How to Make Highlights of YouTube Gaming Streams
Aside from Twitch (which is an obvious choice for many game streamers), YouTube is an excellent platform on which to stream and build a base of fans, and earn ad revenue. According to information released by YouTube at the end of last year, there are at least 40 million active gaming channels providing around 100 billion hours of gaming content. To put that into perspective, that’s about 11.4 million years worth of video game footage. This also mathematically yields a fairly impressive average of about 2500 hours of content from each YouTube gaming channel.
While streaming on YouTube can be very lucrative, simply posting your entire 3-6 hour long video of your game stream on your YouTube page is not particularly the best strategy. Mostly this is the case because anyone other than your most loyal fans are going to shy away from videos that length. Most people just don’t have that much time. Because there will be less views this means that you will have less ad revenue. It is far, far better to have six 1 hour long videos than one 6 hour long video. And because the notorious YouTube algorithm tends to direct viewers towards videos that are about 10 minutes long, it is far better to have six 10 minute long videos than one 1 hour long video. Naturally this means that sharing your video game highlights will likely be far more successful than simply posting your entire unedited stream.
What is a gaming highlight? The simplest explanation is that it is exactly what it sounds like. It is a highlight of something that happened during your game stream that is exciting or important in some way. What this will look like will very often depend upon the context of the game itself, but generally speaking this is going to be a relatively brief moment where something happened that most viewers will find more interesting or entertaining in some way than the slower, less active moments in the stream. This could be in the form of defeating a challenging opponent, encountering a bug or exploit, or winning or losing a match.
So how do you make a highlight video on YouTube? The truth is that it’s really not that difficult. While livestreaming on YouTube, you can create a highlight to share a brief edited version of your livestream. You can do this during the livestream, or afterwards. To make the process easier, all you need to do is place a stream marker whenever something interesting happens during the live stream. Then when you go into YouTube Studio to edit the video you see those stream markers in the timeline of the video, which makes it significantly easier to find those moments in your stream that would make good streamer highlights. (The alternative would be to comb through the entire video to find those brief moments, which would be a very tedious and time consuming task). After you’ve found the moment you want to use to create a highlight video, you just trim the video down to that section by dragging the handlebards of the timeline to just that timestamp. Decide on a title for that video highlight, set the privacy, add a description, and then create the video. It will then be automatically published on your YouTube page.
Even with the use of the stream marker this can still be somewhat of a tedious process, and let’s face it, in this new age of technology doing work manually is old fashioned and is a missed opportunity to leverage the advancements made in automation. The good news is that there is a way to automatically generate streamer highlights without the need of any additional editing software, which is Sizzle.gg, a new online service developed by-gamers, for-gamers.
Before you get started on Sizzle.gg, you will need two things: an existing YouTube (or Twitch, TikTok, or Twitter account) on which you are using to stream your videos, and some kind of streaming tool. The first part of course is simple, and the second shouldn’t be a problem either. There are many game recording programs available, including several that are completely free and come with your OS, such as the XBOX Game Bar or the Mac Screen Recorder. Other options include various third-party softwares like VideoProc, OBS Studio, or Bandicam, or the game recording software that sometimes comes with GPUs like AMD Radeon ReLive and Nvidia GeForce Experience.
Assuming you have those two things covered, all you need to do is just head over to Sizzle.gg and create an account. Once that’s done you just need to link your social media accounts to your new account, which will allow Sizzle to detect your most recent game streams. From your dashboard you will be able to see those streams and will allow you to select which stream video you want Sizzle.gg to automatically turn into a sizzle. When the automatic editing is done you will be notified of the completion of your order, which takes no longer than a few hours. From there, all you need to do is just copy-paste the URL of the new Sizzle video highlight and post it on your social media, such as on Twitter or Facebook. This will allow your fans to click the link and be taken directly to that highlight video. A more straightforward way of doing this, is simply downloading your sizzle and directly uploading it to your social media, in a few clicks, or use our one-click share feature, which includes direct uploads to TikTok and Twitter.
Currently this service is completely free while in Open Beta. So you lose absolutely nothing by trying it out! Sizzle.gg is also very committed to building a strong community and is eager for your feedback on how they can improve this new service for future customers. Try out Sizzle.gg today and be sure to leave your feedback and suggestions.
