With the channel trailer YouTube gives creators a great way to make a splash when visitors come to their channel home page.
The idea is that when a visitor comes to your channel you can put the exact video you want in front of them.
YouTube makes it easy to set up 2 custom channel trailers – one for visitors who are not subscribed, another for returning subscribers.
You can show:
- A video telling a new viewer what they can expect to see & hear
- One of your videos that gets lots of subscriptions
- Your most popular video
- Your latest video
- Whatever works best for you
To make a trailer for your channel is simple. Follow along as I make mine using free tools and royalty-free and public domain audio and video.
YouTube Channel Trailer Example
A guest on the vidIQ podcast described how he made a special 45-second long trailer to introduce new visitors to his channel. His trailer explains exactly what the viewer can expect to see and hear in his videos, in a short and catchy way.
Since Blast Off My Channel! is new and I don’t have any subscribers yet, I want to tell people what they will find here.
I had already come up with a catchphrase or slogan or whatever as I was making the banner for my channel.
“Start your channel. Attract your audience. Spread your message.”
I wanted to get that message out fast and easy to understand.
Now I just needed some way to catch the attention and keep the viewer watching.
What better way to get someone’s attention than red hot flames blasting loudly from a rocket taking off?
I needed some content for the video. Since government documents are public domain, I got the audio and video from the Apollo 11 launch.
I used 4K Video Downloader to grab the video from YouTube.
I pulled the video into Screenflow, cut it down to the section I wanted, then cranked up the saturation until the flames were a hot red.
To make the video fit in the 19 second short channel trailer I had to speed up the video a lot. I needed to bring a 3 minute 20 second portion down to about 7 seconds long.
Screenflow allows you to speed up a video clip by about 330%, so I:
- sped up the clip
- exported the clip
- imported the new clip
Then I did it 3 more times! Finally, I put the clip in place on the timeline, made some adjustments, then it was good to go.
I made the video thumbnail from a frame in the video and screen captured it.
For the background behind the text I made another screenshot. The flames were white in the video and it made the text easy to read, so I took a frame where the screen was brightest and made the background static while text was displayed.
I used the font generators at Font Meme to make the graphics.
I got the audio of the rocket launch here:
I heard the deep synthesizer sound I liked in the sample compilation audio clip on the free sound effects page at 99 Sounds.
Instead of trying to dig through the site and find that exact sample, instead I recorded the screen with Screenflow while the audio played on the website. Then I cut down the clip until it was just a small burst of sound that would fit 4 times in the video.
The robot voice is from Online Tone Generator.
I put it all together and rendered it and it looks pretty good. It’s lofi, like everything else I do.
But considering how I hacked it together using a bunch of free tools and content it’s not too bad.
I wanted something short and sweet that gets attention and shares my message fast. It works for that.
If you don’t yet have a trailer for your YouTube channel yet, what are you waiting for?
It’s easy, quick, and will help you blast off your channel. Get started on yours now!