Transcription
How To Create a YouTube Intro
Hey everyone. In today's video, I wanted to show you how to create animated logo intros or logo stings for your YouTube videos. This could obviously go beyond YouTube videos if you're doing other video production work, but these logos stings are a great way to catch your audience and then show them the production value of your videos.
So I really recommend creating a three to five seconds logo intro to have at the beginning of your YouTube videos. Now we're going to do this in a couple of different ways. I'm going to show you the professional way to do it. And if that seems too complicated for you, I'm going to show you a website called Fiverr and I'll link to that in the description where you could actually pay someone to do it. It could be as little as $5.
I'll show you an example of both of those. I've done both. So some of the logos you see on the screens I created using this technique. I'll show you one of these actually completely from scratch. Where to get the template, what software to use. And in the 20 minutes that this video is going to take, I'll show you exactly what to do step by step.
Even if you've never heard of this software before. And the Fiverr option, if you click that link, you can basically just hire someone starts from $5, but it could be as much as a few hundred dollars, depending on what you're looking for. But one of the logos I'm going to show you here, that's actually playing here was only $5.
So let's focus on the most professional options. Most of the ones you see here were created that way. They were created in a program called Adobe Premiere. It has a similar and free trial. So if you don't have it, I'll link to it in the description and go ahead and get it. I use it right now is open and I use it for all my videos, over 500 YouTube videos, and all my professional work was created on Adobe Premiere.
But you could get a free trial. And instead of creating things from scratch, I actually use VideoHive I'll link to that in the description where you can basically get these templates for Adobe Premiere. For my clients, I may do this from scratch or have my editors do this from scratch, but that does take a whole lot longer.
These templates could get you a video logo sting just in a few minutes. And if you want it to go beyond this video, After Effects, Adobe After Effects is an animation software, that's a lot more complicated than Adobe Premiere. So I'm not going to focus on it in this video, but some of these logos, like this one, actually was created in Adobe After Effects, again, using a template from VideoHive.
So we're going to jump into video hive, make sure you get yourself a copy of Adobe Premiere if you don't have it. And between Adobe Premiere and VideoHive, we're going to get this done for about $20 to $30. And then there is a little bit of audio that goes along with each one. And I get that from Audio Jungle.
I'll show you how to get that right as well. So if you want it to spend just five bucks, I'll show you Fiverr at the end of the video. But right now let's jump in the computer, get our template, and get started creating our logo animation in Adobe Premiere.
So the link should take you right here to video hive under logo stings, and there's a lot of variation of different logo stings here.
We're going to download one of them and animate it. So these could be as simple as what you see here, but they could be a lot more advanced. I'm going to walk you through this whole process of getting these animated logo intros. But if you go back to this page, as you could see, there are a ton of different ones.
Some include images, some are just simple text, but what these do is when you download these, you do need software to actually animate. And the most common industry standard is called Adobe After Effects. Now, if you go to an Adobe After Effects drop-down and go to logo stings, you're going to see some really great logos things.
But I think it's a little bit too advanced. Adobe After Effects is one of the hardest software from the Adobe suite to learn. So the other option is Adobe Premiere Pro, and which has logo stings. And I'll put a link to Adobe premiere pro. If you don't have it, you could get it for free for seven days. So you could create the logo intro with that trial.
It won't have a watermark. I use it obviously to create all my videos. So I already have a subscription that I pay monthly for. It's actually the whole creative suite that has after effects, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, and things like that. If I click it over here, you can see all the different apps that I get for about 50 bucks a month.
That gives me access to all of these. So for this video, we're going to worry about Adobe Premiere Pro. Now let's go to the premiere pro here on the logo stings. We're going to actually download one. Then I'll show you how to use it. Once we get done with the process here, if it seems too advanced, I'll show you a quick way on how to get these from anywhere from five to twenty bucks for someone else to do the job for you.
There is a link to fiverr.com and I'll show you how to take advantage of that. But let's jump in and get a logo that we want here on Adobe premier, by the way, if you don't have any logos or text is not enough, and you want something more elaborate, like the logo you see here, what you would do is go to the graphic section here.
