Recent developments urged me to raise the topic again on watermarking, or rather what I would like to call burn marking videos, because there are so many video players and free services which can create play lists from rss feeds located on external sites, that burn marking your video becomes a real necessity.
“What’s that to me? “, you may ask. Well, what I mean is that anybody can grab the URL of your rss feed with videos and add it to the video player on their website if they find the right tool for it. There are free services that make it really easy to do this, while in the past, it did require at least basic knowledge about the parameters of video plugins.
Don’t get me wrong: This is good news, because you can make your videos go viral and promote yourself or your products on other sites this way. However, it is bad news if you do not burn mark your video, because it means that everyone can use your content without paying you anything.
Often, site owners don’t even know that you are paying the bandwidth nor that they are violating your copyrights.
Marketing gurus and SEO experts tell site owners to add as much video content as possible because it is good for ranking with Google and by grabbing your rss feed, they don’t have to create video content themselves.
In a previous article How to add a logo watermarkon your video I showed 2 ways to watermark videos with advantages and disadvantages, but is begins to look that hardcoding a watermark directly into the videos is the only option to make sure that everyone who sees your video, knows where it originally comes from. Many video editors are capable of adding a logo directly into the footage of your video, therefore I advice you to do this. And not only that, I would certainly add the URL to your website, either directly under the logo, or otherwise at the bottom or any place where it doesn’t really disturb viewing the video, but where it is visible for those interested in it. Or you might show the URL at irregular intervals for about 3 seconds.
Here is a list of video editors of which I know they are capable of burn marking logos:
Vlog It! (www.adobe.com)deprecated- FinalCut Express/FinalCut Pro (apple.com)
- Adobe AfterEffects (www.adobe.com)
- PowerDirector (Cyberlink)
There are many other video editors that can do the same thing, but I have no personal experience. The above are the ones I have used or tested.
With Camtasia, you can add a watermark, but it is actually not embedded in the footage but layered on top of the video as a separate image, which is the same as using method 1 in How to add a logo watermark on your video.
