How to record yourself guide

so you've been invited to speak at a virtual conference because you know everybody is doing everything virtually now because of our pandemic and the organizers ask you can you just send us a video of your talk like pre-recorded so we can just stream it so we don't have issues with the internet and people connecting blah blah blah and you're like sure let's roll and then you start and then you realize wow this is actually pretty hard right all around me on the twitters and on the the linkedins and personal messages people have been asking me tim how do you make those videos and because you have a bunch of youtube videos but you're also a veteran conference speaker like how do you combine it all and after like daily questions i thought you know what i'm just gonna write down a list with all the tips and tricks of the stuff that i know that can help you to make a really good pre-recorded conference talk so this video has a lot of tips and tricks and i'm gonna go super fast there will be chapter chapter markets marker chapter markers um in the video description because there's just so much to get through you really want to have those markers to just jump to the stuff that you want to learn most about are you ready let's rock and roll no matter how good your story is how it looks and how it sounds are for some reason always the thing that the people will remember basically a good talk will become a great talk with high production value because sad truth how you are perceived by the audience especially on film is what they remember and even if your story is freaking amazing sometimes that doesn't matter because if your audio especially your audio is not good people will just not listen they will not be interested so that's why i'm giving you all those tips and tricks because some things are super simple and will actually elevate everything like skyrocket so this was actually the second intro i don't know why i did that but now let's go to general tips just a little thing i might be looking to the side once in a while like that because there are so many tips i have to refer to my notes let's start with the first tip a video pre-recorded conference talk has to be a bunch shorter than an actual live conference talk because you know what when you're live you have an audience you're all in one place so people are kind of forced to watch and that's a much easier way to connect right it's all about the connection to the speaker and you know what when you're at home you're watching a video things are distracting it's just really hard to connect to people and make them stick all the way through so don't go for 45 minutes i'd rather go for 20. next make your points in the first minute of the video right make sure that the audience will learn why this talk what will they learn why is this a good subject stuff like that because hook them in the first minute or you'll lose them next which is quite close make sure that after that introduce yourself because when you're in real life people can kind of come up and talk to you and it's kind of more personable and on video it can be cold it's harder right so make sure that you introduce yourself so to connect to the audience as much as much as possible that they know who you are next speak slow and clear i don't always do that but i know it's very important audio is everything and you know what because this is virtual it's also global people from all over the world are going to be watching those videos so make sure that you are audible next make sure and this is a hard one to be more lively on video than you are in real life like act like you are lively like when you're doing when you watch something in the cinema or when you're on stage performing like in an opera you overact right you have to do the same with video because we tend to as speakers or as you know developers go into the subject matter and just focus on that and then everything gets slow and monotone actually do the opposite it should be more than you feel and it's not easy but work at it next your slides need to look awesome because people are literally going to inspect your slides on their phones or on their laptops all the time it better look great but with that in mind don't put too much text on slides because a lot of people will be on their mobile so they're never going to read that right they want to see your face move and they want to see nice animations and bigger images the same goes for code on slides if you put a lot of code on slides people will just not see it so when you do that is actually have the code in a big font and take it completely out of context simplify it to make the point all right that was it for general tips on to the next so now we are going to be talking about while you are recording or when you are if it happens live um yes stuff you have to think about so these are all like captain obvious things like open doors but you cannot believe how many people forget about these things things like plug your laptop into a power source right low battery costs a whole bunch of very bad things for live presenting or recording for that matter also have wired internet i know that's not always easy but it gets so much more stable next find a quiet place to do your job right interruptions shouldn't be allowed because the moment you're interrupted you're out of your flow and you have to start again or you lose a take or when it's life it's even worse because you cannot fix it next similar to interruptions is turn off your notifications you cannot believe how often i see people present even in videos emails come in steam messages discord slack whatever just turn it off it's easy look professional right same goes for when you show something in your browser don't have 10 tabs open like a youtube and netflix or whatever just don't only have one tab open and just show what you want to be showing because this just shows your professionalism every detail counts right then some tips for um if you record stuff in shorter takes right this is what i generally do i generally say okay this is now the subject about these kind of tips so i do one take and if it's good i keep it if it's not i do it again um if you do it this way make sure that you don't just record one file of like 27 minutes with 16 takes in it and then you have to remember which of the 16 takes was the right one and you have to search takes a lot of time so every time stop the recording and just record again so you have like a little file that you know this is good and then one last one and we'll talk about audio and stuff a little bit later but if we record with a little bit more fancy setup so you have a separate audio stream in a separate video stream make sure that you do something like this because if you do that before recording you can later on sync the audio tracks between the different devices and