Confession time. I can easily spend between 1 and 2 weeks creating a 5 minute long video. 3 weeks if I’m being a perfectionist. Of course, those videos are awesome, and are highly tailored to a specific audience. They say what I want to say. In this blog I’m always looking into efficiency and productivity…
Read MoreHave you ever finished filming your video segments, inserted them into your video project, and thought “Now I just need a few hours to add the graphics, and I’ll be done!”… but you actually wind up finishing 3 days later? Then it’s time we talked about cutting that time down. There are several aspects to…
Read MoreIn this series I’ve given you lots of advice on making your own tutorial-style IT videos for YouTube as a single DIY “maker”: writer, lighting, director, cameraman, editor, audio specialist, etc. But these posts weren’t written in the order of my “workflow”, i.e. the sequence I actually go through when making a new video. So…
Read MorePerhaps your first question is, “What is B-Roll”? Great question. After reading the next paragraph, feel free to throw around the term at your next cocktail party. No need to cite me. The easy definition is that it’s any video, animation, or dynamic graphic that doesn’t count as A-Roll. Yes, I love these kinds of…
Read MoreHave you (like me) been spending too much time memorizing a script so in the final video you look as natural as possible? Maybe it’s because the ideas behind each video keep becoming more and more complicated, but I’m sure my scripts are longer than they used to be. And for me, there’s a point…
Read MoreRather than the type of advice in my series on how to create a tutorial video, today let’s talk about the specifics on how to create a “porthole video”, which is an inset video overlay used during a screencast that doesn’t have the standard square shape (if it were square, we wouldn’t need any special…
Read MoreI’m not one to follow a lot of the latest YouTube trends. Maybe it’s an age thing, though it could also just be a stubborn streak. But after you make enough videos, you start to recognize a good thing when you see it. And one thing that struck me recently were a number of great…
Read MoreOkay, this is Part 12, so we’re all experts now. Still, there are a number of things you can do to up your game. Today let’s talk about one of them: planning your video with an organizational tool called storyboarding. Briefly, a storyboard is a visual tool, a series of drawn frames with written dialog…
Read MoreSo you read the advice I wrote in parts 1-9, you think to yourself “Oh why not, I’ll try to make a video”, and you then plan everything out: where to film, what to say, how to dress, the equipment you need, etc. You’ll pick or reserve a room somewhere in your office building (we’re…
Read MoreSince one apparently just can’t have enough parts of a multi-part blog post, why not one more? Let’s depart slightly from the usual themes, because I want to talk about something that’s applicable to videos that are slightly more marketing oriented than your typical tutorial videos. Of course you could always make full-blown marketing videos…
Read MoreWelcome back to our ongoing series of how to improve the video tutorials you make, especially when you’re on a tight budget, and by that I mean both money and time. Today let’s look at conducting a live, one-on-one in-person interview. Note that online interviews and documentary-style off-screen interviews are their own full, separate topics)….
Read MoreSo your video shooting and editing skills are at a high level now, and you’re comfortable and even confident appearing in your videos. You’ve acquired a good quality microphone, greatly improving the resulting audio. But down deep you know there are still some things about the sound you could improve. I’ve already written a bit…
Read MoreYou might remember from the last post in my series on creating video tutorials that we talked about improving the quality of picture-in-picture video tutorials. I broke it down into two parts, the background and the presenter, with this summary for the latter: What’s realistically the most natural way you can present yourself in the…
Read MoreIn my previous blog post we looked at how to use a green screen to add an extra touch to the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, particularly focusing on the ambient space for filming, the lighting (both the screen itself and the subject), and the necessary audio and video equipment. The goal of using…
Read MoreIn my last blog post we looked at practical suggestions for improving the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, focusing on tips for audio recording, video recording and editing, writing the script, and uploading them. Now suppose you want to take the next step that will (hopefully!) add some impact to your tutorials: putting yourself…
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