Making Videos

1. Create and Record: Camcorders are the best, but you can also use a digital camera, webcam or a mobile phone with video capabilities. It is a good idea to consider lighting, background and set. Good lighting can greatly decrease file size and playback speeds. Complex or cluttered backgrounds can be bad. Film your subject against a simple background to keep the image as uncluttered as possible. You should always try to avoid panning, zooms and handheld shots. When you move your camera, each pixel in every frame changes and this is very hard to compress. By limiting camera movement, you can increase the efficiency of compressing your video, and reduce the video file size for faster upload and playback. Use a tripod to limit camera movement.

2. Edit: You might think your videos are awesome, but we suggest that you use an editor. Transfer the video onto your computer and use a built-in movie editor program like Windows Movie Maker. If you do not have one on your computer you can find several kinds on the internet. Once you have your video into the editor use it to crop your movie clips into a more efficient length and remove unwanted frames.

3. Compress: Marblejars limits videos to 10 minutes and 100MB on normal member accounts. If you do make a movie and it is 100MB, it may take a while to upload. Instead use your selected movie editor program to reduce the size when saving. This will upload faster.

4. Upload: When we receive your video, Marblejars does all of the work for you we will convert it and encode it and place it in the cool Marblejars player. This can take a while depending on video size, quality and your connection speed. Typically, video encoding on Marblejars.com is between 5 and 45 minutes. For more information about this click on uploading videos.

5. Review: After you have uploaded your video, review it and make sure you like what you see. If you do not, you have the ability in your account to change your video for 48 hours or until your jar receives marbles. Once the 48 hours has expired or you have a marble in your jar you can not change the video.

6. Promote: Once you have successfully uploaded your masterpiece we suggest that you go out and promote it. Email it to your friends, embed it in your webpage, and spread the word about your video so that you can increase your chance of getting marbles. Be creative, have fun, and follow our guidelines.

If you have any questions or need any help contact us.

Team Marblejars