Produce a High-Quality Video Podcast

1. Let's Get Podcasting!: If you want to start a video podcast, but don't want it to look or sound like this, then you're in the right spot. In this course, we're going to cover how to create a high-quality video podcast from anywhere in the world. Using Riverside will cover all the gear and equipment you'll need. How to build out your recording space, how to make sure your guests look and sound their best. How to set up and record inside Riverside, how to publish your episode to YouTube and the major podcasting platforms. Plus how to create social media video clips for hyping up your show. As a bonus, we'll also cover some extra features in Riverside, like including a live audience and recording and live streaming. By the end of this course, you'll be set up to produce a top-notch high-quality video podcast. Now, this course is great for current podcasters who are recording audio and went to level up to video. It's also ideal for potential podcasters. Maybe you've got a podcast in mind for yourself or your business and you want to get a solid foundation on how to record high-quality video and audio for this endeavor. You also don't have to be doing a podcast at all, even though this course is called video podcasting. And Riverside is great for remotely recording conversations or interviews with anyone anywhere in the world. So maybe you wanna do a high-quality remote recording that will later be edited into another project, like a documentary or YouTube videos. That a lot, which leads me to who am I? My name is Joey Daoud. I am a media producer, having produced films that are on Netflix, Hulu, and New York Times, to name a few. I currently run a media production agency called new territory media. I also producing host of two podcasts. One is called Behind the upload, which is all about video for brands and marketing. And the other is with iHeartRadio and it's called Paradise Lost crime in Miami. Now, when it comes to teaching courses on Skillshare, I've been here for awhile. The very first course I did, which was about seven years ago at this point, is all about how to interview people for podcasts and documentaries. I look very young there. So if you are ready to get started producing your video podcast, Let's begin. 2. Navigating the Course: All right, Before we get started, let's take a quick note, talk about how to make the best use of this course, how it's organized and how you can maximize on it. So the course is organized. And what I think is a logical flow. We talked a little bit about video podcasting as a whole. Then we're gonna talk about equipment, what you might need to do to get started. Then I'm gonna talk about setting up Riverside, how to get that built out, how it works. Nice overview. And then we're going to run through how you record a session on Riverside high, record your podcast episode. And then we're gonna go into the post-production stuff, the editing stuff of how you finished your episode and Riverside, and how you can create social media clips from within Riverside to then share social media. And then also how to publish it onto the podcasting platform of your choice. And also YouTube, which is a separate deal. And then there's a couple of bonus topics of things that riverside can do that don't really fit nicely inside just doing a regular podcast episode. But it's useful to know other things that are available so you know, you can do in the future. And then with that, we'll wrap up and I'll talk about second part of this course that's coming up. That is gonna be how you can edit the stuff that you record in Riverside if you wanna take it to the next level and bring it into a video editor. And how you can edit it specifically in disk scripts, which is a really good, really awesome video editor. That really is not a video editor. If you know how to use a Word file or a Google doc file, you can edit video using the script. It's that simple. So that'll be the second part of this course that is going to be coming up. Like I said, that's where the way it's organized. But if you feel like you've got a handle on gear and you just want to go to the Riverside stuff. If you want to skip over explaining what video podcasts is and why it's the future. I mean, you're ready to hear, so maybe you don't want to hear that. Feel free to jump around you. This is your course. Jump around to whatever section you want to listen to or watch. I organized it so each section should stand alone by itself. You don't really need to have seen previous stuff, maybe the Riverside stuff. You might need the foundation before jumping into how to record an episode in Riverside, but make the most use of this. Put in whatever order you'd have to watch this whole thing in order. Pick what resonates most with you and also your time is valuable. Maximize your time if you want to play this thing back at 1.5 speed, two-speed, go right ahead. I will not be insulted if you jump around, if you speed up my talking, it is a little bit fast, I believe already. So do so at your own risk, but I play everything back at two-speed in general anyways, because we can hear stuff a lot faster than we can speak. And we're very good at processing steps, so feel free to do that and also resources. So I'll be mentioning a lot of products, a