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Foxvideo Productions



Having spent the best part of 40 years looking through a viewfinder of a stills or video camera, sitting in front of a computer editing photos or videos, producing websites and managing content and social media accounts for organisations or individuals, it’s a very strange feeling to now say “I’m retired".

Despite no longer taking on commercial paid work, it’s virtually impossible to suddenly stop what you’ve been doing for the best part of your working life so, for the past few years I’ve been taking on work on a ‘pro-bono’ basis for church, charity or voluntary organisations. I hope that my experience, skills and equipment can now be put to good use by those who perhaps, don’t have the budget or funding to produce what they want or need for their media requirements.

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The music makes it..

written by: Dave Farrants
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Creating an engaging video for YouTube involves many stages. First you need good content and then get the lighting and exposure correct, framing is important and of course making sure it’s all in focus. These all need to be right before you even begin to edit the video. When you start the edit you need to get the cuts in the right place to convey what you had in mind for the style of video. It needs to flow with no ‘jump-cuts’ and make sense with no continuity errors. Then there’s the audio….

Many, many years ago, I was told people will watch a poor quality video but, what they won’t watch or accept is a video with poor quality audio, so a good music track can add a lot to a YouTube video. It can set the mood, enhance the visuals, and keep viewers engaged. Copyright is one of the hot topics today and using music illegally can get you banned on YouTube or even sued, so where can you get good music?

When I first started producing videos back in the early 1990’s, copyright free CD’s were the ‘thing’. You purchased the CD and a license to use the music on the CD. Today, I get emails almost daily from music libraries offering me deals on music downloads, I have joined a few and yes, there is a good choice of legal to use music. One I used regularly, JewelBeat, closed down suddenly a few years back, no reason was given.

Recently an email offered me 4 music albums from SideTrax (https://www.sidetrax.co.uk) so I took the offer. I had just shot (well, the GoPro’s actually did all the work!) a video with a good friend of mine on his narrowboat and I was looking to do an updated version of a video we produced 7 years ago. One track from the SideTrax album ‘Melancholia’ called Abyss appealed to me for the opening. I felt it set the scene for the moment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs5AplnCxz0).

Unfortunately the 28 minute video was in real-time, so for the main underlying track I wanted something continuous and I found a track from the YouTube audio library by Kevin MacLeod (used with an attribution credit).

I was genuinely impressed with the SideTrax albums and I’ll look to add more in the future. They have a ‘freshness’ to them I’d not heard in a while from some of the other libraries I use so, if you’re looking for some fresh new music for your production, check out their website where you can listen to the tracks. The albums are a very reasonable price of just £25 each to download which, even my limited maths skills can work out, is just £1 per track to use legally on YouTube.

(NB - NO free products or financial remuneration was received for this article.)
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