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Our process for creating great videos

To some extent, video creation is customised to foster creativity and awesomeness. But in general, the production workflow follows the guideline below:

Producing

Once we have an article, blog post or material that needs to be converted to video format, we follow the following steps: 1. Convert it to a video script and push the video script to version control. 2. A video should demonstrate one idea. If there are sections that reference other things, they may need their own separate videos. For instance, if the script requires you to create an account, it might be necessary for you to create a "create account video". 2. Edit it. We need to edit out words like uhhm, pauses and speed up sections where the process takes time. For instance, if a page load takes 25 seconds, we speed it up to take say 5 seconds. Then we annotate the speed, in this instance 5x speed. The speed is discretionary to the editor and it has to make sense. 3. Load the proprietary information. This can be putting the logo of the company we producing the video for as a watermark for the whole video or creating start and end screens with the logos. 4. Render the video. Set the render options based on the requirements e.g 4K, 1080p etc and render the video. 5. Watch the rendered video to check for errors. 6. Optimise the video for the delivery channel. For example, if the video is going to end up on YouTube, you might create the timestamps. 6. If there are no errors and you have optimised the video, upload the video to Google Drive / Slack, AWS S3? for final verification by a supervisor.

Gear

Videos are produced using Screen recorders and point and shoot cameras for the talking head sections. The following gear is the base standard that we use.

  1. Microphone - Half of a video is the sound quality therefore we recommend using dedicated microphones for this. Onboard laptop microphones or headphone microphones are not recommended because the sound quality is poor. XLR Microphones provide the best sound but you need an audio interface to use them with your computer so we will be sticking to some good USB microphones to keep the budget low. The following are the USB microphones we recommend:
  2. Blue Yeti USD $129
  3. Blue Yeti X USD $139 (currently on special)

  4. HyperX QuadCast S USD $119

  5. Screen recorders - You need a good screen recorder with options such as Zoom, Pan, Annotate among others. The following are the ones we recommend ranging from free to paid.

  6. Screencast-o-matic Free
  7. DemoCreator USD $69
  8. Screenflow USD $149 Mac Only
  9. Camtasia USD $225 Windows Only

  10. Davinci Resolve Free (mainly used to edit Talking head videos)

  11. Talking head videos - For the talking head videos, you can use your smartphone as it comes with a very good camera. You might need to plug in an external microphone or record the sound separately to improve the sound quality.

  12. Audio Editing - To edit the final audio and do things like amplify the sound and remove some background noise, we recommend Audacity. Audacity is a free, open source audio editor which does the job.