In one of my first posts I promised to post details of any videos that I create. Here is the first one:
It’s about how to create a database in your web hosting control panel (cPanel).
Since most many of my scripts make use of databases, this was a natural first choice video to make. Also, the process is quite short at around 3 minutes.
I’m not very happy with the sound of my own voice and from what I gather by asking around, most other people are not happy with the sound of their own voice either, so I can’t do much about that. What I did do was work on how to get the background noise down.
After many experiments I ended up in my car with a battery-powered lap top computer. This helped cut out the sound from my home and a nearby road, and the lack of a mains power supply probably helped reduce the electrical noise from the switched mode power supply that is normally used.
I only used Camtasia Studio 3.1.2 which is currently free software to produce the AVI video file which I just uploaded to YouTube. So hopefully, by the time I finished this post, the video will be up.
So, if this works out ok, look forward to more videos and hopefully better ones as I get more experienced at producing them.
In my last post, I included a YouTube video. You do this by copying the embed video code from the main page at YouTube for the video that you are interested in. Then paste this into a Wordpress Post.
When I viewed the page, all seemed fine apart from some small typos, so I went back and fixed them, but I made the mistake of using “Save and Continue Editing”. This brought up the Visual editor which messes up the code if you embed a video. Refreshing the page of the post, it looked fine so I clicked on “Save” in the editor and I was done.
Then I checked my site today and found it all messed up.
It’s because I saved the Post from the Visual editor.
To avoid this problem, click on the “Code” tab when you go to write a post. And then “Publish”. If you then want to make changes, use the “Code” tab and click save to avoid the Visual editor messing up the embedded video code.
Alternatively, you can disable the visual editor by checking a box in your user profile.
Since using video will be an important part of our business building strategy, this should be helpful to you I hope.
Now I have added some web page content to this site, the next stage is to generate visitor traffic.
To get the site listed in search engines I linked to it from one of my other sites via a blog announcement and also I mentioned this new project on a forum and included a link in my forum signature.
What I want to do next is start creating videos to upload to sites such as YouTube. These will be educational videos on topics like I will be covering here on this blog.
If people like the videos, I should get a following and curious people coming to read the blog. Also, the traffic will be highly targeted and free.
I think what puts most people off making videos is things like the sound of their voice, their lack of presentation skills and their lack of teaching skills. Well, I am poor in these areas too but I am trying to learn and get better as I do more of it.
The first stage is to make it as easy as possible to produce good videos despite your weaknesses.
So, the first thing to do is to get hold of software that produces videos from the computer screen so you don’t have to show yourself in the video. The industry standard software for capturing on screen activity is Camtasia Studio. Lucky you can download a free version of Camtasia Studio that is perfectly adequate for making videos.
Next we need to look at the audio. I had great difficulty recording clean sound from a microphone on my PC. This is because there is too much digital noise and also, the recorded speech is not loud enough for some reason. One solution I heard of is to purchase a USB headset so the audio is digitized before it gets to the PC.
Or you could use a separate sound card rather than the on board sound, or you may be lucky and have a better motherboard than me. So I tried my camcorder acting as a webcam just to use it’s microphone. This had plenty of volume and less digital noise but then I found that the sound of the PC’s fan was being picked up to spoil things.
In the end I used my laptop which has decent audio and runs quietly. I just had to play with the microphone recording level to get it as loud as possible but with not too much digital background noise. There was just a small high pitched buzz which I hope to filter out later in software.
I will try and use Audacity for this which is free audio editing software.
I should mention that you can record your voice with Camtasia, but my plan is to dub audio onto the captured video or narrate the video (talk) as I watch it. This should minimise the number of retakes necessary. Also, I expect I will want to edit the video. There are lots of video editing packages available. Sony Vegas is one I have been recommended for power and ease of use.
So this is the basic setup to produce videos.
To get my voice sounding better, I spoke slowly and lowered the tone. Plus I concentrated on the timing of my word delivery. I took the laptop to a quiet room and did some test recordings using Windows XP Sound Recorder (Accessories » Entertainment tools). After some practise, I was getting some great results with low background noise.
After this I found a great video tutorial on speaking clearly:
So now I am ready to make some videos. I will post again once I have the first video done and embed it on this blog.Some of the steps I am taking may seem a bit OTT but I think the extra effort to produce quality videos should pay off.Feel free to post your tips on this subject in the comments.