Which takes you to graphicsriver.net. This is a whole different page, but it does have a logo section. So if you go to the logo and press popular right here, you could see that there are a bunch of different logos that you could choose from depending on what your videos are about or whatever your company name is.
So for example, this is kind of cool. If I was doing Howfinity. This infinity logo is kind of a good fit to start with if I didn't want to create something from scratch. I created mine from scratch in Adobe Illustrator, my logo. But this is the process of getting one right off the shelf here. Again, these are relatively inexpensive for what you get.
If you paid someone to create a logo for you, it will be a lot more expensive than it's usually a couple of hundred dollars to $500, $600, depending on what you want. You could also use fiverr.com. I can get it for much cheaper, even cheaper than these templates. So those are a couple of different places to get a logo but am I assuming you already have your logo or you're just going to use text.
So again, we're going to go to VideoHive, we're going to go to logo stings. Now you could go ahead and sort by bestseller, newest, best rated, and so on. And if one fits your brand, go ahead and choose it. In this case, I'm actually going to buy this and I'm going to show you how to actually use it in Adobe Premiere.
Let me click it and make sure every time you click on one read right here, see says a hundred percent premiere pro, not after effects. So if we're getting premiere pro only make sure you look at a text that says something like this and makes sure it says no plugin required. Some do actually require a plugin. The duration of this is too long for me.
But I'm going to actually make the speed 200% to make this five seconds. People really don't have the patience for having a ten-second intro. So we're going to cut that in half and if you press play, you could actually hear the song too. Little logo sting that you will have to purchase separately, but that is a must-have, that little audio.
Again, you could also find that under the audio section here, so that takes you to Audio Jungle. So the Envato marketplace has basically multiple different sites, each one dedicated to a different thing. So if you start with video, you could go to audio and then you could go to logo and indents and listened to some popular options of what a brief logo intro could look like.
If you don't like the ones that video hive actually recommends to you. So in my case, maybe I didn't like the song that this recommended for me. And then you could see in the description below, it's gonna tell me where that song came from. Right here. It says music is not included. You can find the corporate logo, which will take you to Audio jungle.
So as you can see, that's about $11 to get a license for that, and make sure you watch your entire logo. Sometimes they have different backgrounds and different options here that you could check out. Now that I like this, I'm going to go ahead and add it to the cart. I'm going to go to checkout. This is $19.
And now on this page, you need to either create an account or sign in if you already have one, I already have one. So I'm going to sign in and there's usually a $2 handling fee on these. So I'm going to go ahead and make the payment right here on this page. And it says my payments are complete. So I could either download it here or go to the download page to see more.
As you can see, I use this website quite a bit for a lot of different things, including stock footage. Even my YouTube intros and layovers are here. A lot of my music that I purchase is here and I've been using it for probably about seven years. As you can see, there are a lot of different pages, a lot of different things I've purchased on this marketplace.
So now I'm going to go ahead and press download here. We're going to go ahead and download this main file and it's going to download as a zip. I'm going to go ahead and open the zip here and inside the zip. I have a help file. So it's going to tell me exactly how to use this process here. It's going to even give me a link to the soundtrack and the fonts here, everything that I need about this project.
And I have the premiere project file here. This is what I need to open and under footage, I don't have to worry about it, but some of the footage that is going to come with that logo is going to come right there in that footage file. I'm not going to touch this. I could read this if I get confused about any of the steps of the process, I'm going to go ahead and double click this.
Again, make sure you click the link in the description and got yourself the latest version of Adobe Premiere. And if you don't want to keep it, that's okay. I recommend it for editing videos, but if this is all you're using it for that's okay, let's go ahead and open it. So it just opened Adobe Premiere pro for me here.
And if you've never used premier pro, we could still do this. This doesn't take much to actually get these to be more customized. But you could see here's final sequence one. Here's two, here's three. They're already open in your timeline. This is your timeline right over here. And this is your audio and video tracks.
The video ones are V1 through V4 over here and your audio, which we have not purchased is greyed out here on audio one. And you could also see them over here on the bin here where we could actually make some adjustments to them as needed, but let's go ahead and go to the second one. This is the one I liked the most.
I'm going to press play. And as you can see, this is the animation and I obviously want to change a few things here. So I'm going to let it play all the way and it's 10 seconds long. So I could turn each layer on and off if I want to. So this layer is basically that search box. The search text is inside of it.