lot of links I might refer to other articles or stuff that has a little bit more info. Then I can go into here and the course. So check out the course resources here on Skillshare that will have links to everything, product links to everything. Just a disclaimer that might be affiliate links, but there are links all the same and feel free to go research and find and buy from whatever platform you want of choice if you get anything that I mentioned. But yeah, so everything's gonna be in the resources and that's also going to be the best source to get the most up-to-date links and the most up-to-date products because I'm not gonna go into specifics of like cameras and stuff because they're always changing. But the links and the resources are going to have more up-to-date info. Then I can keep up-to-date with here in this video recording that I'm doing in 2022. But by the time next year, you watch this, if you're watching this in the future, this stuff I mentioned might be out of date. So the most up-to-date stuff is gonna be in the description. And lastly, if you have any questions or you want me to answer some more stuff, leave you leave questions or comments hearing the discussion on Skillshare. You can also just reach out to me on Twitter, I am C17 on Twitter. So you can hit me up there if you feel so inclined, give me a follow up. I'd like to talk about video marketing and podcasting stuff all the time anyways. So if you're into this course, you'll probably be into the stuff that I post on Twitter. So with that said, let's hop into the actual course. 3. Why Video Podcasting and Zoom Alternatives: Alright, let's talk about why we want to bother doing a video podcasts in the first place and why I like using Riverside in order to produce these. So first off, why do a video podcast? You could do an audio podcasts. Audio podcasts is already complicated enough also, and most people listen to podcasts through audio-only. They're not watching the video. So why go through this extra hassle is extra step of adding video to our podcast creation or podcast recording. So I like to think that it's in two reasons why I want to do this. First one is future-proofing. So while a lot of people do just listen to podcasts, audio only, and it's primarily an audio format. There are more platforms that are coming out with video support for one and we've got Spotify, they're rolling out video support at first to kinda started in an exclusive grouping when they bought the Joe Rogan Podcast and they supported video there. But now they've rolled out where anyone can upload videos. Right now as I'm recording this, it's currently only if you host your podcast on anchor, which is Spotify's podcast hosting platform, presumably they might roll it out in the future. They might not. If you host on Ankur or you don't host an anchor, it might be some optional future, but again, the sides and future-proofing, because if you don't have the videos in the first place, then it doesn't matter because there's no videos for you to upload later on. The other thing is YouTube. Youtube is huge. Youtube is a lot of people already uploaded. They're full podcast episodes to YouTube. And YouTube is really great because it has a solid search engine and it is really good discovery platform. And more people have been uploading their podcasts, YouTube and YouTube has caught onto this and realize that, hey, like a lot of people are uploading their podcasts and using YouTube as their podcasts hosting platform. Presumably right now there isn't much support as far as marking a video that you upload as a podcast video or adding additional metadata, like episode numbers are seasoned numbers, but we could assume that that is coming and they've hired ahead of podcasting, YouTube seems to have identified, hey, podcasting is a big use of our platform and we should provide the tools to help people who podcast a better support them and help other people discover them. Because one thing that is missing, and this is across the board and pretty much all Podcast hosting platforms is people to discover new podcasts, to discover your show, and to be able to search or have a better experience and finding new things that aren't just like the top ten podcast so that everyone knows about it. People to discover your podcasts, your show, and your unique insight. That is why I think it's really important to record video because even if you're not using it right now and even if the support for it is not huge, it's only gonna get bigger. And as it expands in the future, if you don't have the video in the first place, if you didn't record the video for your episodes, then it's moot point because you don't have a video. I think you should record the video now. It's always easy enough to take the audio out of it and upload the audio. What you're going to have to do anyways, but you want to have that video for the future proofing. Second reason is you also want to have that video for social media marketing. You've probably encountered a lot of clips on Facebook, instagram, TikTok, Twitter of podcasters posting video clips of recordings from their show. Interesting moments, cool insights. You've seen it. Those clips are way more engaging when there is a video of the person saying it, of them saying it to share. You've probably seen