How I create my videos
In this month's blog post, I thought I would revisit the topic of video, now I’ve covered this topic before when I focused on how you could use video with your students and you can read that post here.
However this time I am going to focus on video production and how I go about creating my videos. I can’t believe I’ve now been actively recording and sharing videos for YouTube for just over six years and in that time I’ve amassed almost 1,000,000 views. What started initially as a New Year’s resolution has ended up being something that I’ve just kept on going with.
The need to find content for my latest videos helps me to keep up-to-date with what’s happening within the ed-tech space. Thankfully it is an ever-evolving space so there is no shortage of material as apps always changing and new apps are being launched all the time.
Every so often I’ll get asked a question about what software I use to record and edit my videos so I thought I would go through it and explain my workflow for creating videos.
So first off how do I record my videos, there are many great screen recorders out there, if you click here you view my favourites on this YouTube playlist. However, I work on Mac and that comes with QuickTime Pro already installed so I tend just to use that. It also offers the facility to trim the video so I can top and tail them if needed.
I typically try to record my videos in one take however if I do need to edit them then I use iMovie as it already comes installed on the Mac. To give all my videos a uniform look I like to add a thumbnail image, which I create using Piktochart. Piktochart is an online graphic design tool with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface similar to Canva. I also use it to create images for my end screens which I then insert in iMovie with a flip screen transition.
Piktochart recently introduced a video element that has a number of features, one of which is a subtitle creator. I simply upload my finished videos and click edit and it enables me to review the subtitles it automatically detected and make corrections. I can then export them as either a vtt or srt format ready to be uploaded to YouTube once my video has been uploaded.
When it comes to creating shorts I follow a similar process in that I use Quicktime to record the video and then use the other video features within Piktochart to alter the screen ratio to generate the subtitles which I have appearing on the lower portion of the video.
Just recently I have been experimenting with an all-in-one solution called Flexclip, it contains a screen recorder and editor, and it can also generate subtitles so it is very much an all-in-one solution for producing videos. At the moment it will only allow you to export your finished video at 1080P which is the only reason I have not moved over to using it as I record my video at 4k and don't want to lose the quality. You can view my Flexclip video playlist here
Finally, when it comes to sound, I initially used a Blue Snowball microphone more recently I upgrade to a Blue Yeti microphone which I find gives a rich sound.