Creating great videos takes a lot of time and effort, so it makes sense that you’d want to maximize use of those clips. 

While we all know it’s not always the best idea to repost the same content to all social media platforms, it’s still possible to re-use your footage across multiple platforms. Here’s how. 

Keep All Your Clips

When you capture drone footage, keep all clips instead of deleting the unused ones immediately. This will give you more material to rework into new content without having to reshoot anything. Let’s look at some possibilities. 

Don’t Discount Bloopers

If you post a video that took some effort to make, you likely have several failed attempts on camera. You can edit these fails together to make a bloopers vid to post after the initial one is posted. This can work well as follow-up content to a successful post to show the effort that goes into producing your work, or it can serve as a background for a motivational message to encourage people to keep trying. 

Alternate Angles

Setting up an iPhone on a tripod out of frame to capture a different angle is a great way to add interest to your videos through different camera angles. Why iPhone? Because they’re good enough to make feature-length films seen in theatres, that’s why. 

That alternate angle also gives you footage to then use on other platforms as well. You could, for instance, shoot vertical video on one angle and horizontal video on another to give yourself footage for multiple platforms during the same shoot. 

When doing this, pay attention to the background of your video from both angles so that you don’t accidentally include anything you don’t want in the video, like the other camera or lighting equipment. 

If you’re shooting a process video of something happening on a tabletop—how to fold a paper airplane, let’s say–you could have one camera across the table pointed at the person and another to the left or right at a 45- or 90-degree angle. Another option is to film an overhead angle as well as a front-on angle. 

The key is to move the second camera to a spot that captures something the first camera can’t to incorporate additional visual information to the scene, rather than duplicating what the first camera sees. 

Highlights

Videos posted to YouTube tend to be longer than videos on other social media platforms. Facebook videos tend to perform best between one to three minutes, while other platforms, like TikTok or Instagram Stories, are made for 15-second videos. 

So how do you condense a 10 minute YouTube video into 15 seconds? You don’t. Instead, you pick the parts that work best as standalone content and pull them out as highlights. This could be an insightful quote, an interesting visual, or anything else that catches your audience’s attention. 

Using this method, you could mine that one video for several highlights, giving you plenty of content without having to shoot additional videos, thus making one video investment extremely worthwhile. 

Remix

Once you’ve been making content for a while, you’ll have a collection of similar videos. This could be things within the same category, covering the same topic, or things that just look similar. Have a look at all your clips, and pick out patterns or similarities. You can then use these clips to create new videos, such as Top 5 or Best Of style videos. 

Once you’ve been making videos for a while, you’ll have plenty of footage on hard drives. Consider how it can be used to tell new stories or to retell familiar stories in new ways. You could, for instance, re-edit an existing interview or talking head video to include interesting visuals that illustrate or complement the audio. 

Video is a great way to elevate your marketing efforts. Get started with great videos from the team at Dream It Reel.