30 seconds not long enough? How to create a longer HTC Video Highlight

Have you ever found yourself in a situation in which you have too many Zoes and pictures for the HTC Highlight Video? 30 seconds is a decent amount of time for most circumstances, but not always. There are many times in which you might have more than ten Zoes along with videos and other pictures. 30 seconds isn’t going to cut it so I came up with a very simple way to make sure you are able to capture all the memories that you want using HTC’s amazing Video Highlights feature. Of course, if you have a desktop with video editing software, you can do just about anything you want, but most people don’t have the time to fool around with that stuff. Just head on past the break for two very simple methods to get the job done. I will show you how to make a 60-second version, but you can apply these concepts to make any length as long they are in 30 second increments.

 

Option 1 – Using your phone

**If you would rather watch how this is done, skip to the video below.

Split your event

Since the HTC Video Highlight feature cannot make a 60-second (or longer) clip, you need to make two 30-second clips. You can’t just make two 30 second clips from the same event because chances are that you will have too much overlap and you will still have a hard time getting all your clips in the final product. So the first thing you want to do is create two separate events. If you need to make a longer video, you can split your clips into more events. Just go to the Events folder in your Gallery and long press on the Event in question. Select “Split to” and choose the clips you want to move. I usually select about half of the clips (assuming you want to do a 60-second video). After you have selected your clips, just tap “SPLIT” at the bottom right, and you will return to the event page. Just hit the plus sign at the top right to create your new event. Name the event the same name, but add a “2″ to it. So if your original event was “Rob’s Birthday Party”, just make this new event “Rob’s Birthday Party 2″ so it’s easy to keep track. Now you have two events and each event will produce an automatic Highlight Video using different clips with no overlap.

After you have completed this guide, you can combine the clips again by long pressing the new event that you just created and select “Merge to”.

Note: HTC has a better way to do this (instead of splitting events), but unfortunately it isn’t working at the time of this post. When playing a Video Highlight, you can tap the three dot menu at the top right and choose “Select Content”. You can choose the clips that you want to use for the video highlight, but unfortunately there is some sort of bug and it doesn’t work. HTC is fixing this with an update. Depending on when you’re reading this post, you might be able to use this method if you received the update.

Save each video highlight as a separate mp4

Now we need to save the Video Highlight created from each Event. I am assuming if you are reading this guide, you know how to get to your video highlights and make adjustments. If not, see our previous guide. Go to the first event and make any changes you want to the Video Highlight in terms of effects and/or shuffling to your satisfaction. Once you have decided on a Video Highlight that you like, hit the three dot menu at the top right while the video is playing, tap save, name the file to whatever you want (or keep their default), and tap OK. After about 30 seconds, the video will be saved to your gallery in the “Video Highlight” folder under “Albums”. You need to do this for the 2nd Event that you created as well. Assuming you titled the events the way I instructed, you should be able to keep the defaults names.

Note: You can either choose the same effect for both Video Highlights or choose a different effect for each.

Cut the portion of the your chosen song

Since HTC doesn’t offer longer versions of their jingles, you will most likely need to use any other song you want. You could leave HTC’s music, but you will find that it might not transition properly between the two 30 second clips. It’s not that hard to use your own song, and we already did a guide on it. The below information is directly from that guide with the only exception being the length of the song you need to cut.

The song you want to use needs to be on your HTC One. You want to grab a free app from the Play Store called ringPod, which edits mp3 files for ringtones. I know these apps are a dime a dozen, but I prefer this one because it has an easy option to fade the last few seconds of the song, which is important.

Open ringPod and select the song you want to use for your video. You will then see the first 15 seconds of the song already highlighted. What you want to do is tap the box next to “End” (at the bottom) for the end time and change it to 62.00 for 62 seconds.  The selected area will now change showing 0 to 62 seconds. You can now hit play and listen to this “selected area”. If you want another area of the song, slide the selected area over different parts of the song keeping the 62-second limit. I should also point out that the highlight video will show as 60 seconds, but definitely make your song 62 seconds to make sure the video editor doesn’t try to loop it. If you are going to join 3 or more highlight videos, you will need to adjust the length accordingly.

After you are happy with the chosen part of the song, hit the three dot menu at the top right and select “Fade and Volume”. In rare instances, you can skip this step if the song sounds right, but most of the time you will want to add the number of seconds for a “Fade Out”. I have been using 4 seconds, but you can play with it and decide what you like. By using 4 seconds, it will start fading right when the HTC Ad appears at the end of the video.

Now all you have to do is save the selected area as a new song. After tapping the disk icon at the top, you can choose either alarm, music, ringtone, or notification for the type. It really doesn’t matter what you choose, but I use “music”. This way all of my edited songs will be in the “music” folder. Name the file whatever you want and tap “Save”.  Don’t worry, your original song will still be intact.

Now you have two videos (or more) and a song. The only thing left is to join them all in holy matrimony.

