A little over a year ago I created a handful of stingers to use on video content that I create. The stinger serves a bunch of purposes. On the practical side it gives the movie player and data stream to get going. I often notice that in the first couple of seconds of video there are some breaks and with a stinger that happens before the content starts. Also, you can name your site and show what license terms apply to it (the later is something I forgot to do in my first stingers).

I decided to redo them and improved a number of things:

  • Made the stingers 5 seconds long. The first ones were 7 seconds and just a little too long.
  • I added the Creative Commons license information that I apply to my videos so it is clear what terms apply to reuse of the video.
  • My first stingers weren’t as high-resolution and didn’t look as good in HD.
  • I made sure the aspect ratio defaulted to widescreen.

Several of my friends asked me how I create my stingers. It is really easy actually. I use Keynote to make the stinger itself, using transition effects that are on a timer. I then export the presentation to a Quicktime movie. I import the Quicktime movie of the transitions into iMovie and do trimming as well as adding audio. I then export them out of iMovie and re-import the completed stingers into iMovie to use in other videos. It sounds more complicated than it is. If you would like to use my Keynote file to start with go ahead and download Video Stingers v2.1.key.

For fun, here are the five new stingers.

Convergence

Flip

Zoom

Fade

Spinner

It’s hard to make these go both on the web and on a large television. I might have to make everything bigger and thicker on these.

Update: I did a recut because I didn’t like how the video looked at very small files. I also made it work better with 4:3 aspect ratio as needed.