the other version of Eclipse where if it's just the audio, maybe you see some form of animated text and animated waveform to make up for the lack of video. Yeah, it works, but I would rather have the video in order to edit the video and post it as a clip on social media and get people interested in whatever my latest podcast episode is. You can only do that if you record the video. Without recording the video, then you're just stuck with animating audio waveforms. And less of a chance for that to spread on social media, less of a chance for people to stop scrolling and watch it, less of a chance for people to share it. So those two reasons are why I am very bullish on video podcasting and why I wanted to produce everything as a video podcast and I'm doing myself. But now let's talk about what platform to use and basically, why, why not just do this on Zoom? So your first thought might be okay, cool. Like I can produce a video podcasts like but if I'm already talking to someone on Zoom, maybe you are recording your podcast on Zoom. Why not? Just keep doing it on Zoom can record the video. You can just upload the video of Zooms little black grid box thing or it's auto AI switching camera angles. Why not do that? So yeah, you could record your podcast on Zoom. You could record your audio podcast on Zoom. But there are a couple of reasons why zooms really not the best platform to do this. Mainly quality. So Zoom is built for live video chat. It can record the sessions kinda more for like a reference point, but it's not recording at any great quality. It has some basic HD support that kinda caps out at 720. By default, it will record the audio as one combined audio channel. You can go into your settings and have it record each individual person's audio separately, which is cool and ideal. But the audio quality is still not gonna be great. It's all gonna be compressed. It's not designed for recording, it's designed for having live conversations, real-time meetings. So a good work in a pinch, but you're sacrificing quality for recording on Zoom. The other reason Zoom isn't the greatest is you're also dependent on your connectivity and the other person's connectivity. So whatever your reception is and the other person's perception or whatever qualitative quality they can stream. That's what's being recorded. There is no local version of the guests audio or the guest's video that's being recorded at higher-quality and uploaded in the background. Whatever you see on Zoom, if it's pixelated, if the audio drops out, if they go on mute, we've all heard that you're on mute. Anything of that stuff that happens on Zoom. It's gonna be, it's gonna affect the recording. There's no magical version that was being recorded somewhere else. That's gonna be better quality. You get, you get what you here, you get what you see. Alright, so we talked about why recording in Zoom is not ideal for a podcast, video, podcast, audio podcasts, any of the above. So let's talk about some higher-quality alternatives. There are two other platforms that are pretty much built specifically for this use for remote podcast recording with video. One is Zen Castor and the other one is Riverside. So they're both very similar. When I was investigating this and looking into producing video podcasts, Zen caster, their video quality capped out at 720 P. They seemed a little bit geared more towards just doing audio. And they had videos support. But 720 p was not high enough quality for what I was looking for. That's not even full HD quality. So if you were to record your video is at 720 p, and then you're uploading them on a platform like YouTube, which can support for k videos. You're already recording lower-quality and now you're uploading at that same lower-quality. For me, I want to be able to have the option to pull the maximum amount of quality possible. Now things then caster has since then, up to their resolution to ten ADHD or ten ADP, which is full HD. But still that's lacking compared to what you can do with Riverside, where Riverside will support up to four K recording. Now this is of course, assuming that your guest has a fork a camera, or you have a fork a camera, which is getting more and more common and popular now and again, I like to think of future proofing. Maybe not a lot of people have for k cameras now, built-in webcams on computers kinda maxed out at 720, but there have been increasing to 1080. But you've got to think of the future. And I'd rather go on a platform that already supports for k. So as more people have for k cameras, I upgrade to four k cameras. I have that option ready to go and I can record and the highest possible quality. The other thing that is great with Riverside, and I believe it's on Castro does as well. But Riverside, what I mentioned with Zoom with the quality where if your Internet connection is a little crappy and your quality is low, zoom is still recording that. Whatever crappy quality you receive, that is what Zoom is recording with Riverside, the huge advantage is it is recording the camera and the audio locally to every person's computer and then it's uploading it in the background. So what that means is I'm speaking to my guests remotely. They're on their computer talking to me. I'm on my computer talking to them, maybe from my end, their