots during the drag performances so that I'd have a record of the show and later rely on Google Photos (then still Picasa!) to create GIFs using my burst shots. The number of photos that I take per night have gone down dramatically since my frozen shoulder incident, but I still end up with a good 500 or so photos on average.
The internet pointed me in the direction of CapCut for video editing, but I have to admit that the raw editor still feels a bit too much for me, and I'm struggling to find photo templates that I like. On the flip side, having TikTok "AutoCut" my photos into a possible template seems a lot easier as an option. I'm pretty sure it's a similar process to what CapCut does, but it lets me select photos first ,then rely on TikTok to find a template, whereas CapCut needs me to select a template, THEN choose the images that'll go into it. But I haven't even spent a day with CapCut, so I know I have more work ahead of me before I get comfortable.
I imagine it won't be too different from my experience with Canva, which really just helps me create quite headers for my blog post and thumbnails for my YouTube videos. I am aware that it can also help with vertical video content, but the editor hasn't been the greatest in that regard, which is partly why I've never really progressed with TikTok content.
If you have other recommendations for converting photos into social-friendly video content as easily as possible, ket me know.
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