DIY Video Production For Content Creators: From Setting Up to Editing | Enrico Luzi | Skillshare
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DIY Video Production For Content Creators: From Setting Up to Editing

teacher avatar Enrico Luzi, Creative travel content

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      1:56

    • 2.

      Class Project

      3:52

    • 3.

      Purpose of Your Content

      3:04

    • 4.

      Scripting and Planning

      5:24

    • 5.

      Setting Up Your Space and Lights

      6:27

    • 6.

      Setting Up Your Camera

      7:32

    • 7.

      Setting Up Audio

      6:02

    • 8.

      Recording A-Roll

      5:40

    • 9.

      Recording B-Roll

      5:43

    • 10.

      Importing and Editing

      15:14

    • 11.

      Timing Your Edits

      10:11

    • 12.

      Creating Smooth Edits

      6:26

    • 13.

      Creating Titles and Effects

      5:26

    • 14.

      Exporting Your Video

      2:09

    • 15.

      Conclusion

      1:18

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About This Class

Have you ever thought about doing video content for yourself or your brand, but it just seemed too complicated? It doesn't need to be that way, not anymore! Join me in this class and learn how to script, shoot, and edit videos all by yourself! 

In this class, we’ll dive into the fundamentals of video production for content creation. I’ll share with you the principles I've learned throughout the last seven years of developing my audiovisual content creation business. Photos once had enough impact by themselves to call attention to your brand on social media, but video is taking over, and nowadays, it's super important to have a strategy that mixes up both. This class serves as a summary or checklist of everything you should consider, in the correct order, to be successful in small homemade productions for yourself or your brand.

Throughout this class, you'll learn how to:

  • Script and plan for your shoot
  • Make the best use out of the space you've got available
  • Set up your camera, microphone, and lighting
  • Talk confidently to the camera
  • Record extra visual content to enhance your message
  • Put it all together in post with smooth edits

Who's this class for:

This class is perfect for beginners. It’s aimed at anyone who wants to create video content by themselves. If you have your own brand, a shop, if you’re an artist, or maybe a photographer that suddenly noticed video taking over all platforms, this class is for you. We'll go through different options of gear, tools that will help you plan for your videos, the best settings for video and audio, and how to do some basic editing all on your own.

What do you need for this class:

Any kind of camera, a smartphone will be enough, and that's all! We'll talk about differences in equipment, and with time and according to your needs, you'll be able to understand in which areas you'll need some upgrades. For editing, you can use whatever you'd like, throughout the class, I'll be using DaVinci Resolve which is a free program. 

While watching the lessons, you'll be prompted to complete small tasks that will help you learn and prepare yourself at the same time to record your final project video.

To make things even easier, you can download the class guidebook over here, where you'll find additional information, links for everything mentioned in the class, and quick reference guides for settings, shortcuts, and recording.

Hope this class gets you excited to create your first videos! And don't forget to post your exercises and project to the Class Projects section to get some feedback! So let's dive in!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Enrico Luzi

Creative travel content

Top Teacher

Hi, I'm Enri, a landscape and commercial photographer and videomaker working with brands to showcase their stories and values.

Originally an engineer working in Brazil, a backpacking trip in South America turned upside down what I thought about life and my goals. A camera became my partner and offered the perfect solution to create my own business and be location-independent.

My love for teaching brought me to my two favorite platforms: Skillshare and Youtube. On both, you'll find me talking about tech, photo, and video tricks to help you have them as allies when conveying your message.

Currently I'm living in Bologna, in the very heart of Italy, and if you're ever around, coffee is on me :D

