Montage Maker Tips

We often receive emails from people who ask for tips on how to make the best montage videos possible. While we’ve outlined some general tips in our blogs about how to make a video montage and how to create the best surprise birthday video, we thought it was time to take it to the next level! Here are some tricks and tips for more advanced users.

Invites for Video Montage Contributors

When you start your video montage, Memento provides you with a unique Invite Link that you can send by whatever means you wish! We always recommend email as the simplest way, but you can also text the link to people or post it on social media if you want to reach a broader audience with your request for video clip submissions.

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• Tip: Make those invites fancy! You can also share the Invite Link through a digital invitation. This can be a fun way to “dress up” your invitation and encourage people to contribute to the video montage! 
  

• Tip: Using Facebook Messenger. We recommend that if you share over Facebook Messenger, you tell everyone to copy and paste the link into a popular browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, rather than using the in-app Facebook browser, which has limited capabilities. 

Your Video Montage “Record & Upload” Page

Your Record & Upload Page is what people first see once they follow the Invite link that you’ve shared. We recommend that you upload a picture of whomever you’re honoring, so that people can see exactly to whom they’re sending their wishes.

• Tip: Share a video to your Record & Upload Page. You can make the Record & Upload Page even more dynamic if you upload a fun video of the recipient or an instructional video then share it to the Record & Upload Page. When the friends that you’ve invited to contribute watch, it’ll give them inspiration for what to say in their video or set the tone for what you’d like them to contribute. Once you’ve received all the video clips you’re expecting, you can delete the instructional video before you create the montage and it won’t be included in the final video.
  

• Tip: Find out who submitted a video. Memento gives every submitter the option to leave their email once they’ve uploaded or recorded their video. As the Group Video organizer, you can find the email of the video submitter if they entered it, and later, you can use this contact list to share the final video montage with anyone who asked to see it.
  

Sometimes you may not know everyone you invite, or perhaps someone accidentally uploaded an outtake filming their shoes instead of their face and you can’t tell who they are by their loafers! You can look to see if they left an email address so that you can get in touch with them and let them know. Not everyone leaves an email, but it’s always good to check, just in case.

How to Make a Montage

When making a Group Video, organizers use Memento’s basic features to change the order of videos and choose a background color or background music, but we also have a lot of helpful, advanced video montage features that you might not even know about!

• Tip: Trim or rotate videos. Use our Trim Tool for a smooth montage experience! Did someone take a while to realize that the camera was rolling? Maybe they weren’t sure how to end their video and there’s a lot of “ummm… so, I guess… that’s… it?” at the end of the video. You can trim those parts out! Along with the Trim Tool, you might also need the Rotate tool if someone has submitted their video upside-down (it’s happened!) or sideways (even more common than upside-down!).
  

• Tip: Mute the background music. If you’d like to have background music during your montage but there are one or two videos that have singing or other music that might conflict with your background music, you can adjust the settings on those individual videos so that the background music will be muted during those specific videos only. 
  

• Tip: Using fancy trim tricks. While Memento is happy to offer a trim feature, we don’t (yet) offer the ability to cut out the middle of a video (for example, to edit out the part of the video where Uncle Eddie swears!). But that doesn’t mean you can’t make those edits! 
  

If you’d like to edit the middle of a video, you can download the video and upload it again in order to make a copy. Edit the end of the first copy and the beginning of the second copy, and voilà! You have now edited out the “middle” of the video. There will be a half second fade so if you’d prefer to avoid the obvious signs that you’ve taken a pair of scissors to the clip, insert someone else’s video in between the two sections (this way, it will simply look like dear Uncle Eddie just left two videos because he was so enthusiastic!).

Editing one long video into smaller clips can also make the montage a smoother and more dynamic watching experience! Additionally, it will help balance out the screen time so that one or two of your chattier participants don’t dominate the video montage too much.

Share Your Video Montage

Once your video montage is ready, you can share it with whomever you want by using the Shareable Link to Video. You and the recipient can also download the montage for safe keeping (and if you want to watch it offline!). Here are a few other advanced tricks that you might want to try as well.

• Tip: Generate an email list.  When people participate in a video montage, Memento gives them the opportunity to leave their email for the Group Video organizer. You can generate a list of these emails when you’re finished making your montage to make it super easy to share the video montage with everyone who wants to see it!
  

• Tip: Record a response video.  If you show the video montage to the recipient in person, you can either film their initial response right then and there, or you can have them record a reply to all the participants. Once you’ve uploaded the response video, you can use the “Re-do my Group Video” button to add the recipient’s response at the end. Then, if you share the video montage with everyone who contributed, they can see the response right away!
  

Memento’s Birthday Video Maker on the Big Screen

Surprise birthday video montages are best if they’re shown on a big screen with the recipient’s family and friends; this is a wonderful opportunity to witness the recipient’s reaction and share it with loved ones! If you have a smart TV that can connect to the internet, you can watch your montage that way or download the montage and play it from a USB drive if your smart TV has a port available. You can even take it a step further and contact your local movie theatre to play it on the REALLY big screen like one of our customers did for his mother. 

When Jim made a birthday video montage for his mother, Shirley, he really wanted to make it a very special surprise so he contacted his local independent movie theater! With the help of the Sayre Theater in Sayre, Pennsylvania, James was able to book an evening for a private party and show.

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The Sayre Theater had the Memento video montage cued up as they walked into the theater and Shirley even commented that one of the faces on the screen looked like someone she knew! Once everyone had taken their seats, the birthday messages started playing, and Shirley was delighted to find out that the movie she was watching was indeed her family and friends! Jim said that he hadn’t heard his mother laugh like that in years and that the theater was full of laughter, tears (the good kind!), and lots of joy.

• Tip: Share your montage with the world! If you’re super proud of your video montage or the story behind it like Jim was, share it on social media and tag Memento! We love to hear and tell others about touching stories on our website, blog, and social media. 

We hope you enjoyed these advanced tips and tricks on how to make a montage video. Whether it’s a happy birthday video, a congratulations on a wedding proposal, or even an employee appreciation video for work, there are plenty of ways you can deliver a great experience!