Add Music to iPad Stopmotion Videos with YouTube Capture

By Wesley Fryer On March 24, 2014 · · 2 Comments

I’ve been helping our elementary school art teacher, Jackie Myers, get ready for a stopmotion video project she’ll be starting with her students on Wednesday. I wrote more about how we found the free iPad app she’s using for the project, Stop Motion Cafe, in the March 17th post, “Preparing for a Stopmotion Art Project.” Jackie asked how she could add background music to the final stopmotion videos students create, so I figured out how to do this with the free YouTube Capture app. It’s possible to do this with iMovie for iPad also, but I like YouTube Capture better for this purpose because:

It’s a FREE app
The app makes this a quick process
Copyright friendly music tracks are provided through the app
The YouTube Capture app streamlines the process of uploading final videos to YouTube

To do the following steps, however, the videos you want to combine and/or add music to must be in the photo roll of YOUR iPad or iPhone. Jackie is having students email their final stopmotion videos to a Posthaven website (iesart.posthaven.com) to “turn them in” when they finish. It’s possible to copy the links to separate student videos from the Posthaven site and import them into the photo roll of a single iPad. I’ve done this before using the free app “Documents by Readdle” and the commercial app “Goodreader.” If you know other ways to do this please let me know via a Tweet or comment on this post. It doesn’t seem possible to use the Safari web browser for iOS and directly save a video link to the photo roll. Perhaps an alternative iOS web browser has a direct “save to photo roll” option for video links like this? I’m not sure. The way I’ve figured out how to do this is:

Copy the direct video download link in Safari.
Use either Documents by Readdle or Goodreader to download the video.
Choose to open the downloaded video directly in the YouTube Capture app.

This is a screenshot of step 3 of this process:

by Wesley Fryer

Here are the steps for using the free YouTube Capture app to add music and upload a final video to YouTube. I took the following screenshots using my iPhone, but the steps are the same on the iPad version of the app.

STEP 1 Tap All Videos

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 2 Tap EDIT AND UPLOAD by the video you want to use / start with (you can add additional videos next)

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 3 Tap the + at the bottom to add more videos if desired (to make a combined collage) then tap ADD MUSIC

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 4 Tap YOUTUBE SOUNDTRACKS to show available, copyright-friendly music tracks

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 5 Tap to preview tracks, select the one you want and tap DONE

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 6 Adjust the volume if desired and tap DONE

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 7 Add a title, select the desired YouTube account and channel, and either

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 8 Tap beside the video after the upload completes

by Wesley Fryer

STEP 9 Tap the SHARE button to copy the link or send the link in a message

by Wesley Fryer

Here’s the 9 second video Jackie created last week, which I added music to with YouTube Capture today. I named it, “Oranges in Motion.”

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes' free newsletter. Check out Wes' video tutorial library, "Playing with Media." Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..

2 Responses to Add Music to iPad Stopmotion Videos with YouTube Capture

Ryan Collins says:

March 25, 2014 at 4:59 am

I do like a good challenge…. 🙂

I tried Atomic Web Free, but it doesn’t let you download in the free version. This morning I hit upon the brilliant idea of using a podcast client. Unfortunately, this didn’t work with the default Posthaven RSS feed.

Alas, all is not lost. I found iDownloads PLUS (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/idownloads-plus-download-manager/id429648406?mt=8). It’s a free app with a built in browser. I was able to download a movie and open it directly in the Youtube Capture app. In this mode, it didn’t let me edit/add music until I switched to the camera and then back into the app.
Wesley Fryer says:

March 25, 2014 at 1:30 pm

Nice work Ryan! I’ll give that a try too…