To find me virtually, check my Youtube and Instagra... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro: No, no, no, this doesn't look quite right. Why don't we try it like this? This is much better. Switching from that to this took me literally 10 minutes. The trick is just knowing what to look out for. This is exactly what you're going to learn in this class. Hi, I'm Enri, travel and commercial photographer and filmmaker based in Italy, but I'm usually on the go, telling the stories of my client's brands through images and videos. I've helped partnerships and created content for the likes of Airbnb, Oppo, Pagani, and many others. Everyone is diving into videos these days and has become vital to establish your online identity, Instagram Stories, Reels, TikTok, YouTube, but it can be so overwhelming. It looks simple until you hit "Record" and then nothing seems right. Then suddenly, you have to learn a whole new theme even before starting to record what you were meant to in first place. In this class, we're going to break video production down in many simple steps for you to be able to record your first videos. We're going to talk about scripting, how to prepare your set, how to use natural and artificial lights in your favor, how to record super clear audio, and how to film additional material that will enhance your message, and then how to bring it all together in post-production with nice move edits, visuals, everything. This class is aimed at anyone who wants to create video content by themselves. If you have your own brand and your shop, if you're an artist or if you're a photographer that realized that video is taking over all the platforms nowadays, all you need is a simple camera to begin with and yes, your smartphone will do just fine. For the class project, you're going to be recording a one-minute video from scratch presenting yourself and your space. At the end of the class, you're going to have all the knowledge necessary to create your own content and make it look like a high-value production, even without owning the most expensive gear. You're going to have a clear checklist in your mind about the things to look out for to have successful recording and editing sessions on your own. It's going to be an exciting journey and we are here to get the ball rolling together. I'll see you in the other side. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Now the class project couldn't be anything else than creating a video to share with our community. I'd love to see how you apply what you learned during this class, putting some thought into planning your scenario, camera, audio, lights to create a short video telling me what to do and how you're recording it. The topic is going to be a presentation of yourself in your studio setup. This way, you're going to be applying all the techniques you learned in this class to do it by trying out different options to find the best positioning for your camera lighting gear, setting it up correctly and filming day row, talking about what you love and explaining how you're doing it. What are you using to film and how and then adding some bureau on top of that. But don't worry, we're gong to go into detail on every step of the process. Now sharing this video in the project [inaudible] is vital for you to really learn what's in here. Nothing's going to help your learning process more than applying it immediately after watching these videos. Posting it there will allow the community and me to give you immediate feedback on how can you improve it right from the start. Now your video projects should be about one minute long, in which the main shot is going to be a talking head shot, just like you're seeing here we view talking to the camera in which you're going to tell me what to work with, what is your passion. Then also show me what are you recording with, what is your light, where you position in your room and doing the explanation while you're still talking. You can also add some bureau showing the images of what you're talking about to illustrate it even better. You can add some facts, your name or your logo to your video if you want. But above all, don't worry about what anyone thinks and don't be shy. Now practice makes perfect and I'm only helping you to take the first step into being super comfortable with the camera so that it can record whatever you want later without a problem. Remember that you are already one step ahead of so many other people by investing your time in watching this lesson and we're going to do this all together. Now in the sequence, watch an example of the project for you to have an idea of the structure and how to set it up. Hi, I'm Andrea, a mathematician that teaches kids of all ages how cool maps can be when they're learning how to memorize it, thanks to everyone that's super quickly. Let me show you. Here's the trick, first you write from 0-9 and then from 0-9 again. There you go. I decided to take this course to level up a bit my videos on social media. Mainly I'm moving my couch or my table around to be close to the windows. I'm using my smartphone as my main camera on top of some MacBooks. They are good for that. But sometimes I use this small tripod when I need to show something that I'm writing. For the audio, I'm using this ear buds as my microphone. Sometimes when it gets a bit darker, I'm using also as more light from aperture that was recommended in the course. It's not very difficult to set up. When I'm done, I put everything in the same drawer and in five minutes tomorrow, I can just start all over again. I guess that's all. Thank you for watching and see you next time. Now a quick tip to help you guys follow along with the lessons in a much better way, I included in the resources section of this course, this guidebook that has some extra information or content about each of the lessons that you're going to find here. You're going to see the links and pages that I mentioned and some additional ones. All of these links are clickable and they're going take you directly to what you want to see. Besides that, you're also going to find some diagrams and illustrations, especially about the lessons in which I talk about how to set up your space and also some quick reference guides for things such as the settings of your camera. For the editing lessons, for example, I included the very big list of shortcuts that you might want to use and it's just difficult to write down while I'm explaining during the lesson. The PDF is all there. There's the lessons in this course. But in the end, you're going to find the also a recording checklist. This one is meant to be just a quick reference for you before recording to be sure that you remember to set up everything correctly. I guess that's all about the guidebook, download it in the resources section, and continue on to the other lessons. Take the chance for any doubts or questions, remember that you can always use the discussion panel below. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to discuss the purpose of your content. 3. Purpose of Your Content: [MUSIC] Before setting out and hitting record, some pre-production can save you a lot of time later on, if not avoiding having to do it all over again. Now for the purpose of the class project, you're going to be creating a video to test out and present your setup. It's very to the point that we understand the purpose which is posting in our gallery. But whenever you're creating content for the Internet it's important to think about some things first. So the first thing is going to be defining where this video is going to end up. If it's going to be on a website, if it's going to be on social media, if you ask, which one? If you're going to post it on YouTube, for example, this is going to dictate some things like, for example, the format if you're going to use it horizontally or vertically and also about the pacing and the length of the video, which is going to change dramatically depending on where you post it. Instagram or Facebook stories, TikTok, or YouTube shorts. They're all in vertical format, and it's 1080 by 1920. This is also called in many cameras as 1080p or full HD. For these are definitely going to be better off recording already vertically. Now regarding the resolution, you need to think of what your final file needs to be. If this video is going to be in the loop on a massive television, for example, you're going to need the maximum resolution possible. But if you're just going to play it on a smartphone, for example, then you can get away with some smaller resolutions without a problem. If you're in doubt, just shoot as high as possible because later you're going to be able to reframe it or scale it down without losing any quality. But instead, the opposite is not true. If you shoot it smaller than what you needed the file to be, you're going to have to stretch up the image and you're going to lose quality with it. That's when you begin to see that the image is not sharp enough or pixelated. Also, remember that depending on the app you're going to be posting, there's going to be text on the screen covering part of your image. Let's say, for example, you want to show a product, but you leave it on the table and you post it on Instagram, well, it's going to be covered by all these things over here, and then it doesn't look very cool. It's also important to define who is going to be your target audience because things like age, for example, are going to dictate massively how you're going to express yourself through the camera. Talking to a teenager is going to be completely different than talking to a person that is over 60. If you mix the style too much people would just won't give you their time anymore. Lastly, which emotion do you want to evoke from the video? Is it supposed to be inspirational, fun, entertaining, or educational? Of course, you can mix them up to create your own concept, but just having an idea is going to help you later, especially in the editing, where you're going to be choosing which song to use, sound effects, which images to add on top of your talking head video. A good exercise for you to practice after this lesson is going to be answering these questions; to define where your content will be posted. Define a general idea of who your audience is, and write down the main emotion you want people to get from your video. So let me give you an example and show how to approach answering these for this lesson, for example. First, the content is going to be horizontal and in the 5-10 minute range more or less, so no need to rush, but I also cannot go too slowly. The audience is probably going to be young creators and entrepreneurs trying to improve their brand presence online. The outcome is that people should feel inspired to take action. You can share your answers in the discussion panel to have them really clear in your mind. Now I'll see you in the next class for us to script and plan your video together. 4. Scripting and Planning: [MUSIC] Scripting is a very important part of your pre-production, and every five minutes you're going to spend here is going to save your 10 minutes later on. This script can be something as simple as just making a bullet list, and then free styling over it. Or you can be extremely detailed in writing word-by-word what you're going to say and which camera and angle you're going to use for each shot. Now to decide which route is going to work best for you, I'd say that if you're starting out right now, I would take something like an intermediate step by making a rough guideline of what you're going to say, but not going overly detailed about everything, not to make you overthink too much the recording. Now if you're not using it to recording it, just having bullet points is going to be difficult for you to express yourself in a clear and concise way to the camera. For my videos, for example, I like to script deeper when the topic is really broad, meaning that I could go many different ways while talking to the camera and maybe I would get lost. Or if the time is really short, for example, when I'm recording a 15 seconds reels, in which I have to express an idea in just that timeframe. In that case, you need to up the pace, but it still has to be understandable. Today I'm going to show you the app that is going to change the way you use your Sony camera. No more bulky external monitors and no more fighting with the imaging edge app. This third-party app is going make your smartphone even smarter. Is going to turn it into an external monitor where can see the zebras focused speaking. You can change all the parameters in the camera. When the video is a little bit longer, you have a little bit more time and patience to be able to talk more naturally to the camera. Just paying attention to when you make some mistake, you have to start again from the beginning of the sentence. Otherwise, later on, cutting this video is going to be terrible, but more on this on the arrow lesson. Now where to write this script. You can go the old-fashioned way, which is simply using a notebook to do it. Or if you'd like more than digital approach, I can suggest two different apps. One is called Evernote and the other one is called the Milanote. Evernote is a really cool notes taking app, that you can add a lot of different medias to it. You can add images, videos, references, you can clip stuff from websites. It's really cool because it's synchronizes across all your devices, so you can have it on your computer, your notebook, your smartphone. Let me show you this shot list I prepare