And if I go here to the tagline, that's video layer two, I could turn that on it, but in order to actually edit these, again, this is going to depend on your project and I do have a tutorial for Adobe Premiere if you just want to get familiar with it, but let me go to version two here on the side. This is my project bin, over here.
And if I go to edit. And if I want to edit my text here, you could see the tagline on the search text. So the first thing I want to change is the search text. Let me double click and it'll bring me to this text window where I could actually just make the change. So this channel, for example, and this whole Howfinity platform is to teach you how to do anything.
So that's what I'm going to use right here. How to do anything. And then you'll go-ahead to the search window. So now for the tagline, I'm going to double click that. And right now it's Envato. I'm going to change that to Howfinity.com. So now I got that and the last thing I need to do is add my logo. So I'll go back here on the side, I'll collapse text.
That's the little arrow here and I'll go to the logo. So let me go ahead and click this. This looks like another sequence. So if I double click it, it's going to open the logo sequence for me and it's completely empty. So I need to drag a video file over here that is my logo, which does not exist. So I need to bring it in.
How do I do that? Right here on this bin, I could just double click. And it'll open a window here where I could bring my logo. Now I have a logo already saved up as a PNG. So I'm going to go ahead and find that I'm going to go to my Dropbox and look for it. And as you can see, I have a lot of variations of my logo, but in this case, because it's a white background, I'm going to want a black logo.
So I'm going to look for that one. And this is it. This is the logo that I've created in Adobe Illustrator with just a few different shapes and just a simple font. I'm going to press import. I'm going to say merge all layers. That's okay. And this is the PSD file. That's a Photoshop file basically. And I could just go ahead and bring this over here and I could grab the end of it and extend the time.
So this is about 10 seconds. I could make it about 10 seconds or so. Now it's black on black, so you actually can't see it. But if I go back to the sequence, final sequence two, you could see it over here. It just now is black and white. So it appears, but as you could see, the Howfinity.com text is covered over here behind the logo.
So if I select this layer right here, this is the logo and tagline. I could go ahead and double click on it to open it. It looks like it's in a different sequence. And the two things are on top of each other here. So what I want to do is grab the tagline. I just selected the tagline. I'm going to go ahead and close this text window and there is an effective control. Again, if you've never used Premiere, this might seem a little much, especially if you're not using this exact template.
So again, I recommend learning Premiere a little bit. So these simple things come easy to you but select the tagline here. Go to our effects control, and we want to just basically take the position and bring it down. You see how this is moving in up and down. I'll move it down here. And now if I go to my final sequence, this has moved down.
So it just says Howfinity, Howfinity.com. And my logo is there. And now the rest of the animation seems to work very well. I could even change my background here. So my background currently is white, but if I select it, I could change the background color to be any other color. So as you can see, here's my background color.
Here's a picture layer. I could even throw a picture over here to make the background different, but if I double click that I could change the background, let's say to blue. If I wanted the background to look darker blue, and now if I go back to the final sequence, you could see it's dark blue, obviously, that doesn't work with the way they wanted color is.
So I'm going to go back again, again double click and I'll bring him back to white. Let's go back to the final sequence and you see what that looks like here. Now, final sequence one and three have not changed at all because I didn't do anything there, but I only changed the things inside of this version two.
That's why only version two has changed. I like what I'm seeing here. Next, what I want to do is I need to add this audio file here that is actually not purchased yet. So I need to find a logo sting that I like and add it over here. Now, where do we find that? Let's go back to VideoHive there. If I go to Audio Jungle here.
I could go to logo and indents and just go ahead and look for popular items here. And I could just basically press play on the ones that are closer to my length. So this one's nine seconds, so press play. And that obviously doesn't fit, but you get the idea here, just go ahead and press play on a few of those and see which one fits the animation.
Just use your tastes there. And then once you pick one, we're going to go ahead and download and purchase one the same exact way. You basically add it to the cart and then just pay for it. So now that once we've done that, let's go ahead and import it over here. I'm going to go ahead and again, double click and find it and import it.
