Learning With Lucie: AppSmash - WeVideo and Google Slides

The new WeVideo IMPORT PDF feature combined and Google Slides are a great duo for collaborative video creation!

When it comes to collaboration, Google slides rule!

When it comes to creating videos, WeVideo rules!

Now with the new IMPORT PDF feature of WeVideo, collaborating on a Video just got even better.

First of all let me describe the new Import PDF feature of WeVideo and why this has me so excited!

Usually when we add media assets to a video creation project, we are adding photos, video clips, and sound clips!

But recently WeVideo has made it possible to ADD PDF files as media to a video project. When you select Upload Media and you select a PDF file, WeVideo automatically separates each page into a different image for you to drag and organize as you like into the timeline of your video! Way cool!

Select Add Media 2. Select a PDF file

3. Drag individual pages from your PDF from your MEDIA folder to your TIMELINE

So now you can take any tool that can save as a PDF and use it to create content for your Video projects! (PowerPoint, Word, Open Office, Google Docs, Google Slides)

This opens up lots of possibilities for Cover Pages, Transitions, Backgrounds for Green Screen, and even core content in your narrative. (PowerPoint, Word, Open Office, Google Docs, Google Slides)

When you are ready to import your content into WeVideo

Simply Use DOWNLOAD AS and select PDF from the File Menu of your favorite tool!

Then Upload Media (ADD the PDF) to the Media Folder for your WeVideo Project.

Each slide will appear as a separate media asset that you can drag onto the timeline.

Once these are added to the Media folder of a project, only ONE of the collaborators can work on the video at a time! Since the bulk of most video project is planning, storyboarding, locating or creating media assets, using Google slides is a great way to keep all members involved in many steps of the video creating process. The whole team stays actively involved for much longer.

If you choose Google Slides as your content creation tool for your video, your team can

work together to create beautiful content for a digital story or narrative slideshow
organize the content in any order they want
revise and reorder them as they work
use comments to discuss and plan throughout the process
use the NOTES section of Google slides to plan narration or storyboard
add placeholder slides for where video clips or effects might appear in the projects

Once the media assets are imported into the Video project, your team can continue to collaborate using the collaborative features of WeVIdeo EDU, but remember that the at this point in the process, the collaboration happens ASYNCHRONOUSLY! Which means only one team member can EDIT the video at a time. Similarly to the way Wikis or Google Sites works, the first person to start editting gains control of the video, and others editors are locked out until the collaborator is finishes, and leaves the project. As soon as the editor saves their edit and closes the video project, the video is available for the next person to edit. How I describe it to others is that “Only one person can hold the pencil at a time. You need to let go of the pencil to pass it on to someone else to edit”.

But as with any Group project, the rest of the team can be working on finding music or sound effects, creating credits and title slides (in Google Slides). Or perhaps, you might break up your projects in sections and create more than one Google Slide Show. After each section is complete, you can provide different team members with the job of adding that section to the video project and editting the video project, while the rest of the students continue to work on the the next section of the project in Google Slides.

One more collaboration tip: For each video project, consider setting up a Google Folder where you can store your Google Slides along with any images, photos, and music that you might want to add to your video projects. (Even though only one person can add to the actual video project at a time, ALL members of the team can add images, video clips photos, and music to a Google folder synchronously -- and they can even do this from their phones using the Google Drive app!

Meanwhile the ONE person who is actually editing the video project from inside we Video can simply IMPORT the new media assets into WeVideo using the IMPORT from Google DRIVE feature of WeVideo!