to film the reference project you saw before. Now the shot list you guys saw in that blank template are going to be available and the links are inside the guidebook that I mentioned before. So that you have it clear in your mind, what exactly do you need to write down for this shot, you can use the blank template and write down five shots that you think you're going to use inside your project. Now this list probably is going to change with time. As you watch the other lessons, you're going to see other ways that you can illustrate whatever you're talking about and you're going to be changing or adding some extra shots to this list, but this is perfectly normal. The important thing is for you to use it right now and begin imagining in your mind how this video is going to look and what you're going to need to do it. As I mentioned, links are in the guidebook. To use it is very simple. You can just create as many notebooks as you'd like and have the notes inside it. For example, to create tables in which I can reference, which is going to be the camera, the lens. A lot of people call this app a second brain because you can write down stuff that you don't need to actually to memorize and you can just refer to it later when you need it again. For example, for this lessons in which I needed to write down what was the height of the tripod, what were the settings that I had in both cameras to always have the same thing in case I needed to record in two different days. This makes sure that I don't forget anything making it really difficult later on to fix it in post-production. Now Milanote is a little bit more like visual planner in which you can create the boxes with content and you can also link them around to understand also what's going to be the flow of your recording. Now both of them have free versions. They're just going to limit on the amount of stuff you can upload, but the functions mostly are there. If you'd like them, you can check what the paid version has to offer and see if it suits you. Now one other thing that can be really useful if your script is using a teleprompter app like this one. Now this is going to allow you to have your bullet points or the tax properly rolling up and you can just read it as it goes. Now for this one to work well, there is a trick to it. Interior, you need something like a mirror that is going to be in front of the lens and that can reflect text back to you. This way it seems you're looking at the camera at all times, but actually you're reading the text. Now this is not a very portable solution it can be a little bit boring to set it up. Now the other solution would be to have the camera as far as possible, but zoomed in and the text as close as possible to the lens. This is going to make the movement of your eyes from right to left a little bit more difficult to notice. Then it won't seem as much like your reading, which usually is the main problem when you're using a teleprompter. Now if you feel none of these works well for you, you can also try the interview style recording in which the person being filmed is actually looking at the teleprompter or what should be the person interviewing them. The recording properly is made at an angle like this camera over here, for example. This way if the person is reading, it's almost impossible to notice that the eyes are growing sideways. This takes some time to feel really fluid. What I recommend you is to record, check it on the computer, see what works or what doesn't, and then change it and try again. Slowly you're going to begin feeling much more natural in front of the camera. The key takeaways for this lesson are: time spent in planning, is time saved when recording, discover what works best for you by trying different methods and reiterating. The more you do it, the better you get it. In the next lesson, we're going to organize your space and set up the lighting to start recording. 5. Setting Up Your Space and Lights: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll be setting up your environment to start recording, positioning yourself, the camera, the lights, and the microphones to make it look like a cinema set. Now the first and most important thing to do, because all else is going to revolve around it, is to define what's going to be your key light, your main light. If you're using natural light, it's going to be close to one of the windows you have in your space. But it really depends on the time of the day that you are going to be recording this because direct sunlight, for example, is a total no go for this situations. It is going to produce a lot of contrast, blown highlights, it's much more difficult to manage. Now for everything there's some solution, and if that's the only time of the day that you can actually record, you can also use some diffusion panel in front of the window to make it a little bit softer. Like for example, some white sheets or a very thin curtain. Another super important thing is to avoid being too backlit. When the light is just coming from behind, your face is just going to look very dark, so you need another light in front of you to compensate for that, or maybe something to bounce the light that is coming from behind. To compensate for this shadows, you can use any white cardboard that you already have in your house, but ideally sitting at 45 degrees to the light is going to produce the best results possible. Just pay attention that if you use something colorful, it's also going to bounce that color onto you. [MUSIC] One strategy that I use sometimes like now, for example, is using a notebook with a white screen on it just to compensate for the darker part since my main light is on my left here. Just don't use flashes or lanterns because they're going to ruin your shot. Now, if you don't have a good natural source of light or your time of recording doesn't allow for it, we can check also some artificial lights, they are going to help you record even when it's in total darkness. Let's take a look at some artificial lights of different budgets. There are some cheap and great looking options like ring lights or a small LED lights. They're already going to help you pop. In that grid from that can already be the most basic soft box that you can find with a lamp in which you simply have this thin white layer in front of the lamp that just helps diffuse the light and makes it so much nicer on you. Probably the ultimate for a home video production would be to have a bit of a stronger LED light with a large soft box and a couple of diffusers that make the light source soft and nice on you, and on top of that, you can also add the grid in front of it that helps the light be a little bit more directional and not spill everywhere on the scene. If you don't have it, it's hard to make your background very dark so that it can add other colors or lights to it. How you position yourself according to the light is going to change how dramatic this video is going to be. More of dramatic videos call for more contrast images. The more sideways you put the light, the more brightness you're going to have on one side and more shadows you are going to have on the other. The more frontal it is, the more it is considered some beauty light. Now where to be in the room. You mainly depend on your source of light, but the angle can vary a little bit depending on the depth you have and also which background do you want to capture in your video. As a general guideline, the further you are from the background, the nicer it is because it helps you detach a little bit from the background, making it much nicer for the viewer. Also keeping many of the distractions you might have in the background out of focus. Now here you can experiment by rotating your camera around a little bit and trying different angles to see which one fits you best. Remember the idea is to find a spot that has very good light, where you're a little bit distanced from the background and that the background actually looks nice even if out of focus. Now regarding sitting down or standing up to talk to the camera. I feel like usually when I'm standing up, it's easier to put more energy out. It looks like the camera sucks the energy out of us, so we need to double it to make it look normal on camera. This definitely goes into the category of recording and checking it before continuing for you to have an idea of how much you have to dial up or down your tone to make it look cool. Now two extra treats regarding lights that can help you. The first one is positioning some practical lights in the background of your shot. These are going to help transform the walls behind you in something a little bit more colorful and interesting, and also helps in giving some separation from you to the wall. There are some cool solutions like PavoTubes or the Aputure MC that I'm using here right now. But something much simpler and practical that you can do is just buying a couple of smart bulbs and replacing the normal lights on your house with that. Something like the Philips Hue or any other brands will work just fine, just like these lights that I have here on my left. They're all controlled by the Google Home app and I can change the color as I please. One of the trick related to light but also a little bit towards fashion is for you not to wear something that is exactly the same color as your background. The more contrasting colors you've got, like for example, if you have a blue background and you wear a yellow shirt, or if you have a green background and you wear a red shirt, are going to make your pop so much. If you don't want to go that extreme, you can go with analog colors. Like me, for example, right now wearing blue with a purple background. They are closed colors but not the same, which already helps me make a color scheme for the video without making it too crazy. Now all of these may sound a little bit complicated right now, but actually it's just a series of very small adjustments put together. Let's do a recap together, shall we? First we talked about our main source of light and where to position ourselves according to it. It can be the window, can be a small LED, can be a big soft box. If well positioned, any of these are going to look great. Then we learned that separating yourself from the background makes it look much more professional, and to do that you can physically distance yourself and also add some lights to the background. Besides that, choosing the colors will really help the viewer concentrate on you. To the key takeaways. Privileged soft light through diffusion or reflection for better results. Separation from the back is key for a pro look. Different light angles creates different moods, so pick the one that suits you best. Now as a homework for this lesson, I want you to just look around you and find the three different spots that you imagine could be very good for recording and just try them out. Record just a little bit for you to be able to see later in the computer how they look over there. Then you're going to have a little bit better idea if the angle looks nice, and what exactly around you should change or move a little bit so that it looks even better. If you want, you can take even a picture of each one of them and post in the galleries section so that we can take a look and give our opinion also about which one looks the best. In the guidebook, you're going to find some diagrams illustrating the positioning of yourself, the camera, and your main light. This will probably help you explore a little bit around. [MUSIC] That's it. In the next lesson, we're going to put the camera in place and set it up to start recording. 