SOME OFYOUTUBE'S best videos aren't exactly original creations. Many are mashups, meaning they're a mixture of original and existing material. A classic example is "Vote Different" (watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo), which combines a Hillary Clinton speech with Apple's iconic "1984" TV commercial. The clip itself plays like the original, but with Clinton's visage superimposed on various screens and her voice overlaid on the soundtrack. In contrast to the slick "Vote Different," the entertaining "Ballmer Monkeyboy iPod Mashup"/ watch?v=FncILxajmlw) takes footage of Microsoft president Steve Ballmer wigging out on stage and superimposes it on a familiar iPod-commercial background.

Create a Mashup Before you get started with your own mashup, keep in mind that YouTube strictly enforces copyright laws; you can include copyrighted songs and video clips only if it qualifies as "fair use." Unfortunately, making that determina¬tion can be complicated. Check out YouTube's guidelines on copyrighted content, and then use good judgment. Obvi¬ouslya lO-minute clip from The Office would be copyright infringement, but a clip of Michael saying, "That's what she said," may be fair game.

Finding material for your mashup requires a little creative borrowing for clips. With a program such as Replay AV (pcworld. in/downloads/index.jsp), for in¬stance, you can capture just about any streaming audio or video. Head to sites like AOL Video (video.aol.com) and Veoh.com to unearth all manner of news clips, TV shows, and even movies. If you have a Media Center PC with a TV tuner, you can re¬cord shows and then extract clips using editing software. YOU CAN EVEN borrow from other YouTube videos, provided they're deSignated "public." You'll need to download the videos and convert them to a format your editing program sup¬ports. Free Web sites such as Vixy.net and Zamzar.com can do both in one step: Paste in the URL ofthe YouTube video, select a format, and provide your e-mail address. You'll get a message contain¬ing a link to download the converted video. Several sites offer free sound effects and music to complete your production; try Partners in Rhyme and Soundsnap.com.

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Edit and UpLoad
To turn your found footage into a cool mashup, fire up Movie Maker in Windows or use iMovie on a Mac. Or try YouTube's own Remixer (youtube.com/ytremixer). Re¬mixer lets you add titles, transitions, borders, and music. It also allows you to combine multiple videos from YouTube into a single video, though you can't actually edit the footage.

Import your video into your editing program. Most programs will automatically split your raw footage into separate clips by detecting scene changes. With that done, you can cut your clips to the proper length and arrange them in any order. You can trim each clip from its beginning and end, or split it in two ..

Using your application's timeline view, you can drag and drop clips to put them in the desired order. Add transitions by dragging them in between clips. After you've finished editing your video, save it as a YouTube-friendly file. YouTube accepts videos in popular formats such as AVI, MOV, and WMV, and converts them to its own FLV format. Just be sure to keep the file size under 100MB.