Adobe Spark Movie

Adobe Spark Video allows you to upload video and string several clips together into one movie. It’s pretty similar to uploading digital photos, but instead of clicking on the photo icon you’ll click on the video icon.

I’ve already done the beginning slide with a title and a photo behind it, but for the rest let’s use some videos I recorded of me showing pictures of the boarding school I attended and talking about what life was like there.

Click on a thumbnail and click on the video icon. Double click on the video you want to upload…and there it is.

Now one disadvantage is that there’s no visual sound track, so you just have to click play. And I actually need to move this out to the very end and it only gives me 30 seconds, so that’s all you have in each thumbnail. Let’s go ahead and play this and see if we’ve got these in the right places.

Okay, right there I’m going to bring that in just a little bit and let’s start again.

“When I was six years old I was sent away to boarding school, and I was excited to go! I was in the first grade and this school was a place that my older brother and sister had been to and had told me exciting stories about, so I went away and this is about the size of the school. I’m in the second row the second one from the left. So, there were about 40 or 50 kids in…”

Now, as you can see it cut me off at 30 seconds. So what I’m going to have to do is actually move this a little bit to the left and I can’t really tell if I’m getting it in the right place.

I would have to listen to it from the beginning again because it doesn’t let me put my cursor down anywhere here in the middle. I just have to start right at the beginning.

So let’s just pretend that I got this right and to save time let’s go ahead and click Save.

Now let’s adjust a few more things starting with the edit strip you see on the video. The sound defaults to soft, which isn’t very loud, so click on the sound icon and change the sound to loud. You’ll have to do this on every clip.

Let me click here again and get that strip back. I also want to click on the Zoom icon and I’m going to zoom this in a little bit…and move it up…and that way you can see that this is me right here. So I’ll click outside of this to commit that.

If you already did the narration in the videos there’s no need to use the microphone on the app, so that saves some time.

You may want to click on Music in the upper right and click to toggle the sound off. Here it is on and here it is off.

I’ve added a couple more video clips, and now I want to show you how to string a video that’s longer than 30 seconds across two or more thumbnails.

On this video the sound was cut off at 30 seconds. When that happens go ahead and save it and do your edits.

I’ve already changed the sound to loud and I’ve zoomed in a bit, but I also need to click on the “Continue Clip” icon.

Let’s take this out as long as it wants to go. We’ll go ahead and play this…OK, so that gets the entire rest of the clip in there. We’ll go ahead and save that…

And there’s that second clip right there with that little mark, that little icon, connecting the two clips.

This will ensure that the sound will continue at the exact spot where it left off—and it does a good job of connecting the sound. You can keep duplicating and connecting as many thumbnails as you need to finish that clip.

So that’s a very brief overview of Adobe Spark Video using actual video clips. If you know about the few little quirks you can end up with a very nice video!