If you have logged into your YouTube account lately, you may have seen the YouTube Annotations under "what's new".
Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. Use them to:
- add background information about the video
- create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)
-link to related YouTube Videos, channels, or search results from within a video.
You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.
To get started, log into your YouTube account and go to the Video Annotations page.
Start playing your video, if it's not already playing using the ?Preview? button.
At the moment you want to add an annotation, click on the appropriate ?+? icon on the top left corner. You can add annotations that are Speech Bubbles, Notes, or Spotlights with text.
Enter your text. You can edit your annotation on the video itself:
Edit text as you type;
Drag and drop annotations anywhere you want;
To resize an annotation, roll over the edge until you see little dots. Click and drag the dots to resize. A speech bubble has an additional resizing dot on the pointer.
You can see all your annotations listed on the left side. Here you have advanced editing options:
You can add a URL link to your annotation. It could be a link to either a specific YouTube Video, or a user Channel, or a YouTube Search result page.
You can change the time both start and finish, manually. An annotation's default start time is when you click to add it (?+? icon). The default end time is 5 seconds later. To change this, just enter the start and finish times you want in [H:MM:SS.s] format. For instance, [0:01:05.2] means 1 minute, 5.2 seconds into the video.
You can delete annotations from the list on the left. Click [x] on the upper right corner of the annotation you want to delete.
YouTube Annotations is very useful in making tutorials, silent movies, product descriptions, labeling videos or tagging people in them as well as funny videos.
This feature is sure going to be a hit amongst the users. Annotations look even better in full screen mode. But annotations are still in beta, so they still have some thing to implement such as
- viewing of annotations in embedded videos.
- text in other languages then English in annotations.
- you can't put up links in annotations other then related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
Until then, check out this card trick video below and let me know how it worked out for you.