everything is nicely in sync okay that was it for tips while recording or presenting on to the next let's talk about the harder stuff but also the more juicy bits of this video first let's talk about the camera how you focus on yourself how you place yourself then we'll talk about light and then about camera settings a lot more complicated stuff coming after beware look at the chapter marks in the video to skip if you want to so first of all position yourself by the rule of thirds vertically and horizontally you can see on the sides of me there's like one third another third and then there's me the same like the top of my head is kind of in the last third um if you don't do this well it kind of it can be an artistic choice but generally just do this and it all works the best next is keep the camera the best would be on eye level right so i'm kind of looking in my lens correctly now it can be coming from above a little bit because people are used to that from game streamers that have their camera a little bit higher don't do the opposite though so don't go down and let the camera look up to you because that's how they portray serial killers in movies and then they put like harsh lights and stuff don't do it be in the center of the frame and look at the camera the right way actually this is a fun one i'm reading here look at the camera when you present don't look at your slides i was literally just looking at my notes while talking to you honestly don't really do that of course you have to sometimes but when it counts look in the lens when you speak like a slightly off topic or less when it counts like in the in between stuff it's cool to look at your slides because you know what's coming but generally look here you know this is how it goes um then lastly please i guess this might be a bad piece of mind but i freaking hate it do not use ai to remove your background right because it's just ugly it really doesn't work not yet if you wanted to do it and there are certain valid moments where you would do it is then use an actual green screen and light yourself correctly with super white bluish light and then actually key yourself out but don't have ai do it just don't it's don't let's talk about lights for a bit i could speak for a week on lights there's so much info out there i'm not going to do that i'm going to keep it simple so first and foremost do not have a big light source behind you not like those fancy small lights that i have but like a big window because the moment you have a big window behind you the camera is trying to expose for your face but because there's so much light coming behind you it cannot really find your face and it's trying to do stuff and it's just ugly so instead do the opposite have the light behind your camera and then actually have the sun or whatever you use eliminate you rather than the camera because it's just hard for cameras to deal with that even the most expensive film cameras have issues with that right so just don't do it so blast your face with light and if you have a bit more time or money or whatever brain space you can do a bit more like i have like a little light hair and a big light there and they're really diffused which means it's not sharp edges but the light goes through like a white paint and it just diffuses nicely that's why this kind of looks good i think it's not the best just yet anyways that that will come later when you guys donate to my buy me a coffee page i'll buy likes anyways um the last thing you should think about is what i see all the time is people actually buy a light super happy they put it on and they put it quite yellow bit warmish so a low kelvin like 3400 kelvin but then they use the window on the other side to light the rest but sunlight is a higher kelvin it's like 5000 or 5200 it's much more blue so you're combining those colors and then when it comes on your face your camera makes that green you don't want that so the moment you have an extra light but you use the sun match the kelvins and if you want to know more about that you can just google it and you'll figure it out it's very easy yeah that's it are you ready to get nerdy let's talk camera settings so i know if you have a webcam there's not that much you can do i will link um to a video that i've done about how you get your webcam to look good but generally it's just add good light and that's kind of it um however if you do have a camera you're in luck um there's just like the light section before there's a lot of things you can talk about for camera settings again this is not that type of videos i'm just gonna go over a couple that i think you should do i won't really explain them and if you want to know more just google basically so start with the fact that your camera has auto focus and focus on your face if you don't have autofocus set the manual exactly to the the length of how far you are away from your camera don't focus on your microphone and not on your eyes that will be very sad you know next double your shutter speed um to the frame rate that you use um this can go quite technical quite fast but if your shutter speed is the same as your frame rate or lower you will get if i do this you will get a whole bunch of motion blur and that's generally not what you want you want it to be more crisp however that works google it next iso iso is awesome if you have a dark room and you want to actually see still still see some lights you make the actual sensor more sensitive but it also adds noise you don't want noise so put it as low as you can and if you still noisy add more light of course expose for your face with the right exposure settings use the lowest f-stop you can because the lower your f-stop the more light goes into the camera and onto its sensor but also you get a better um hopefully depends on your camera obviously uh bokeh right there's a bit blurry behind me that's because of my low f-stop frames per second just do 24 25 or 30 but don't go up there's no need next don't go over hd quality you can do 4k because you're a nerd and it's all fun but you know what those conferences will just stream um your your talk right it's never going to be 4k they won't have the bandwidth there's no need for that so this might have been the quickest how to set up your camera section in any video but with those settings you'll be probably fine anyways on to the next let's talk about audio for a bit you know what audio is probably the most important part of a video if you've ever seen a video with bad audio you probably just stopped watching quite fast even if you really wanted to watch it it's just super annoying right so to get good audio just to start um what you should do as a base okay i'm stumbling over my word but we'll continue find a room that's quiet it's a sound treated room this is really hard to do and people charge a lot of money to soundproof rooms but what i