6. Setting Up Your Camera: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to go over the different kinds of cameras that you might use to record your videos and how to set them up correctly for the best quality and avoiding surprises considering you're going to be doing this solo. Way too many things can happen when you're not monitoring it. First of all, let's pick your camera. The most basic you probably already have is a smartphone. All you really need is to stack a pile of books and put it there. If you want to be a little bit more comfortable, you can also get a small tripod for it. It can be with rigid legs or just flexible ones like this small Joby tripod that I have over here. Now for maximum comfort, you can just set the selfie camera and be sure what you're doing at all times. But usually, this camera has a lower quality than the ones in the back. If you're feeling confident, you can set up model in the exact same place you're going to be and make a couple of tests to see if it works out for you. A strong advice here is to have your camera or smartphone plugged in. Having to change batteries or worse, having it run out in the middle of a recording can just ruin your day. If you're feeling like stepping up a notch your production value, you could go for a proper camera mirrorless DSLR, these are going to give you a better image quality and some more features. A compact camera like the Sony ZV1 for example, gives you excellent out-of-focus. It's so small and portable, has a beauty filter, a product showcase feature, and it's super stable. My only problem with it is the battery that doesn't last much. It's got already a newer brother that actually allows you to change lenses also, making it much more complete small camera. But it's a little bit more expensive, and it's been a little bit hard to find these days. The same thing is going to apply to basic DSLRs or more advanced mirrorless or DSLR cameras. They're going to give you a much better image quality and features. On screen now, you're going to be able to see a comparison of many of these side-by-side. Mostly what you're going to notice is that in the most expensive systems, you're going to be able to blur more of the background, you have a better separation from your subject to all the other things. You have much more control over it. One thing that I can recommend you right now is that even if you have the budget, I don't recommend you to go right now to the shop and buy the most expensive camera you can get. It's much better if you begin just with a smartphone or whatever you have already and have a feel for it and see what you actually need. Also the more expensive cameras need you to invest a little bit more time on how to properly use them. It's much better to take it one step at a time. Talking property about how to set up your camera, there are some features that I totally recommend to use in automatic, and they're going to make your life much easier. Others that I totally recommend you to put in manual mode, meaning that to have absolute control over them and that your camera won't do anything crazy in the middle of the shot. I'm not going to go crazy and give you details about the settings for every variable and camera that exist out there, but I'm going to give you a general guideline that you can also find in the resources section below as a checklist to remind you what to have to control in your camera. The first setting is going to be setting the camera to manual or pro mode in which you can actually control everything by yourself. Next step is going to be which resolution you're going to use. Is it full HD or a 4K? It really depends on the resulting file you need from this video. As a general rule, you have to record at that the same size or bigger to be able to export with the same quality in the end. Just bear in mind that higher resolutions demand a little bit more on your computer later on in the editing process. I totally recommend you to test with your first files to see how it works out. You might feel, for example, that with 4K resolution, it's just too slow to edit, and it's going to be impossible to put out videos like this. Then it might be better to make these videos intended before now until you upgrade your editing system. Imagine a video like a sequence of photos, and this is how you're going to choose how many pictures per second the camera is going to take to make this video. Usually for these kind of videos, you're going to film between 24 and 30 frames per second. Anything higher than that is usually aimed at producing some slow motion later on in the editing. We're going to talk about it in the B-roll section. Now the shutter speed, and this is going to affect how much motion blur you're going to have in your scene if you don't have any things look robotic and natural, just strange. If you have too much, things begin to look a little bit dreamy or trippy. If you're not choosing it to have some artistic effect, usually double the frame rate is going to work for you. Let's say for example, you chose 25 frames per second to record it, then a shutter of one over 50 is going to be enough to have the right amount of motion blur and make it look really natural. The aperture is going to determine how much of your shot is going to be in focus and not what's going to be in focus, but how much of it. Usually the smaller the number, more blurry areas you're going to have around your shot, which can make it really nice and make your subject really pop like here, for example, in which I am in focus, but the background is a little bit soft and out-of-focus. Let me show you how it would look if everything was in focus. [MUSIC] The ISO is going to be the less resource to compensate if you don't have enough light and there is nothing else that you can add to it. On a smartphone, I definitely wouldn't go over 200. On a very basic DSLR, maybe 400, that would be my maximum. [MUSIC] On a more professional camera, even 1,600 can be perfectly acceptable. This is a general guideline, but if you feel you're going to need much more than that to make for the right exposure on camera, then probably, it's the time to go back and reassess the lighting of your scene to see if we can do something to fix it without having to resort to the ISO. The white balance is something absolutely critical to put in manual mode and set it up by yourself. I've seen so many people having trouble with it because the cameras suddenly felt that it was better to compensate for yellow or blue and just shifting the colors all around in the middle of the shot and making a mess out of it. Considering you're using white light, be it from a window or from a proper LED light you bought, you can set it around 5,500 Kelvin, and you're going to be just fine around this range. If for some reason you had no other resource and you had to use a yellow or a blue light, you can use the white balance to compensate for it. Just checking camera which temperature makes it neutral. As a reference point, you can just hold up a piece of paper and check if it looks white. Now that you know all these, a pro tip is to record the 30 seconds video of just you in front of the camera and take it to the computer right away before continuing recording. You might notice that some of the settings was not right and you didn't notice which could ruin everything later. Or maybe that you just forgot something in the background that you'd only realized right now. Our key takeaways are start simple and grow according to your needs, manual control would definitely avoid surprises when recording by yourself, and test everything before hitting "Record" for real. This homework is very important because one of the worst feelings is when you take a lot of time to set up everything around you and when you try to record, there is some failure or some wrong setting in the camera that just ruins everything. Just take your time, get your camera right now, and do some clips around you just to get the feel of it. I just wanted to check if the settings are right and you can use the reference in the guidebook to do so. Record some clips to have an idea about the light, the shadow, how contrasted the image is, if the resolution looks fine. But most of all, this is just aimed at you getting comfortable of being in front of your own camera and understanding how it looks from this side. [MUSIC] Now if all looks good, we'll get going in the next lesson with maybe the most important part, audio. 7. Setting Up Audio: [MUSIC] Now, there are many different ways to record audio, but one thing's for sure, overlooking this can be a total disaster. Just tell me, which of the following two videos would do rather watch? This is an example of a video with auxiliary lighting, a cleaner background but with no microphone. I'm just using the built-in microphone from the camera. This is an example of a video with backlight only, but with a very well-positioned microphone. I'm pretty sure which one you picked. Let me show you how to improve this, easy, cheap, and fast. Now, before taking a look at each microphone we can use, let's take a look at some issues that are going to be common to all of them. The first one is try to eliminate as much as possible the surrounding noises you might have, even from home appliance, for example, a fridge or air conditioning. Sometimes, of course, it's going to be impossible to turn them off entirely. The more you can step away from them is already going to make a huge difference. This is how it sounds when the microphone is too close to something that is making noise. Sound can change a lot, even if you're just a couple of meters away from the position you were before. The second one is to be as close as possible to the microphone. If you're using the internal microphone from the camera or a shotgun mike connected to it, have it as close as possible to you. Right now, for example, I have mine just out of frame here, which is about one hand away from my mouth. If you use a lavalier mic, for example, don't leave it on the table. Just clip it on you and it's going to sound much better. Now, one of the terrible enemies for audio is the wind. Probably, it's going to be better to record indoors, or if you have to do it outside, try to position yourself in a way that your body is blocking the wind. [NOISE] The first one is the one that actually goes around the [FOREIGN] There was a sign there saying that there was a path this way. The more protected the microphone is from it, the better it's going to be. Usually, lavalier microphones come with more protection that you can put on it. Other microphones have this thing called dead cat, that is just some fur that will protect from the wind reaching the microphone directly. But anyway, if you can avoid it, it's better. Now, the last one is that sound seems to reflect everywhere. The more empty the room you are recording, the more echo you're going to get. The more you can add to it like curtains, sofas, carpets, anything is already going to help dampen the sound a little bit. With this in place, let's take a look at our different options. First, let's consider that you're going to be using the internal microphone from your smartphone or from your camera. Without putting any fur to it, this is how it would sound. This is how it sounds with the smartphone. It's quite far away from me and I'm not using any external microphone. With a little bit of care, this is where you can get it to. This is how it sounds with the smartphone really close to me sitting on the table. Not bad. One trick here, considering that you cannot move the microphone independently from the camera, is to use the widest angle lens possible. This way you can get the camera as close as possible to you, and this is the microphone also. The next option is a budget but very powerful solution, which are these lavalier microphones that you just clip to your shirt. Usually, all you need is that the camera has the 3.5 millimeters check to connect it, or your smartphone needs to have this port or an adapter to the USB-C or lightning port, depending on which smartphone you have. But it's definitely also possible to use with them and it's going to sound much better. They can already anticipate that this is going to be the best value solution of all the microphones I'm going to present here because it's such a big leap from not having any microphone to having a lavalier microphone. It's cheap and really easy to use. Be careful to position it around the chest area and not let any clothes hit it in the middle, otherwise, it's going to produce a lot of noise. Other things to pay attention to are necklaces. [NOISE] Noice because of jackets or necklaces. If you don't like the idea of having so many cables lying around, you can upgrade to a wireless solution, for example, the rode Wireless Go. In this one, you're still going to have a receiver connected to the camera or to the smartphone. But there won't be any cable between this receiver and the transmitter, which is actually the microphone that is going to stay with the person talking. Now, this is a test to see how the wireless mic sounds in a very busy environment. I love the solution, especially when I'm recording outside so that it can be totally free from the camera. You can get pretty far with it. Lastly and for best audio quality are the shotgun mics. These usually have a very nice response to the voice and just sound so natural. But they are a little bit bigger, a little bit more difficult to operate and to position by yourself. Let's make a quick comparison and listen again how each one of them sounds separately. This is how the internal microphone from the camera sounds like. This is an example of how a shotgun microphone sounds like. This is how a wireless microphone positioned on my jacket sounds like. This is how a lavalier microphone sounds like positioned just here. Now, after choosing your microphone, don't forget you're going to have to set the level of audio also in your camera or a smartphone. Remember that when you're recording, you're going to have highs and lows of the time, so be sure to account for that when you're setting the volume. Usually, if you see the outer level control reaching about minus 6 dB, you're going to be okay. Now, this was less impactive information. If you have any doubts, just write them in the discussion panel below. Let's see our key takeaways here. Audio is usually more important than the video quality. The closer the microphone is to the speaker, the better it's going to sound. Definitely, avoid the wind and try to turn off everything around it that makes noise. For this lesson, I really recommend you to do some audio tests. If you're just using the microphone on the camera, experiment with how far can you be from it without having a lot of echo. If you're using something else like a lavalier microphone, experiment with how high can you put it and that it still sounds good, and pay attention to the clothes you're using and where you're positioning it because if it moves around in the middle and just makes noise, it might totally ruin your shot. This test will also help you understand how your camera handles audio and how to enable it. Of course, this is going to remind you to set the correct levels, so that you don't have a very loud voice or very low. In the guidebook, you're going to find some references for these levels. [MUSIC] In the next lesson, we're finally going to get the cameras rolling. 