Cat Speedpaint and How to Make a Speedpaint

Hello everyone! Here is my first speedpaint! A while back, I downloaded Hypercam 2 to start recording some of my digital paintings and drawings, and well, this is one of a few results. I finally have a YouTube account (yay!), which means more speedpaints and video tutorials to come! Since this video is sped up 16 times it's original speed, it doesn't exactly qualify as a how-to, so I will also walk you through how you can create a speedpaint of your own.

Here is a direct link if the video doesn't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt1xbGFm7Uo

You will need:

A Digital Drawing Program of your choice (I used GIMP for the speedpaint above, and Photoshop Elements 13 for the demo)

Hypercam 2

Windows Movie Maker or another Video Editor

Step 1: Recording

Open the program that you wish to draw in and open Hypercam 2.

You can now do one of two things to begin recording:

1. The most obvious choice is simply clicking the button labeled "start recording". This will minimise the hypercam window and begin recording the video.

2. Your other option is manually minimizing hypercam and using a hotkey to start the recording process.

Why should you do this? If you don't want to see the hypercam window at the beginning of the video, this method will easily eliminate that problem.

Noteable Default hotkeys:

F2 - Start/Stop Recording

F3 - Pause Recording

Once you have begun recording, go ahead and draw whatever you want.

Step 2: Post-Processing

To speed the video up, open the file in Windows Movie Maker. If you haven't changed the default file destination for your recordings, your video should be in your "documents" folder (nope, not in the "movies" folder like you'd think).

Once the file has been processed, click the "edit" button directly under the "video tools" tab.

Under this, you will find a box next to a label marked "speed". The higher the number you put in the box, the faster the recording; likewise, the lower the number, the slower the recording. There are default speed settings in the drop down menu, but you can also type a number in the box yourself to get it just right.

You can add text with the "caption" tool in the tab labeled "home". There is even a "credits" option. I won't go into too much detail about these two tools, but I figured that I should at least let you know that they are there.

When you are finished adding in all of the little bells and whistles you like, you will need to save or export your video. You will have two options for this as well.

1. If you are done for the day, but plan to continue editing later on, you may want to save it as a movie maker project. To do this, simply click the tab labeled "file" and click "save" or "save as". This will bring up a window that will allow you to name your file and choose where it goes. Click "save" to confirm.

2. If you would rather save it in a more useable MPEG-4 format, click the "save movie" button in the upper right-hand corner with the "home" tab selected. Choose whatever option you prefer. There is even an option to upload the video directly to YouTube, Twitter, and a few other popular social media websites. Again, upon selecting an option, a window will appear allowing you to choose the file name and the location to which the video saves.

Now you have made a speedpaint (with free programs, too)! Good job!