mean by this is if you are in a room that's completely empty and it has like a stone floor and a high ceiling the sound can bounce around a lot so currently i speak into my mic which is just here but it's really close right but then when i speak i also the sound bounces against the wall behind the camera and it comes back into the mic but because it travels further it comes in later right so you there's not just one beam of voice going in here it comes from all over the place and the more your room reflects sound the worse it's gonna sound and this is something you really have to take care of and you know what this room is not that good so i have a rug on the floor here i have extra blankets i have some crap behind my screen so it doesn't reflect as much yeah it's not easy but there are some things you can do to actually make it better right so for example have your microphone really close to your face like this one is actually really close i'm not going to move it now because otherwise we don't have the audio that's the same every time but if i speak very closely you have a very nice radio voice right and this is cool about these kind of microphones the closer it is the better it sounds so if you don't have a fancy mic just get like your headset from your phone or from a gaming um headset or something never ever rely on um the microphone in your webcam or your computer because they are far away and they're generally crappy just get like little headphones with a little mic that's always better okay then so one last thing is then when you start recording you have separate audio tracks potentially because you might be recording the audio separately from your video do this i know i already said this one in the beginning but it's super important because you later on want to find that spike in the audio track and align everything so when you speak it's completely synced with what you recorded you know what there's a whole bunch of stuff in my notes that i'm looking at now like doing a low pass filter eq match the loudness compressed gate man there's so much stuff um if you want i'll i'll just put some really nice um links in the description for you to learn more um that's it for audio we are almost there i promise so in this section we will talk about editing and recording tips so this video is one of those where you have a lot of talking head right so you see me speak like that to you in conference talks this can be really cool right so sometimes you just don't show us your slides and show the talking hand to have a bit more impact um that's relatively easy to do but there's a whole bunch of other things you can also do right you can just have like the picture-in-picture thing that you see all the time like i am small in the corner and my slides are big you can also just do only slides sometimes to make that kind of impact maybe you're showing a video or you go 50 50 50 you 50 slides i do this all the time and just keep changing this up to you know don't have the same thing all the time because people i don't know why but apparently people need to be woken up all the time so you'll see also in the edit of this video that i kind of change it up quite a bit to keep you focused right and the same thing is like when i do this talking head stuff sometimes i zoom in a little bit and then zoom out a little bit there's like these little tricks you can do and that's actually really important other things to break up the monotone like talking hat thing is maybe add a bit of background music that doesn't interfere too much and lastly make an actual intro like do two sentences show your logo do a bit of music and then go it just it's it gives a bit more professionalism wow that was a fast one next so now that you have all the information on how to speak how to put the lights how to use the camera how to edit we actually didn't discuss software just yet because you're actually going to have to edit this thing right so let's first talk about stuff to record your screen and there's a whole bunch of software out there i'm just going to give you my opinions of what i like to use at the moment and some alternatives i might get a bunch of flame for this um you know what i don't care i'm just going to tell you what works for me and you can see if that works for you so generally to record my screen even though there's a million pieces of software i always use open broadcasting software which is obs um obs can do a lot of stuff it can live stream you can do like photoshop for video basically and then live but i use it to record because it just has so many options right and what is good about it it can also just capture your webcam and capture part of your screen and capture your browser and have overlays and you can do whatever you want so it's kind of a one stop shop it's not that hard just dive in and see it's actually really really really really easy to use once you get it next actually things like screenflow or ecam live yes live but also for recording are also great options if you want a paid version of something with better support right okay so for more control what i would suggest if you can record your camera your audio and your screen capture separately so if you have that nothing is baked in nothing is final you can actually switch things around completely if you have that possibility try to do it right so if you want to record your audio separately you can go expensive and use adobe audition that's one i use and you can also use audacity or just garageband who are free generally they work pretty well okay now for actually editing the videos i use and i'm quite convinced by davinci resolve davinci resolve is basically a professional grade program but they have a free version that has like 99 off the page version and you know what i i just used it like okay i'm done anything i want to do like some sort of like 3d animation or just editing or i can do it with this program and it's free and it runs well right so i would urge you to check it out um then of course if you want to go really simple you have things like imovie works really well you can also check out adobe rush which it's called rush because it's very easy to do quick edits with so i know i didn't do too much in depth about those programs but they really work and they're relatively simple and this video was already very long so if you have any questions on any of the things we talked about today there's my twitter just reach out and dm me directly we are a community we help each other and this is my way of giving back because i have experience of doing like about 50 videos now and i've started with trash and now i'm like mid-level it's it can always be better but i've learned so much so i thought it was time to do this video now anyways thanks for watching all the way to the end check out the sponsors thank you and i will see you next time [Music] you