Based on a few questions from @CCbro I attempted to whip together a demo video of a console. DANG was it not easy!! Three or four tries just explaining a channel strip was much harder than I thought it’d be. I sounded like a rambling idiot! Well…maybe not an idiot but it was much harder to demonstrate the functions and explain them at the same time. I tried video recording the DAW control functions and I felt like it took 15 min to explain what I feel should have been presented in 4 min. I wrote out what I wanted to say, but struggled reading and punching buttons at the same time.
I didn’t explain what the EQ does, I attempted to highlight how this consoles EQ is different than any other console EQ around. Not in how it sounds, but in just terms of how it works. Same with the dynamics section.
Hell did you ever listen to @bozmillar first interview? Christ! If he said “umm” one more goddamn time ,I would have…umm…killed someone!
Now in his TRANSGRESSOR vid. , he sounds pretty damn legit.
I give a LOT of presentations, although few of them ever get recorded. There is no substitute for practice and rehearsal, just like in music. Sit in front of a mirror and give your spiel to yourself several times, or better yet get someone to sit and watch you.
Dry runs are how you get comfortable with your material and with the mechanics of illustrating your points with whatever visual & audio you have. When I was earlier in my career, I would practice every talk I gave multiple times, in the same room where I’d actually give it if possible. Nowadays I can come up to speed after just a couple run-throughs. For example, I am giving a science talk tomorrow afternoon and I haven’t practiced yet-- will do that this afternoon.
When I stepped behind a church pulpit (damn, that was in my former life) I found that sermons worked lot better when I spent time perfecting the script sticking to it word for word. Each line still took some practice. And I found that some lines read well on paper but were hard to deliver verbally with fluency and an inkling of enthusiasm. I was a terrible improv speaker and I learned that fast. But I did discover that if I had adequate time to write the script and really trusted it when I got on stage, I could communicate better because I had reduced verbiage, wasn’t rambling, and wasn’t constantly um uh interrupting uh myself with uh filler words.
It just seems so different. I’ll keep at it. Seems like a really fun skill to have.
So you’re trying to do video and audio at the same time? I know it’s much more time consuming, but if you want to make it look and sound good, script what you’re going to say as concisely as possible, along with a video cue time sheet. Do the video shots following that, then do the audio separately as ‘voiceover’. That way you can edit both video and audio independently and put it together ‘professionally’.
And there was the mish mash of also trying to show button pushes, along side fader, pan, eq, moves. I also needed shots of the digital screen displays.
I started cutting up a video. I’ll finish it tomorrow. It was the one on the basic channel strip. I’ll just post it tomorrow for comic relief…but maybe you all could critique it a little bit. Its about 12 min I think.
Ha. Making videos is far more work than it should be. It’s the kind of thing that you see and think "that should take about 10 minutes. " then an hour later, typy are trying to figure out how you were able to talk about a volume knob for 10 minutes.
The worst is that when you feel like you have something you want to talk about, it’s hard to sort through what is important information and what is just extra junk, because it all feels important, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about it.
As far as the speaking goes, I find that my first take is when I sound most excited, and the more takes I do, the more boring my voice gets. If I remind myself to not say “umm” I’m usually pretty good at not saying it, but if I don’t remind myself, I say it all the time. With screencasts, at least it’s easy to cut those out. When I’m thinking about it, I only have 1 or 2 umms to cut out. But if I do 5 takes, it will be boring.
For me, the best way I’ve found to do it is to just go until I screw up, then just go back 30 seconds and start again, without stopping the recording. Then I just cut it out in post. It’s way easier to keep the flow going if I don’t stop. If I restart the whole thing, when I get to the part that I tend to screw up, I don’t remember how I screwed it up last time, and I just end up doing it again. If I just redo the spot right away, I can just focus on that one spot and it’s easier.
I don’t do videos that often, and I’m not that good at it, so take what I say with a very large grain of salt.
No shit man. I annoyed myself listening to it. 3-4 was the goal. And I wanted to break the stuff down into super short sections by topic. Watching enough videos online, you get an idea of what should be communicated within a certain amount of time. I missed it by like…triple.
You can also do “punch and roll”, which is similar and skips most of the post cleanup, but you may find it too much of an interruption even at that. Basically you just stop the recording, put the cursor before the error, set a pre-roll and punch in. Similar to recording a vocalist singing, if you have used that punch-in method (sometimes preferable to comping in post). The pre-roll (several seconds usually) lets you get your tone before the punch-in hits.
Punching in is hard when you don’t have set times for anything. It’s easy to punch in a vocal on a song because you can set your cursor to the verse or chorus or whatever and punch in until you get it right. With video, you don’t have the same structure. You have to go back and find where you messed up, delete and edit, etc, and I find that’s not faster than just doing it later. The difference is you have to stop and break up the flow.
If you are completely botching it, sometimes stopping and breaking up the flow is exactly what you need to do, but for small slip ups and such, I find it’s much much faster to just keep talking and edit later.
If you are making a really well thought out video with a script and such, it may be a different story. But for a quick video that should only take 5 minutes to make, scripting and live editing quickly turns a 10 minute project in to a 5 hour project.
This is the key. Taking into account scripting, dry runs, shooting, editing, exporting, uploading etc., a five minute video can take a full day out of your life. I have done many software video tutorials, half a day is the best I have achieved - even then, then end result wasn’t that clever.