How to make a mobile screen recorded video with music ideal for twitter

After reading this post, you will be able to make your own screen recorded video, add music and share wherever you like.

In this example, I spotted something (like Essex Police on twitter reaching 200 accounts) and thought - how can I easily and quickly make something worthwhile and timely to tell this story. Something to look back in a while (in this example, Essex Police on twitter had about 104 accounts at the start of 2015, so 200 on 29 Oct 16 is a landmark).

Step One .. Have a idea and visualise it. In my mind's eye I saw a dark screen, scrolling photos and text, all set to bouncy dramatic music on a 16;9 widescreen format. I had a desired outcome of a twitter video, and if that failed, a youtube video. Twitter videos can only be (for regular users) a maximum of 140 secs (2mins 20 secs).

Step Two .. Record the mobile screen. On an android nexus 7 tablet, I opened the twitter app and in settings, selected 'Night Mode' which makes the screen turn dark (geeks can look here for the hex colors).

After having a little scroll with the twitter list, I was ready to start recording using the brilliant, and it is brilliant, AZ Screen Recorder. I used 30fps at 1280x720p, turned of Mic, and scrolled knowing three twitter users would be on screen at a time. I also counted in my head '4 seconds' so as to have audience able to read said text, as it stays put for a little while. Stopped record and was left with a video file 5:54 mins in length at a size of 199mb. I transferred this using USB cable to my win10 Lenovo laptop. I knew 5:54 was far too long, but ploughed ahead knowing I could easily fix it later.

Step Three .. Music Choice. Next, I visited: youtube.com/audiolibrary/music, selecting filters of Genre/Cinematic and Mood/Dramatic where Warrior Strife (at 1:23mins) was 2nd on the list, clicked download, thus saving file to laptop hard drive. I will say, you can spend hours in youtube music looking for and listen to music - there are 1,000s of tracks and all are pretty good. Just train yourself to get a feel for what yo need (hence Step One above).

Step Four has two parts: A, Desktop and B, Mobile/Tablet

Step Four A, Desktop .. Vegas 13 Video editor. I open a new project, added video and music track on time. Then trimmed start and end of track, cropped in a little to lose the mobile header, arranged the audio. Simple math will tell you a video of 5:54 and music of 1:23 does not fit, not to worry.

I added at marker at 2:20 on the timeline, knowing that's where I wanted the final time of the completed video to end. Using mouse, click video, hold down control and drag to the left, and bingo, video is now perfectly aligned, now playing at 2.4x faster speed (by counting those 4 secs in my head at time of recording, speeding up by 2.4 means the audience will still get 1.6sec to read text).

I use a 11 frame fade in, so added those to video/audio and duplicated the audio track. Dragged 2nd audio track to end of timeline, adjusted for fade out and then craftily mixed both tracks together (at 1:06 for 1 second - if done well, audience should not notice). Quick preview to watch and listen - then render video, saving as a mp4 video file at 29fps, 89mb, 2:19 in length.

Step Four B, Mobile/Tablet .. Using the AZ Screen Recorder brilliant new video editing tool, trim video, add audio and save. I believe at time of writing, AZ editor does not have a video speed controller, so record screen at less than 2 mins 20 secs (if you need to share to twitter). All simple math really.

Step Five .. Adjust file and Share/Upload. Depending on your upload bandwidth is whether you use a tool like Handbrake (open source video transcoder) to reduce file size. I used it this time leaving a file of 59.5mb 1280x720p.

For whatever reason, uploading twitter videos on desktop seems to fail in processing for me, so being a guy who just gets on with doing something as fast as possible, I knew using USB cable to transfer video file to Moto E mobile, then tweeting would have a greater, and faster element of success.

Step Six .. Tweet it. Not much to say here about from added video to a tweet, slid the blue bar to select all 2:19, wrote a few lines of text and waited, this took a few mins. And bingo again, we are done. The tweet read, 'Celebrating 200 Twitter accounts for @EssexPoliceUK set to music ..

As a backup, I uploaded the video to youtube as well. It's embedded below.

Resource List: Nexus 7, Moto E (both on android). Lenovo G50 15.6 Laptop on win10. AZ Screen Recorder No Root App. YouTube Audio Music Library. Twitter with Night Mode. And a little imagination.

Although this example uses a twitter list from the police, the theory in this post, will apply to making ANY kind of screen recorded videos. If you prefer, just use AZ screen recorded with Microphone and/or webcam turned on and make one video in one take - very easy to do.

This post can also be used in support of UK Police using Smart Phones and Social Media together to create resources for themselves or the to engage with the public. Most smart phones these days are using very fast quad core processors, so they are more likely to be MORE POWERFUL and FASTER than your desktop computer.

Get stuck or want to ask a question, get hold of me and I promise to give you my best answer.