Understanding Backgrounds – Video & GIFS

Introduction to Videos & Gifs for Background Canvas

Hello guys and Welcome to lesson three of the MakeStories 101 course. We left the last chapter where we learned about how to use the image background and to upload your own image and how to reposition them. We will start our next chapter in depth.

In this Lesson, we will be covering video and Gifs.

How to use Stock Videos in Background

Go into the video tab. You will see that there are lots of videos coming up. All of these are stock videos, which are totally free to use. If you want to use one of these videos, please feel free to use them.

On top of the stock videos, we'll see a search videos option. Now let's say You want to have a video about a cat. So you would search for a cat.

Here we go, we have all their stock photos, stock videos of the cats.

Now when you want to use any of the videos, you just need to click that video, it has been applied as a background to the slide automatically.

Similarly, in the last video we missed one thing, which is that the way you have searched for videos, you can also search for images.

All those images are coming in from Unsplash. Let's say you want the search for New York City.

Type New York City and hit enter. You can see that we have all the stock photos of New York City.

Now let's get back to a video background and here we have this video background. Now, you can see that the video played it for once, and then it stopped playing, it's because in the video settings, in the right-hand side, we don't have the video loop turned on.

If you want that, the video should keep on looping itself. You should turn on the video loop setting. Now, if we play again, you can see that with this video, we'll keep on looping.

We will see the same thing over here. Here is the video of a cat, and you can see that it keeps on looping at itself.

How to use your own video as a Background in MakeStories

We are done with how to use the stock videos, but now suppose just like you have used the stock images. At the same time, we tell you how you can use your own image, the same way we are going to show you how you can use your own video.

In the last video, we saw that if you want to use your own, or you want to upload your own image, you will click on the media library and you will click on add Media and they will use this upload files option.

At that time, we did tell you that there are two ways to do this. Now we will look at the second way of uploading files to make stories.

Now we have a folder on our desktop that says videos. We have this vertical video.

Now what we can do here is we will just drag-drop this video into the MakeStories editor. As soon as we do that, you can see that this video is uploading.

All you have to do is drag it into the MakeStories editor. Now we will go into the media library. As soon as we log in, we get into the media library and see that this video is uploaded over here.

Now we will select this video and set it as a background. Again, the video loop option is turned off, so we can go in and turn it on.

What is a Video Poster?

Now you can see something called a video poster. This video poster is something that's pretty much needed. The reason why you need a media video poster is that suppose your user has a slow internet connection.

In such a case, till the time the video loads, the web story will show the poster image.

A good thing about using MakeStories is that if you upload your own video, then we create this poster for like, without you having to explicitly create this like we extract the first slide of your video and set it as the poster image for you.

We will come into all those options later. For now, we saw that you can use the videos from the stock library. You can also upload your own on top of that.

If you are a big publisher, then you can also use the videos from Getty images, and to do that, you will have to authenticate your Getty account.

When you do that, you can see Getty videos over here.

We will deep dive into this later when we get into the Getty Media and this whole Media library altogether. Now I think we are done with color, gradients, textures, images, and video backgrounds.

How to use GIFs for background canvas in MakeStories

You can use Gifs because Gifs can be at times very entertaining and Gifs are pretty much funny.

If you're creating a story where you want to have a certain fun kind of element, you can definitely use these Gifs and you don't have to worry about the Gifs increasing the weight of your story, because we use the MP4 files and not the .gif files.

All those gifs are coming from Tenor. Let’s search for dancing cats or running dogs. You can search for anything you wish.

All you have to do is, just have to click on the choice of your GIF video and it will be applied to the background.

Now, if you want to reposition this, all you have to do is double click this and then drag it from right to left or the way it suits in the background.

You can use the video loop on or off to turn it on and we will click on play. This will keep on playing on itself. we will come on the overlay and the animated options in the next video.

For now, we have seen the six background types that you can use for your web story. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to us. We have a small chat button over here at the bottom, right?

We hope that you are liking this and then see you in the next video.

Thank you.