8. Recording A-Roll: [MUSIC] We are finally hitting record. You should have now your camera setup correctly. All this through the beautiful compose be to have one or two cameras. Now check our battery levels and plug everything you can. Check how much time of recording you have in each SD card and set yourself a timer not to lose track if necessary. This is considering you're going to be recording everything by yourself. If you have some help, then you can be a little bit more relaxed about this stuff. Now grab your script and position it right outside of the frame or make it part of the scenery. One thing to remember is that you're not talking to a camera, you're talking to a person that is watching you right now. It's important to keep the spirit and to look into the lens and not to the LCD screen, for example. Now one less technical aspect is which kind of focus to use. I don't mean your own focus on the script or something like that. But if you're going to use out-of-focus or manual focus on the camera, if you're pretty sure your camera has good autofocus and you can rely on it, then just go with it if it's going to be much simpler. If not, I would totally suggest that to put it in manual focus, set something in the same place you're going to be sitting and just focus on that, like this you can be sure that nothing is going to change in the middle because focus is something that can be extremely distracting and can ruin your shot. If you already recorded it, then it happened. You can add now something on top of it, another image just to cover for it in those seconds where it happened. But the best thing is to avoid it. In some cameras you'd have to flip a switch and in others you just have to do it on the menu. Extra trick; it can be really useful to see yourself while you're filming, just to be sure that all the framing and everything looks good. So if you have a camera that has an articulated LCD screen that you can just flip around, perfect. Use that. In case you don't like, for example, using a camera that doesn't have this kind of screen or maybe you're using your phone, but you really wanted to use the better lens, you can try positioning a mirror behind them. Like this, at least you can see if it's recording and have an idea if everything is in place and nothing behind you fell down or something like that. This is the time to hit record on all the cameras and we are live. The first thing to do now is just to give three loud claps. [NOISE] You're going to understand this much better later on when we're in the editing to synchronize all our files. Now breathe deeply and count to three before starting talking and also at the end of a sentence. This is going to give you some space between sentences that can be really useful later on to edit. As for myself, if I'm not using a teleprompter, it's really difficult to memorize very long sentences. What I do is that I break them down in much smaller ones that are much easier to carry on and also give it the right attitude. Just be sure that if you make any mistake to start a sentence all over again from the beginning, instead of trying to retake a word that was broken in the middle, like this it would just seem like you were on a roll and talking to the camera and you never actually stopped. Like for example, what if I told you that this very last part that you listened to was cut in many different parts and you didn't notice. Do you see it? With some re-framing and cutting away to the secondary camera, you can just eliminate this stops and it just feels natural. Just be sure to keep a notebook close by for you to write down some things that happen. Let me give you an example about the notes that I would do if recording something. Mainly two things are going to happen when you're recording yourself. The first one is that you're going to make some mistake and you're going to have to begin a sentence all over again. In this case, I just find too boring to stop recording and begin again because maybe it's just going to happen way too many times for it to be practical. My solution in this case is just when I get it right to give it a little bit of time before I continue. But in case you're reading, you're not making that many mistakes. It might be easier if you just stop recording and start over again to have different takes of the same thing. You can check in your camera or in your phone what's the name of the file you have right now. Probably it's going to be on a numerical sequence. In my case, for example, I would write down that my first test clip was named C001. That then I record the three different times the same thing and they are the Clips 02,03, and 04. Beside these on the table, I could write that 02 was good but not very fluid. Maybe 03 was very good and 04 was good, but it wasn't better than the previous one. This is just going to save you so much time because later in the editing you don't have to watch all of these again. You already know that that file in the middle is the good one. Of course, sometimes it might be useful if in doubt for you to watch again in the computer to have a view also of how you looked. But this is already going to give you a very good reference about what to pay attention to. One other thing that can happen is if some loud noise happens in the middle of your recording but you don't want to stop it to begin again because it was just something very quick. You can check on the screen of your camera for how long you've been recording, write down this time code so that in the editing later, you already know that you have to pay attention to that moment. Now for this lesson, I want you to do something exactly like this, a talking head shot to the camera so that you get feel of being in front of it. You can also use the template linked in the guidebook for you to write down what happens during your session. One other suggestion is trying not to record a very long session in only one file. First because some natural disaster can happen like for example, your battery running out. But most of all just to try to protect it from small failures that can happen. Like for example, the microphone cable unplugging itself for some reason or maybe some noise in the background that you didn't even realize was happening at that moment. Onto the key takeaways of this lesson, give some breathing time at the start and the end of your shots. Keeping notes of interruption and cuts will immensely help you later in the editing. Constantly assess if everything is running smoothly. Assuming everything is going alright, you have A-roll recorded, and now it's time to grab the camera, and let's record some B-roll. [MUSIC] 9. Recording B-Roll: [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're going to learn how to film the videos that are going to be supporting what you're talking about. These help the viewer understand the context, and also contribute to grab their attention instead of having just a fixed and static shots during all times. Now the principles for positioning, depth and light that we talked about before they all apply here also. Separation from the background and good lighting are key. Now for the B-roll property, you're going to have to be moving your set around a little bit, especially the lights. For this I like to write down a list of everything that I want to do in a specific position, and do all my B-roll there at once. Only then I'm going to be moving around my camera and lights to other position to continue working from there. This is going to save you a lot of time, but requires just a little bit more organization, especially when writing down what all the shots that it took refer to. To prepare a B-roll shortlist you can download the templates that is linked in the guidebook. There you're going to be able to fill it up with all the bureau or additional information that you need to be able to complete your message on top of your talking head video. The way that I like to go about it is watching all the talking head videos once again and in the template, filling it up with everything that I want to show in those moments. Meaning that I'm going to insert the time of the video in which I want to insert something else and what do I have to show there? But in this moment I'm not really worried about how am I going to show it. Just what? After I finish this first pass I have an idea of how many things do I need to shoot. This now is also going to give me a rough idea about how many shots of the same thing I'm going to need to perform to convey a message. Like this, I can start brainstorming, how can I show it to the best way? Maybe it's positioning on a nice place, maybe it's just creating different movements with the camera around it so that I just have some variety of shots that I can use later. With these, you also going to be able to fill the information about where you want to shoot this. After this list is ready, you can just filter it by location and do everything that you need in the same spot and then move on to the next. You're going to see that in my example shortlist, there were two main columns. The first one was talking about where I was going to shoot it. The second one was saying if the studio is going to be all closed with the lights on or if it was going to use natural light. This allowed me to save so much time by not having to move around too much and opening and closing curtains all the same. Now for this lesson, I wanted to write down three different B-roll shots that you're going to use in your project video. Try to think of different angles and movements for you to showcase it. Definitely avoid the eye level looking down shot, try to get closer, try to get lower, try to insert a little bit of movement. Everything that you can do that is a little bit different from the normal eye level perspective is going to generate much more interest. If you're going to film yourself doing some activity like painting, drawing, using the computer, you're probably going to be better off using a tripod. Then you're just going to repeat the same sequence over and over. First place the camera according to your taste and the light. If it's an artificial light, then placing it in the proper position or positioning yourself according to it. Controlling if manual out-of-focus is set, recording and repeating. In case you're going to be filming at hand-held, then some other tricks apply. First, maybe you're going to want to bump up a little bit the frames per second on your recording. Remember when we talked about it before, the frames per second are the amount of pictures the camera is going to take within a second. Now let's just think about it, there's a book, for example. Imagine that the person watching your video later on is going to be reading your movie at 25 pages per second. Now if you record at 100 pages or pictures per second, it's going to take the same person four times more to be able to see all those pictures or pages, meaning that it's going to feel like slow motion. This helps a lot also for stabilizing the footage. Watch this clip without slowing down. [MUSIC] Now in slow motion to see how much of that jitter just goes away. [MUSIC] Now, if your intention is not to slow down the footage, be sure to check in your camera if you have some in cameras stabilization or maybe on your lens to make it much smoother. In some cameras like the ZV-1, for example, you're going to be able to choose between standard or active stabilization. Usually the more stable options are going to crop in a little bit, so you have to account for that when you're recording. Are there good tricks to be stable is to try to support your elbows against your body, move really slowly and preferably just by transferring your weight from one leg to the other. It takes a little bit of practice, but in no time you're going to be doing amazing B-roll. One other cool trick is to put the camera on top of some clothing and just slide it around the table or the floor to make it really fluid. On smartphones, be sure to check in the settings if you have some super stabilization option. Usually it comes at the cost of reducing a little bit the resolution, so be sure to check it. Now as a general rule, it's important to create some movement, be it with the object you're filming or with the camera itself. This generates much more interest in the scene. After all, we are talking about video and not just photography. You can transfer the weight of your body laterally or maybe forward and back, you can use this lighting trick, you can move it up and down or maybe behind some object to create a little bit more depth in the scene. The key takeaways of this lesson are, organize a shortlist to avoid wasting time, there's no motion can make B-roll much more stable if handheld, and movement creates more interest. Just remember, you don't necessarily need to show absolutely everything you're talking about all the time, otherwise, too many cuts can also be so distracting when you're watching a video, and then the audience loses the connection with you. But when using the right moment, it can change the rhythm a little bit and illustrates something that maybe for the viewer is not that obvious as it is for you. 10. Importing and Editing: [MUSIC] So you carefully filmed everything you needed and now it's time to put it all together. In the next few lessons, you're going to be seen me using Da Vinci Resolve, which is a very good software to edit and works either on Windows and Mac. Also other softwares that you can use and they are famous and very good also are Adobe Premiere, that works on both