How do I setup my first YouTube live at zero cost? (part 1/2)

Are you someone who is considering starting the live feed on the social media platform but doesn’t know where to start? Well, you just ended up at the perfect item:).

I had the idea of launching a YouTube channel, where I can make podcast, live stream and a few other things. But I had no idea where to begin. Last week, I had some time in hand and I mainly use it to create a live feed configuration. Now, this configuration is not limited to Youtube, we can use it for twitch, fb live , périscope. In this article, I’m going to focus on Youtube live stream.

1: Pre-Requisite

To launch basic streaming, you need three things:-

1. YouTube Account.
2. Device- Laptop, Desktop, Phone, Tablet e.t.c.
3. Excellent Internet connection. (Speed counts for the quality of the video continuously).

That’s all, just open YouTube Studio app and “Go Live”.

But hang on, that’s not the end here, at least not for my use case. So my idea is to create a video podcast where I will invite various participants, mixing video and audio from various sources in real time. This is not possible in the above configuration, now the actual agitation has started.

2: Setting up

First draw up a list of my requirements:-

• Wait for the stream delay message.
• Introduction video followed with a feed
• Option for changing more than one scene on request.
• Add participants from different video applications (for example Zoom, Meet, Teams)
• Share a variety of live video sources, such as YouTube, spotify and local media resources.

2.1.1 Stream Delay Message

Let me explain what I’m talking about. Fundamentally, I want to show a video message informing the user that the feed will begin soon please hold your horses:). I didn’t really need it because I don’t have a lot of live viewers, but I did it anyway:).

After some google searches I found this great website canva, You can create here different Audio, Video, Gifs and what not. Simply put, it suits all our use cases.

Canva offers you plenty of free templates, items, audio, video clip to choose from. I selected a blank template, added “Stream will start soon” by adding textual elements, downloaded a custom animation Gif and chose a soothing audio clip. Now just download it as Mp4 and just like that your late Stream message is ready.

You can check my sample of stream lag message at the very beginning of this video.

2.1.1 Introductory video/ Trailer Video

Canva provides you with sufficient resources to create a video trailer, but if you’re in more complicated things follow along.

First, I used canva to build an animated video with no audio. You could ask why without sound? I have an idea of background music that I would like to mix with a voice message, which is not possible in canva.

Google again to help, with some fast searches, I found this awesome audio mixing tool named Audacity.

I haven’t explored all of it, but I’m learning enough to do some basic mixing. Audacity is a native tool that has the ability to record, mix and modify sound data. I used Audacity to save the voice message, I made sure to give a few seconds of blank data before reading my message, it will help reduce the noise.

Click the selection tool and select the blank data from the sound wave shape. Go to effect -> noise reduction and click on «get noise profile», you now have a noise profile which we are now going to use to filter the noise of the entire audio. Using the selection tool, select the entire sound waveform now. Click on effect -> noise reduction and click ok, again click effect and click on normalize, click ok. Read and listen now for a more fluent output:)

We have the vocal message ready, now we need background music to accompany the video. It’s really hard to find good free music on the internet. After a little agitation I decided to make my own, Groovepad to save.

Groovepad is a really incredible application, here you can buy several musical packs. Each pack is bundled with a few defaults beats, leads, drums, guitars, sound effects. I’ve decided I’m going with Industrial Rock Pack. After a couple of attempts and mistakes, I did the music I was looking for.

Now I have my voice audio data and background music data, but before mixing them with the video file, I must mix the two audio files as one. Additionally, I want to mix the two audio files in a way, when the vocal message plays the background music volume down so that the user can listen to the vocal message. But once the audio crosses the vocals, the volume of the background music should return to the original level.

We will return to Audacity for this, here is the link from the video that shows you exactly how to do this. I’m probably going to put a similar video on my channel:).

Great, now we have both audio and video ready, but they are still not embedded so our next task is to mix and synchronize audio and video.

I used imovie for this, but you can choose Windows Movie Maker too, since both of these are free options. My future plan is to invest more time into video editing and purchase the final professional cut. But since the article refers to not investing money, we will not discuss it.

imovie is a simple tool, drag and drop audio and video clips onto the timeline (lower panel). Alternatively, you can import multimedia files from the menu. Once you have downloaded all the necessary media, you can click Play to check the synchronization, the speed of audio playback. If you think there is a synchronization issue in the media files, you can use timeline tools to adjust the length of the audio video, split the media images or freeze the image.

My music video was a bit longer than my music video, so I split the very last second of my video frame. I change the split frame into a frozen image over the length of my sound clip. Once the video is finished, come back to the projects by clicking triple point-> share -> media and export the file locally.

The trailer of your channel is ready, bravo!

You can check out my channel trailer here.

If you like this article, you can give me a clap as well check my last YT channel.