audio drops out a little bit or the quality gets lowered a little bit because maybe there's some internet throttling thing happening. But with Riverside, It's not a huge cause for concern because Riverside is Recording Everyone's camera and audio to that person's computer and then uploading it in the background. So I know when I'm recording with Riverside, I might see something that looks lower quality. But once I get the final file, once it's complete, we uploaded in the background. It is about as good of quality as you can get as if I had that person open up QuickTime or open up a video recording program directly on their computer and hit record themselves. Which is very like a little bit more complicated for someone to do if they're not technically savvy. I don't have to worry about that. Riverside is recording the high-quality file on the computer uploaded in the background and then I get it myself. So all my guest has to do is go to a website, log on. Very similar experience to Zoom. Have the conversation. They don't have to worry about any technical stuff. It's all happening in the background. And the files I get are much higher-quality from Zoom. The other advantage is you get independent video and audio tracks. So we're Zoom. If you record the video, it's going to give you either like a very compressed grid and everyone's videos super tiny on like a Brady Bunch style grid with Riverside, you can get everyone's individual camera as high-quality as their camera allows them to record whether it's 1080 or four K. And now you have individual high-quality independent files that you can then later take, put into your editing program and edit it either in a social media clips or you have that full control over how you want to finish your podcast episode. If you need to mix audio levels or switch camera angles or do some custom layout, you have full control. So it's really gives you the ultimate options, the ultimate possibilities in creating full control and getting the highest quality episode out there, which is at the end of the game. That's the goal I'm after. I want to get the highest quality video podcast episode done. And that's why I like using Riverside to use that. Then lastly, it's got really great controls over being able to trim down clips, creating shorter social media clips, and using AI to automatically switch between various camera angles depending on who's speaking. So it's a one-stop shop where I can get social media clips done inside Riverside, spit them out and I'm good to go. And now they'll have integration where I can directly export independent media or the final episode to a number of programs, including the scripts, anchor, and a transistor. 4. Equipment: Mics and Headphones: Alright, let's talk about equipment that we're going to want to get to setup for our video podcasts. Now, you don't have to get all this stuff all at once. We can do piece-by-piece. I'm going to start with an order of importance that you're going to just get one thing. This should be the first thing that you get. So I'm gonna go and order that way. So even though this is a video podcast, of course, about via podcasting, the first thing you want to get, it has nothing to do with video. I'm gonna get a microphone. So if you're going to invest anywhere, get a good quality microphone. Even with video, people can forgive bad video, grainy video, but bad audio, way more annoying. And when it comes to podcasting, where you can have a mix of people watching this, but most likely listening to it, you want to invest in having good quality audio. So the moral of this is going to be literally anything will be better than the built-in microphone on your computer. So you want to use whatever is available in a pinch. You can use even the headphones that came with your phone, or just any headphones that have built-in microphone. You can use those. You can use AirPods or any other Bluetooth wireless microphone that has a built-in microphone, and the other Bluetooth headphones that have built-in microphones. You can use those. So either of these will be great if you're in a pinch or if you're traveling, or if you're doing something remote, moving up to next step, if you want invest a little bit more, but not break the bank. Another great option is getting a USB microphone. So this is a Blue Yeti that I've used. It comes on the small Stan I don't know why they come on small stands because it's very deceiving. You want to get an arm or something else because you want to get this closer to your face if it's down here. Sure. Again, point of this lesson is anything is better than your computer built-in microphone, but this is still pretty low. You want to get this closer to your face so I don't know why they come with such small stands. Get another stand if you get something like this. So these are great because you don't have to worry about interface devices or other adapters that we'll talk about in a second with a microphone like this. You just plug in the USB in the back and you plug it into your computer. And then it just shows up as another microphone on your audio inputs. And you just use that microphone when recording your episode. Now, the Blue Yeti or the Blue Snowball, those run in the range of a 100 to a $130. For another step up, as far as USB microphones, kinda