platforms or Final Cut that works only on a Mac. If you're going to be editing on a smartphone, I can totally recommend CapCut, which is totally my favorites, and also VN. Now it's time for you to get your SD cards or transfer your files from your phone into the computer if that's where you're going to be editing. Let's open Da Vinci Resolve and begin. Let's open the Da Vinci Resolve over here. This is the paid version, but everything we are going to use today are tools that are included also in the free version. So don't need to worry. To begin with, I'm going to create a new project down here and I will just name it Skillshare Editing Lesson and create. Now it's going to create a new project with the default settings from Da Vinci Resolve, but you can always come down here, click this gear to and then you're going to be able to see all the settings you have for this project. The most important part here is going to be to check what's the resolution of your timeline. In this case here the default was 4k, but we're going to change this to 1080p, which is this version over here. The rest is fine, 25 frames per second, which is what we're going to be using and I will just hit Save and we're good. Now every editing software is going to have different panels for you to do different things. Mainly there's going to be one panel for you to import your footage, one for you to edit, one to treat audio, one to treat color, and one to export. But you don't need to worry about all of these, we're mainly going to be using the edit and the export pages only. In the Da Vinci Resolve, you can access them by going down here into these icons and I'm just going to go into the edit page. If you are in Premiere or Final Cut, there will be a similar page over there where you're going to be able to see all the editing tools. In case you're not seeing something, you can always come up to Window on some softwares or Workspace and you're going to be able to see here what's on and what's not on the screen for you to be able to use. Now first thing we have to do is to bring everything inside the software. I'm just going to open here the folder that I separated just for this. Most editing softwares accept you just carrying a folder inside it and it's going to keep the same structure, so you can already organize your files before and just drag them in. That's what I'm going to do, I'll just have here one folder for the smartphone videos and one folder for the camera videos. I'm just going to select them both. In the case of Da Vinci, I have to drag it over the master over here and it's going to ask me if I want to change the project frame rate because the files, some of them are different from what we just set inside the Da Vinci. I'll just click, don't change, just keep it and now everything is inside here in their respective folder all organized. Now Da Vinci, you're already going to have a timeline ready for you to work down here on the right. Another softwares like Premiere for example, you're going to have a button just for that, which is like a blank page and you just click on that and choose new timeline. In this case, I'm just going to go to Timelines, Create New Timeline and it just asks me if I just want to use the same project settings that we set before, what is the name? What's the kind of audio track that I want? I'm just going to cancel because one is created already. I don't need to create a new one for this. Remember, for example, when we talked about filming in vertical and if that's exactly what it did, what you're going to do when you are creating a new timeline is inverting the numbers for full HD for example. So instead of doing In 1920 by 1080, you're going to do 1080 by 1920 in the height. Let me show you how it works here. For example, I have two files from the Sony camera. I'm just going to grab one of them and I'm going to drag it over here to the timeline. Now you're going to see two bars divided by this line here in the middle. Let me zoom in a little bit and you're going to see a little bit better. So this blue bar up here is the video part of your fire. Video 1 is exactly the name of this layer and below here you have Audio 1, which is the audio that is connected to that video. If we play it here, you're going to be able to see that it's exactly the audio for that video. Here you're already going to be able to see how long is it. Here you can see that it's 27 minutes long, just this file. Now, in the audio and you probably noticed already, you have some gaps and you have some of these spikes. What you can see is exactly where I was talking and where it was just silent or at least I wasn't talking really close to the microphone. This is going to be exactly the queue we are going to use to know where to cut this file. I'm going to show you. But before we begin cutting, there is something really important to do. In case you used two or more cameras, it's much easier if you just bring them into the timeline right now, than later on. I want to show you why. The other file we had was this one here. So I'm just going to drag it over. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger here for us to see. You can always see this preview of what the file is everywhere. As you can see, this one was my main camera and this one was the secondary camera and both audios are here. Now for us to see very clearly which one is which I'm going to right-click and I'm going to go to Clip Color and change the color to violet, for example. This one here, I'm going to do the same and I'm just going to change it to orange. That's really clear which order belongs to each video. As you can see, the audios are not matching, meaning that if I just go over to this position and I hide this layer for a second, I'm not in the same position in both videos. So I have to align them together and this is where you're going to choose both of them by dragging around like this, right-clicking and just going. In Da Vinci its auto align clips based on waveform and the software is just automatically going to align both and you can see that it's perfect because the shape of the audio just matches perfectly one of the other. Before in the recording arrow lesson, I told you to give three loud claps for you to be able to use later in the editing stage and this is exactly why. Sometimes the talking is just not enough for the software to understand what's going on and the clapping really helps for this to work. Now if you're in a controlled environment in which you can see here, for example, the moments that I'm not talking, it's almost silent. It's not going to be a problem. So you don't really have to worry about it, but in case this was much more mixed, the claps just solve the issue. Now I'm just going to quickly hide the Media Pool here for us to be seeing these a little bit bigger. One thing that you probably noticed is that we have this Preview Window up here. This is showing the frame from this video in pink. What happens if I hide it? Then you begin to see what's below, which is this video over here, meaning that what's on top has the preference over what you're looking. Imagine that these videos are just like photos on a tabletop and you're actually putting them one on top of the other. So the only thing you can see is actually what's on the top. If you just remove it temporarily like here, then you're going to see what's below. Now mainly what you're going to need is to use the cutting tools to be able to split this file into what you need. For example, let's just go here close to the first part where I'm talking. So now the class project couldn't be anything else than. Now the main idea of editing is just going to be cutting things around, using the right tools for that and selecting the parts and moving them to wherever you want them on your timeline. For example, here we have these two videos, and I can see that I tried to say some sentence about three times over here, and the last one is the correct one. I'm just going to come up to here and I'm going to grab the blade tool that you can see here that you can access by clicking or using a shortcut B on your keyboard. Let's just press in B. Now wherever I place my mouse on top of the video, you're going to be able to see that blade tool. If I click, it's going to generate a cut. As you can see, it just created a board there in-between this part over here and this part over here. If I go back to the selection tool by clicking here or typing A on the keyboard, I'm going to be able to select the part on the right or the part on the left. But just notice that the video in orange hasn't changed at all. It means that I'm just cutting through the first slides, but I'm not going through to the end. You can either use the blade tool to cut them both if you want and it cuts video and audio, or you can use one tool, that just cuts them altogether. Now as you might have noticed, it's going to take a long time if you have to cut twice every time that you're to cut something. I reassign some keys on the keyboard to make it as fast as possible. This is something that are going to be seen in mostly all of the editing softwares. There's a very high level of customization you can do with your keyboard to make it faster to do things. In my case, I assigned three different shortcuts that I use absolutely all the time and makes editing so much faster, which are Q, W, and E. We're going to show you what they do, but you can also find some extra information about it in the guidebook, attached to this class. In this case, for example, E is the one that is going to cut through everything. I can just press it once and as you can see, it just slice through all the clips, and now I can move any of these independently if I want to. The other ones that I mentioned, they are Q and W. Q is the one that cuts everything that is behind the play head until the first cut. Let's see, for example, I'm just going to drag this layer head around here. Let's say that I wanted to begin from here. I need to delete everything that is around here. What I could do would be to make a cut, select them, and then press Delete. It just brings everything back and we achieved what we wanted. But there's a faster way. I can just come up to here to the same position and I can press Q, and it just cuts and cancels everything that is behind that point. Here is absolutely [NOISE]. Imagine that I want to cut what's between the last part of the sentence here, and the first cut. Instead of cutting, selecting, and deleting, I'm just going to press W and it just cuts everything and brings it all together so much faster. When I have a small timeline like this with just two clips, it seems that it might be useless to learn this thing because you don't actually gain that much more time just by doing this. But when have several layers and you've been doing this for half an hour, one hour, this shortcut saves so much time because it all adds up together. Your job from now on is just going through the whole timeline, cutting and deleting the parts that you don't need anymore so that we end up with something like this. [MUSIC] As you can see, using these was quite quick to just get through all the videos and audios in here. Mainly I used key, W and E to do all this cutting. Now besides all this cutting and deleting and dragging the clips around, there's one other thing that we're going to use very constantly, which is dragging the edges of the clips around to make them shorter or a little bit longer. Let's see, for example, this clip over here. When I drag it over and you can just see that I finish talking and then I just changed my look to the sides, to the script, and then you go to the other camera. We need to reduce this part here to cut it. Before I do that, so would be around here, for example. Now, if you should drag the mouse really close to the edge of that clip, it becomes something different with an arrow. If you click it, you're going to be able to see that now, you can just drag this clip around to the right or to the left, so cutting or expanding this clip. In this case, I'm just going to clip it until here, whereas exactly where my look finishes for both of them. Then I can just drag this one. Now the connection is seamless and we don't have any looking around or something like that. If you need to cover for something a little bit more serious or long. So if you're in a desperate situation, you can just come to your bureau and lay it on the timeline exactly on top of that point, and then the connection between one clip and the other is going to come through the clip that was laid there before, is going to alternate to the bureau and, then we can also credit back here. It's going to go back to this second clip normally. The idea is to make the video flow and not make your spectator notice everything that happen in the backstage. To navigate on the timeline, I was just carrying the play head around until the points that I wanted. Probably you'll notice that I was zooming in and zooming out and also moving laterally on the timeline. This was just achieved by using also some shortcuts. If you press down Alt or Option on a Mac and you use this scroll up and down, you're going to make it bigger or smaller. If you press Control and up and down, you're just going to navigate on the timeline. In some other editing softwares, this is actually inverted. Alt is going to allow you to go around and Control is going to make it go up and down, so it depends, but also the other controls are usually on screen like here, for example, that you have the zooms lie there