Combine the Video Highlights and the Music

I recently reviewed WeVideo, which is a video editor. There are a number of video editors, so you can try whatever you want, but I found WeVideo to have all the features needed to make this simple and painless. If there is one issue in using WeVideo, it’s the fact that it will downgrade your video to 720p, but I don’t consider that a big deal at all. If you really want a 1080p version, you can pay 99-cents for it.

You can refer to my review of WeVideo for more information, but we are going to keep things very simple for this application. Since WeVideo is a cloud solution, you will need to create an account. You can simply log in with your Gmail account, Facebook, or another email address.

After you are set up, the first thing you want to do is start a project and name it. You are then given the opportunity to add videos, images, and music to your project, but we are only going to add two (or more) videos and one song. Before you do anything, tap on the title box that is already in the timeline. Check, “NO TITLE FOR MY VIDEO” and tap “Done”. Ultimately you can leave the title in place, but it will add to the length of your video, which means you would need to make the appropriate adjustment to your song. I choose to go without the title in order to preserve what HTC is doing.

Next up is to insert the two (or more) Video Highlights (mp4) that you saved earlier into the timeline. Just drag them into the timeline below. You can also change the order of the videos by sliding them. Once you have decided on which video is going to be first, you need to tap it (within the timeline) to adjust the clip. Under the Trim tab, you will see left and right controls for the length of the video with the left control being at 00:00 and the right control at 00:32. You want to slide the right control to the left to 00:28. This eliminates the HTC ad that shows up at the end of the video. You only need to do this for the first video assuming you are doing a 60-second movie. If you are doing a longer movie, then you need to do this on every video, but the last one. If you want to remove it from the last video, you will need to adjust your music since my instructions are based on the ad showing up at the end of the last video. As far as I am concerned, HTC has done a fantastic job with Video Highlights and deserves the advertisement. I didn’t create the videos, they did.

Assuming you are going to use your own song, you also need to tap on the “Volume” tab and slide the volume down to zero. This will eliminate HTC”s song. If you want to try and use HTC’s music, you can skip this for now and preview the entire video. If you then decide to use your own song, you can go back and change the volume afterwards. Make sure to tap “Done” to ensure your changes for the clip and volume (if you changed it) are saved. If you didn’t change the volume of the video clip, you can now hit the Play icon at the bottom left to see if you like your video with HTC’s music. If you don’t like it, just tap on the first video again (within the timeline) and tap the “Volume” tab and slide the volume to zero. If you do like how HTC’s music sounds, then skip on to the publish section.

Now tap the second video (within the timeline) and tap on the “Volume” tab and move the slider down to zero just like you did with the first video. This needs to be applied to all videos if you are using your own music.

Swipe over to the Audio section and select the song that you made with ringPod. It should be easy to find since “ringPod” will be the artist for all songs that you edit. Just tap on the song and you are good to go.

The next step is to preview your work of art. Just hit the play button at the bottom left to watch the video with your song. At this point, you should be happy with the result, but if there is anything that is unsatisfactory, it will mostly likely be the song. You can still  go back to ringPod and make another adjustment and swap the song clip.

Publish your video

Assuming you like everything, just tap “Publish” at the bottom right. You can check “Save a local copy” to save the video to your phone, and if you added your YouTube and Facebook accounts, you can automatically upload the finished product to those sites as well. Once you have decided on these options, just tap “Publish” again. Your video and music will be uploaded to and rendered at the WeVideo site. It can take as much as 10 to 20 minutes to complete, but it all happens in the background, so you can do other things.

Once your video is completed and/or uploaded to your social sites, you will get a notification and an email letting you know. If you chose to “Save a local copy”, you will find your video in the gallery in the “Movies” folder under “Albums”. It will be an mp4 file so you can do whatever you want with it. You can save it in Dropbox and/or upload it to any site you want.

If you ever want to change it to another song, you will be able to easily since your projects will be saved in WeVideo. You can also go to the WeVideo website and edit via your chosen browser if you so wish. You can also pay for a 1080p version using your desktop as well.

Sometimes reading the instructions can be grueling so I put together this hands on video showing you each and every step. Trust me, this is very easy.

Note: By using copyrighted songs, you could run into a problem with YouTube even though you aren’t using it for commercial purposes. Most of the time, YouTube will only ban your video from certain countries, but if this is an issue, you can search for various royalty free music online that you can use. If YouTube is going to be your main area for sharing, you might want to take a look at option 2 below.

Option 2

If you don’t mind using your desktop and you plan on using your video on YouTube, you can easily combine videos and change the music by using the YouTube Editor. There are a couple of drawbacks. One is that you can only use the music that is partnered with YouTube and the second is that you can’t apply a fade. On the plus side, you will be able to retain your 1080p video quality and you don’t have to worry about YouTube taking your video down.

Just upload both videos to YouTube and set them as private. Go into the YouTube Editor. You can combine both (or more) videos and clip the HTC ad from all the videos other than the last one. You can leave HTC’s music in place or select audio and select any song from the YouTube library. Unfortunately, it isn’t so easy to find songs, but it is an avenue that works and is quite simple.

If you want to see our other guides regarding the HTC One, click here.