The highlight film is the quintessential piece of media you need to attract the attention of coaches and universities. Lots of though should go into what you show in you highlight, but that's for another article though we give free advice for athletes on the ordering of their clips. One of the biggest struggles athletes have is downloading film and editing it. We'll cover several methods of downloading regular season highlights from Hudl and off season film you for from camps via other methods PLUS what you need to do after downloading to make the biggest impact on social.
Many of the most popular film sharing platforms do not allow for the free download of film unless you cough up some dough. The common solution is to use the built in iPhone Screen Recorder - which quite frankly turns a crisp video picture into a blurry mess. Many times, coaches can't even see which athlete is which let alone analyze your technique and ability to compete at the next level.
While you can make the edit in Hudl if your coach gives you access, you should download it using one of the below methods to make sure it's high quality. You might go to camps or other trainings in the off season. GMTM partners with several camps to give out free film, detailed instruction on for that are provided for free here.
The Solution to Pixelated Video
Downloading your Hudl film is not easy by design. The simplest online download is tubeoffline.com.
Simply paste the link to your film and you can download it in high quality.
While this is a good solution to save your film it's not the best.
GMTM is an athlete social network that lets you post your highlights, workout film, and communicate with coaches across the college sports landscape. After making your free athlete profile and adding your Hudl highlight, you can also download your film for free with no ads or unwanted pop-ups.
The download button pops up as soon as you click on the highlight and you can save it to your computer easily in high quality.
The next step is the most important. Now you can share your clean new video and promote your talent on social media. Here is some instructions on how to edit your video down to what might get the most engagement on social media.
If your highlight is organized with the best and most diverse content in the beginning you're at a good start already here. If not, we'll talk later about how to re-edit you highlight after its downloaded. From here, all we need to do is trim down the length so that social sites allow the post.
For instagram, you can post up to 15 minutes BUT reels just recently have been extended to a 1 minute time limit and will easily net you more exposure since they seem to show up on the discover page more frequently than typical feed posts.
We want to maximize the engagement and exposure of our posts so if your highlight has ten plays, it is best practice to post ten different times across several weeks rather than making one social media post. You can select individual plays easily in the Instagram app or Photos on iPhone with the white/black range selection bars
GMTM has challenges and other activities that might be good to submit individual plays to as well. The Freak of the Week Award from NXGN only allows for single game clips.
Twitter allows for 2:16 long video posts but similar to Instagram you should trim your highlight to the best portion and post that with a link to your entire highlight. Unlike instagram, you can put links in the body of a tweet. The only way to put links to your full highlight on Instagram is in your bio or using the "link" sticker on a Story.
This feature was previously only available to verified users so make sure you take advantage of it and link back to your recruiting profile.
Editing on Mac
We'll cover only a solution for Mac in this article, but let us know if you want more info on how to edit on iPhone or Windows.
Since you used GMTM to download your Hudl film in the highest quality (wink emoji) we'll cover editing on a computer first. On Mac, you get iMovie for free. It's very basic, but has just enough tools to make good edits for social media.
After we open iMovie, we get to create a new project, click the plus then movie.
Next we'll click and drag the file we downloaded from our downloads folder to the bottom grey area in iMovie that say "drag and drop video clips"
You can use your mouse to scrub (going left and right over the clip) to preview where you are.
When you come up to the beginning of a play you want to post, you can click so the playhead (the grey bar) goes to where your mouse is, the right click and select split clip.
You can repeat that process when you find the end of the play, then select the beginning and end sections and click delete on your keyboard. You should be left with just the part of the highlight you want.
In the upper right, click the share icon, then the option that says export file.
The standard parameters it chooses for quality are OK, so click next, then tell it where to save the video and click save.
Finally, let's post that clip! You can send it to your phone via Airdrop or post using Instagram on the web browser. Same for Twitter and GMTM Profiles.