that you could just use, or you could just navigate around using this. But after a while when you learn the shortcuts, it's just so much faster to do that way instead of having to go with the mouse where you want to go and then moving everything to the right point. Again, all these shortcuts are going to be on the guidebook. Let's go for the key takeaways. The first one is that laying the clips on the timeline and synchronizing them has to be the first thing you do when editing multi-cameras. The first cut of the video is super important for you to have an idea of where it's going and what's going to be the base for the rest of the video, the foundation. If you have any experience with editing, you already know that it's not a very complicated puzzle, it just needs some practice. But if you never had any contact with an editing software, I really recommend you to open right now the one of your choice and try importing some of the files that are shot from the previous lessons and homeworks. Learning a new software always requires you to have a little bit of time of getting used to. Just import some of the files you already have, throw them on the timeline and just begin chopping them up into pieces that you actually want to use to have the feel for the software and how it operates. If you want to already to become a much more skewed editor, go check the guidebook where I left a lot of shortcuts for you to experiment and memorize. You can also print the page and have it by your computer so that you can quickly refer to it while you're editing and memorize them forever. [MUSIC] 11. Timing Your Edits: [MUSIC] Now the next step is going to be creating some gaps in the video that is on top for you to be able to see the lower one. For example, in here we're just seeing myself in the secondary camera. Choose one of these like this, for example, to alternate between the camera here in this part that finishes just around here in this cut and then to this other cut over here. To do that, you just have to select this video and cancel it either using delete or backspace. Now if you use delete, it just brings everything over here to the left and we don't want that. I'm just going to click and then hit Backspace and that's it. Now since we don't have that video over here anymore, you're going to be able to see the video that is below. We just created a change [OVERLAPPING] in this part. The important thing to do is to decide which audio track is going to be your main one because in this moment they're just the same, but they're coming from different cameras. In this case, the audio connected from the main camera was the one that had the microphone connected to it. What I could do is just delete all the audio that is down here, but I like to keep it just to be sure that everything is still synchronizing. That I didn't move anything by mistake. What I usually do is that I just come up here, to where these controls on the audio track, and I mute this track. This way, I can always have the track over there. I can be sure that it's synchronized and if I play [OVERLAPPING] I'm actually just playing with my track over here. But don't worry, we're going to going to detail on every step of the process. Now sharing this video in the project together, is vital for you to really learn what's in here. Now once you've done this rough cut, it's time to bring in the bureau, all those complementary images that you shot for us to put on top of this video. In other words, you've seen this basic preparation. I'm going to bring in the videos from the example project that you saw in one of the first classes, and here we have it. In this part, I'm just talking about that I'm moving things around to find the right spot and that I'm using a pile of books to support the smartphone too film myself. This is where I want to bring exactly that image. To do that, you can just come back to the meter pool over here and you're going to be able to see all the other shots that it took. If you just pass the mouse over it, you're going to be able to see a very quick preview of what these files are. One other mode of doing this is coming up here and choosing this dual Windows setup, in which you can. For example, double-click this one. Now you have all your files over here. You have a preview file here about what you just clicked and you have here, what's on the timeline. If I just scroll over here [NOISE] you're going to be seeing the timeline itself. If you scroll over here, you're just going to see the video that you're about to insert into the timeline, like this. You can choose just the piece that you want and bring it into the timeline. In this case, I'm talking about the pile of books and the smartphone being on top of it. I just want to bring in one of these images here, for example, in which you can see the light, the pile of books, and the smartphone just down here. Let's say I wanted from here until this part here, for example. To do that, you can just drag and drop this on the timeline, but then it's going to bring the whole clip inside and I don't want that, or you can just select here the part that you want, type I on the keyboard, which makes an endpoint, and just go to the end and type O and it marks the outpoint. As you can see, it highlighted here on this small timeline just the piece that I want. Now if I bring it in, it's going to bring just that piece. Probably you noticed that when I hovered over here, appeared two different buttons. One for video and one for audio. You could actually bring to the timeline just the video or just the audio or if you just click on the image itself and bring it in, you're going to be bringing everything together. I'm going to delete because in this case actually, the only thing that matters to me is the video. I'm just going to bring in the video and just position it exactly. I'm using my smartphone as my main camera on top of some Math books, they're good for that offset. I show exactly what I'm talking about. Now if you watch carefully, the Bureau lesson, you know that some of these clips might've been shot in a higher frame rate than 25 frames per second. To see that, you can just come up to here and make it a list instead of this thumbnails and you're going to be able to see FPS. Other editing softwares just the same. You're going to be able to see these pool of media as a list or as thumbnails. You can see this column called FPS. You're going to be able to see that, for example, this clip over here was shot at 60 FPS. Let's see which one it is. It's this one over here. Let's bring it into the timeline directly also. We can do that. We're going to be able to see that it's just playing real-time, just giving a small glimpse into the light that I was using to record. What I can do here is select this footage and press R on the keyboard and it's going to bring up the change clip speed dialog box. In other softwares, also the same. Can be control R or you can also right-click and go into real-time controls or change time, read time. It's always going to be something around this. In my case, I'm just going to press R and here you're going to see speed frames per second or duration. You can simply change one of these and it's just going to calculate for you what you want. Let's say, for example, this is 60 frames per second. Let's slow down this clip the maximum we can. Since we are on a 25 frames per second timeline and we have 60 frames per second, we can still slow down this to 40 percent. Let's put here 40 change. Now if I play this back, you're going to be able to see that it's just slowed down to 40 percent speed perfectly without any problems of skipped frames or anything like that because we had more material than we actually needed to in this timeline. We are almost good to go. Let's add one more item to this timeline, which is music, because we have an edit anything yet to the audio part of this project. I'm just going to drag one wave file over here and it's the same thing. If you just double-click it, you're going to be able to see in the preview panel here all the waveform of the song. You can just select one part or you can simply drag and drop. In this case, you have to drop it on the audio part. You don't need to create manually one new track here for you to insert something, you can just drag it. I'm just going to do it again. The moment you position it below a track that already exists, automatically the software creates a new track for that. We don't need it, so I'm just going to put it back there. If you make it bigger over here, you're going to be able to see all the track laid out here for you. It finishes around here. [MUSIC] You can see it's impossible to understand anything that I'm saying because it's way too loud, the music. But controlling the volume on audio tracks it's super easy, and you can do it directly here without using any shortcuts. As you can see, this small white line that is passing here in the middle, the moment you pass the mouse over it, I'm going to zoom in to make it even clear, it becomes this double arrow thing that you can just drag and drop to increase or decrease the volume of something. Let's do it here, for example, for this song, I'm just going to click and drag it down. You're going to be able to see how much we are decreasing in dB, in real-time, and also the waveform going smaller and smaller, which also makes it much easier to understand if it's being reduced or what's happening here. I'm just going to leave it here around minus 40 dB and let's play it back again. I'm using this ear buds as my microphone and sometimes when it gets a bit darker. Now you can't even listen it. I'm just going to drag it up a little bit. I'm using also a small light from aperture that was recommended in the course. Now you can here. Now it's working pretty good. You just have to regulate so that the audio of the song doesn't overcome your voice and then it becomes too difficult to understand. Let's go for the key takeaways. The first one is that lay the clips on the timeline and synchronizing them has to be the first thing you do when editing multi-cameras. The first cut of the video is super important for you to have an idea of where it's going and what's going to be the base for the rest of the video, the foundation. Use different cuts to keep the video flowing. One exercise here that is going to help you understand better the relationship between the amount of frames per second that is shot on your camera and your timeline in the editing software is to just grab one of these clips that are supposed to become slow motion, throw them in the timeline, and just slow them down and see how they react. Let's say for example, you have 100 frames per second clip and the timeline is 25 in the sense you could slow it down up to twenty-five percent. I want you to configure it like that, see how it looks, and then try some higher percentages, for example 50 percent, meaning that it's going to be slowed down only to half of the speed. Then try 75 percent and see how much that slows down the clip. In the guidebook, you're going to find some references about the frames per second and how much you have to slow them down in percentage so that you have similar results. But what I want here is just for you to pay attention about how fluid a clip looks with different speeds and also how stable it looks. [MUSIC] Now that you know the basics of video editing, in the next lesson we're going to talk about creating smooth edits. 12. Creating Smooth Edits: [MUSIC] Editing a video is much like telling a story. The more fluid you can make it, the more interesting it is for the person watching it. To generate this feeling, there are many techniques that you can use inside the editing software. Let me show you some of them. The most common way of cutting a clip is seemingly a rough cut in which one clip finishes, [NOISE] one begins immediately after it. But there are some other ways that we can do this that helps flow the video a little bit better. One of the most used ways of joining two clips together is using an effect that exists in all editing softwares. The name is usually something around Cross Dissolve. Here's how you apply it to. You just drag it over to the connection between the clips. You can see that now there's this rectangle exactly around the edges over here, which means that if you play it back, it's going to [OVERLAPPING] Let me just show you one and a little bit bigger over here. To share with our community. [NOISE]. What happened here is that one clip fades out and the other one fades in while the other is still visible. It makes them connected somehow. You shouldn't overdo this effect, but in some cases it can be a nice way of going from one clip to the other. Next up we have J and L cuts, and they are named like this, exactly because of the shape they generate inside the timeline. The J cuts are the ones in which the clip below is going to be heard before it actually appears on the screen. Let me show you. Let's open up some space here, for example. I'm just going to drag this clips up to create some space. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit and you can see the camera ends around here. If I grab all these clips that are here, and I anticipate them until the audio hits exactly the play head. It means that when one finishes immediately, [NOISE] topic is going to be a present. In this case, since we're not cutting away to a different camera, It's a little bit strange. I think it's more interesting if we do it like this, for example, we have this angle and then we cut away to this other angle. Let's see how it sounds. [OVERLAPPING] The topic is going to be a presentation of your area of camera. You just listen it a little bit before you actually see the image. It just connects it and make it much faster and more fluid. Now the L cut is the opposite. You're going to be able to see the clip ahead, but you're still going to be listening the clip that came before like this, for example, I already positioned one in which [OVERLAPPING]. [MUSIC] You're already seeing the next clip, but you could still hear the ending of the clip before. Now a cutaway is simply like we were adding B-roll before in which you're just like cutting from one scene to another and then coming back to show something, to explain something or even to cover some mistakes or errors then that row and behind the scenes. But don't worry, we're going to go into detail on every step of the. You can still listen the clip from before, why you're seeing that image. You can already anticipate what's coming in the next one before you actually see it. It's a very interesting technique also, to make everything flow together with just an abrupt cut between those two clips there. Now you probably noticed by now that this cutaway is from one camera angle to another, have a very specific reason. This is exactly to give some flow to the video. Like for example, in this part here in which the main camera, [OVERLAPPING] [NOISE]. Then I have to take a look at the script to understand where should I go to now. Then in this point, I can simply cut it and just connect it to the next clip. It's going to look like this, [NOISE] now sharing this video. It just looks strange because we are in the same position and I just [OVERLAPPING] and that continued from another hand position in the same place. Two things that we can do here are, one of them is simply cutting away to the other angle, to the other camera. In this case, we can just see, of the process, [NOISE] [OVERLAPPING]. You've seen it throughout this whole course and its exactly like this. It just gives flow to speech that was actually stopped before. Now once you get there, you can use if you have just one camera is to change the framing, so for example, you can go from this to this. You can actually just come to the Zoom and just make it a little bit closer. Then you have this. [OVERLAPPING] It's a little bit of a jump, but it just makes it more interesting and actually still looks natural. For most editing softwares, you're going to find this panel over here that allows you to change many things about the video or the audio of that clip. This is like a Properties tab. There are so many options inside here, but one that you're going to be using very often are the scale, which in this case it's called Zoom the positioning. You can simply move in the x axis or the y-axis. This video, up and down or laterally. You can zoom in and out. You can just use these to reposition your framing and then make things like this cut for example, or simply showing something on screen that you wanted to highlight. Let's go to the key takeaway. Use different cuts to keep the video flowing more naturally. Don't exaggerate on one style of cut. Otherwise, the video just becomes predictable instead of flowing together and it just becomes boring. If you've already imported some talking head video into your editing software and cut it up a little bit. This is the perfect timing for you to try some J and L cuts.If you didn't, this is the moment for you to import them and do the same. This exercise is going to help you understand a little bit better about how multiple layers work and how much of this cuts is going to be too fast, or how much is going to just make the editing a little bit more fluid. With time, you also develop some sensibility about it and it's just going to get better and better. But for now, just try it out and see how it looks and sounds. [MUSIC] In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about adding some text and visuals to finalize your video. 13. Creating Titles and Effects: [MUSIC] Your video is almost ready to go to the oven. We just need to spice it up a little bit. We're going to do it by adding some titles, texts, things that will enhance the message that you want to pass, and also some sound effects and visual effects. For titles and visuals, you can usually find the library inside your own editing software, like on the video. For example, you're going to be able to find under effects library, a very vast collection of many things you could use like transitions, audio transitions, many different titles that you just need to hover over the name to see what exactly they are going to do and also generate some solid colors. There are also some special effects like pretending that you're on TV or just on a DSLR filming. This can be useful and you can also download some more over the Internet in many different websites that I'm going to help you also with a list. To use any of those, let's just use a lower third. For example, that is one of those texts that come up just to say the name of the person that is talking. Let's just grab one lower third over here and position it on the timeline. It acts exactly like a video clip. You just position, it has an animation, [OVERLAPPING] and then a fade sound. What you can do is click on it. Now on the attributes panel that you find here on the right, you're going to be able to change also the text if you want, you can just put your name or put whatever you want in there. It's going to appear, [OVERLAPPING] and go away. These are already embedded inside the editing software. On Premiere, for example, you're going to find inside the essential graphics panel and in other software there's always going to be a place with some of these pre-built effects. Now, if you don't like the effects that you have pre-built in your software, you can also download some more graphics. Some that I can recommend you are Envato and Motion Array. These are all paid, but it can pay a monthly subscription and download many different things that will for sure enhance a lot your videos. If you're looking for music, there is a free library inside the YouTube website in which you can just download totally copyright free songs to use in whatever project you'd like. It's really cool that you can filter them by genre or mood or how fast they are. There are also many options for paid subscription websites like Epidemic Sound, Artlist, or Audiio. These are usually going to have some better tracks than the free ones that you can find in other websites like the YouTube one that I just mentioned but you have to pay a subscription to these websites. If you're looking for some sound effects, there are many in freesound.org and it's a very good library provided by the users themselves. Now if what you need is some video of something that you can't capture yourself, you can go to pexels.com that has a lot of free assets for you to use in many different projects. Each thing has got a different license. On some of them you have to give credit to the creator and some are just free, you don't need to do anything. But also if you need something a little bit more professional, you can go to Storyblocks. It's a really good website for stock footage or images like this. Finishing touch on our video here, it can be to color these clips to make them pop even more. Let me show you how it's done. As I told you before, the editing softwares all have different panels. In this case here we're just going to go to the color panel. The [inaudible] color panel, it's a very complete suite for coloring. But mostly what you're going to see in all editing softwares is going to be like for example, on Premiere, there's going to be a Lumetri panel, which is going to have all the controls for you to adjust exposure, shadows, make your clip a little bit brighter or a little bit darker, and play around with the saturation. It's enough for you to know that it's possible to do all these around this page here. For example, let me show you brightening it up a little bit, making it a little bit more contrasty here, and maybe boosting the saturation a little bit. Just be sure not to go too far with these controls. Because depending on the clips and the camera that you have, these are going to be a little bit more or less flexible. It's better to follow the tips from the other lessons and just get it as right as possible in camera. Now, all you need to do is export the video and it's going to be ready to be shared. Let's see the key takeaways of this lesson. Text, visuals, sound effects, visual effects, can be the finishing touch of a pro video. The videos can always be color corrected, but don't overdo it and try to get it right in camera. This is the time for you to reopen the project and try inserting some titles in the beginning and some effects to some clips. With this exercise, you're going to realize what happens when you try to stretch them out or move them around a little bit, which controls you have over different titles, and how some effects behave inserted in different clips. Some are going to be super light and you're going to be able to preview them immediately and others are going to be super heavy. You're going to even have to do some processing before you can even visualize what they're doing. This is also going to give you an idea about how well your computer handles the files and effects that you're inserting. This is going to give you some boundaries about what's going to be practical and look good and what's just going to be a huge waste of time. [MUSIC] In the next lesson, we are going to be exporting your video and making it ready to be shared. 14. Exporting Your Video: [MUSIC] The video looks amazing and now it's the moment to bake it into a final file ready to share. Editing softwares are going to have some sort of option like delivery or export. In there, be sure to select both video and audio for the final file to be complete. Next step, you have to choose which kind of format or codec you're going to use. There are so many options that one could get totally lost in here. But one of the most common accepted everywhere is H.264 or MP4. Just find this option in your editing software and you're going to be just fine. Now regarding the quality, some editing softwares are just going to ask if you want a regular, good, or very good quality. Other ones are going to let you dial in the exact amount of information you want in the final file. It's difficult to give a precise number because also depends on the quality of the camera you use it to record. Consider that for YouTube for example, if you go for something around the 30 megabits per second, up to 50, you're going to have very good quality. Now if you're aiming for something that is going to be displayed on a larger screen, then you can go for a little bit higher than that. Then in this, you just click "Export" and you're editing software is going to get everything that you've done, all the titles, all the information, all the transitions and cuts that you made, and bake it all in only one file. Now, this process can take quite a long time depending on your computer. Just be sure to check that the progress bar is going forward and that it doesn't say an insane amount of time left to finish. As an exporting exercise, just try to export whatever timeline you're already playing around with until now. Don't wait until your whole class project is done to do your first export. This is important for two different reasons. The first one is to understand how long your computer takes to export as more file. The second one is for you to take this file and send it over to your smartphone, for example, and see how it looks. See if it looks way different or if it's similar. This is going to give you an idea if the resolution is good, if the audio is nice, if the size is correct. Also, about the colors, you can see in different devices. In the guidebook, you're going to find that quick reference for the settings to use to export your files. Once it's complete, it's ready to share. You are now officially a video production company all in one. 15. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Congratulations. You now have all the tools required to start doing right away high-quality videos at home using the gear you already got, but the knowledge to do much more. We talked about how to set up your environment and your gear for the best quality possible, and you learned many tricks on how to do it in the most efficient way possible, besides discovering many tools that can help you along this path. We got the cameras rolling, and it all came together in the editing software. A-roll, secondary camera, B-roll, sounds, effects, music. I really hope this class encourages you to enjoy the process of filming, of showing your art, what you love, and to inspire you to create more and more. Remember, now it's on you. Show us your space, tell us all about it on the short video using all the techniques you've learned here. Post it on the project board, and I'll be sure to give feedback, on what you can improve and what's already top quality. For more content about photography, video making tips and tricks, just follow me on all social medias, @flyenri. Be it Instagram, Twitter, on YouTube, you're going to find me everywhere. If you want, just shoot me a DM saying you came from Skillshare. I really like to connect with you guys. I hope this was a fun and info-packed class, and I can't wait to see what you come up with. To the next class. [FOREIGN] [MUSIC]