Now with modern logo two, the one I just bought, I'm going to bring that over here. And now I could press play
and it looks like this is only six seconds and my video is longer. So here's how I'm going to actually speed this up and make this twice as fast. Now, this is a little bit more advanced. So stick with me. I'm going to select all these layers. Background and all these three layers. And I'm going to go ahead and write or control-click here on a Mac, and I'm going to go ahead and nest them.
So if I nest them, he becomes one track basically. You see, it's now one track. I could always double click this to see what's the upside of it and make those changes. But now that it's nested, I could go ahead and right-click and I could go to speed. And I can make it 200%, double the speed, press okay. And you could see you just cut the time in half.
I could actually erase the audio track one. I don't need it. I haven't purchased that one, that was recommended. I created my own, but if you purchased that one, it usually times exactly. And it doesn't become this complicated. So now let's take a listen and look.
Okay. That seems to work. And it's about five seconds. If I want it to make it any faster, I could still go to speed and I can make it 250, for example. And then I could go ahead and bring this back and shrink it back. Let's see what that looks like.
That seemed to work a lot better this time. And it's only about four seconds, which is kind of perfect. Three to five seconds. I've seen channels that go up to 10 seconds, but you're going to lose the audience right at the beginning of the video if you're newer on YouTube. So now that I have this ready with sound and video, I'm going to go ahead to file.
And then I'm going to go to export and media, or you can press command M or control M here if you're on a PC. So now I have my format, H264. I have my preset, YouTube, 1080P HD. I have the width and that's 1080. I could also do YouTube 4k. If I bought a 4k version of this logo. Everything else, I'm going to leave the same, hardware coding if you have it. One bit VBR, one past 16, all these are the same. This is all I changed basically on top. And I'm going to go ahead and press export. And it's going to go ahead and export it. And now if I look at the file on my desktop here, I could just go ahead and press play and see exactly what that looks like.
And at any time, I could basically drop this on any of my video files and I'm good to go. Okay. I hope you stuck with me through that. I know it could be a lot, especially if you're not familiar with Adobe Premiere here, but I promise you Adobe After Effects, it was a lot more complicated, even though you can make a lot more advanced logos stings in that one.
And at some point, I'll make a video on how to do that. But now let me show you the part I promise you where you actually don't have to do anything and don't create anything. What you do there is click the link below to take you to fiverr.com. And the link I have brings you basically to this page where you could see some other people, they have logo animations already created, and they could be as little as $5.
So let's click on this one. This guy has a 4.9 out of five stars. As you could see, some of these logo animations are just $5 in 720P. So, you may have to pay a little bit more to get 1080, for example. And as you can see, what's included is here. Super simple, lot of variations, but you don't have a lot of control here.
They basically look like what they look like. These creators usually use a template, so they don't have a lot of control there. Like you would with something in Premiere or After Effects. But there are a lot of options to get you started. The ones that you see that are for a lot more come from Fiverr Pro.
So if you see something that's closer to a thousand dollars, they may do a lot more for you including creating your logo and right on this website. You could also look for people to create your logo. So if you have nothing, right here, logo design, get someone five or $10 to create a logo for you, then pay someone else under logo animation, 5, 10, or more, depending on what you're looking for to animate the logo sting for you.
So that's one way to go. The other way is the one I showed you where you do spend money on a video file here, a template under Premiere logo stings. And then you go to the audio jungle. If you want to buy the little song that comes along with the logo sting, and you get yourself Adobe Premiere, or Adobe After Effects, again, depending on what you're looking to do and how advanced you want to go.
Well, I hope that wasn't too complicated for you and you found this video useful. If you were too complicated, again, check out the Fiverr option. That will just simplify a lot of the things that we did in Adobe Premiere. And if you were too simple and you're looking for something more complicated, Adobe After Effects is definitely the way to go.
So let me know in the comment section if you want me to make a video about Adobe After Effects, again, you can marry VideoHive to it. So you don't have to create something from scratch that could get it a lot more complicated. Sometimes we spend up to three days on the logo animation that we create from scratch.
So let me know in the comment where you thought of this, please give it a thumbs up if you'd find it useful. I want to create these more in-depth tutorials, multiple times a week. And I hope to catch you on the next video. Thanks so much for watching.