the top end of USB microphones is the apogee height mic. Now moving up a step to the next level is XLR microphones. So that is what this is. This is the road pod Mike. It's also about a $100, but you're gonna need a device to plug it into your computer. I go over in a second. There are a couple of other nice microphones from road. And then the other one, the gold standard of like nice podcast audio mix is the SM7B, that is $400, but it's high-quality. And the nice thing with microphones to is there a good investment? Because unlike cameras, the technology doesn't change. And once you invest in a mic and as long as you take care of it and don't bang it around, it's going to last a really long time. So Mike, You're good to invest in because they're gonna be around for awhile. So I'm going to have links to all of these microphones and other options in the course notes below. So go check that out because I'm not going to cover every single Mike option here. There are a lot different styles too. You wanted to have a microphone that maybe is not in front of your face and his off-camera hidden. You can get a shotgun microphone. And so we'll have links and stuff to other options in the course notes. Now, if you do get an XLR microphone, it's going to have the XLR plug and you need a way to plug that into your computer. So the two sort of easy options are these XLR to USB inputs. One is the Elgato wave XLR. And so that takes, you just plug in the XLR from your microphone into this box. Then the box plugs into your computer and it has some controls where you can adjust your audio levels and it can also power your microphone. Another common option is from focus, right? There's a scarlet and a couple of other options from focus, right? That same deal. They have options that would be one to two XLR plugs. They can plug in and then plug it into your computer. Now if you plan on doing a mix of maybe recording episodes of your podcast in-person or having a couple of people are multiple hosts recording and you're talking to someone via Riverside, then you're going to want a mixer. And you're also going to want a mixture that has a USB audio interface. So you could plug it into your computer and pull the audio from your mixer into your computer and then also get the audio out of your computer into your mixer. So everyone who is live recording and person can hear the person on the computer. So this one I have right here is the broadcaster Pro. It's super solid. It can take four inputs. It can also take the input from the computer. You can take an input from a phone and a Bluetooth device. If you wanted to have phone calls are mixed and someone on the phone, you could do that all with this. It also has sound effects and you can program sound effects here. But if you're using Riverside, which we'll go over, you can actually do that in Riverside as well. This device is great. I just got it. And then they just came out with the broadcaster Pro too. So if you are looking to get the road cast or pro it's probably on sale now because they just came out with a new one that I did not know about. You can get this one. It's still followed device or it can pick up the road casts are prone to. There are a couple of other options, have devices from different manufacturers that do similar things. So Road is obviously one of the big ones, but there are some other devices from Zoom and tascam that they make similar mixture devices. And they're in a similar price range from about depending how many inputs and how many controls you have in the range of 200 to six to $700. And again, all this stuff, I'll have links in the course resources with some additional options that I'm not going to mention here. Now, other thing with audio recording is you want to have headphones. Headphones are super important, especially when it comes to Riverside or recorded on a computer, because you don't want the audio from the person speaking, coming and then getting picked up by the microphone that you're recording on. Now you might have been used to Zoom and you're like, oh, but I use Zoom with my computer's speakers and microphones all the time and I don't hear feedback, I don't hear the other person or I don't hear myself talking when they're speaking. And that's because Zoom and the other video chat programs have very clever and really good noise gates and noise control where when you're talking, they'll shut off the other person's microphone so it doesn't pick up your speech coming out of their speakers and then give you this weird feedback reverb thing, and then vice versa when the other person is talking, it'll cut off your audio. That works well and video chat and also when quality is not of the most important and you're prioritizing just having a real-time communication. But in our case where quality is important, leaving it up to the computer to turn on and off. Audio is not ideal. And so we wanna be able to put headphones on so that we can hear the person, but the microphone won't pick up the person. So we have nice clean audio recording from our microphone and from the guests microphone. Now not to worry, you can control your setup, but obviously, you can't fully control whatever gear your guest has. And so when we go over how to use Riverside when the guest and when you log on. The first thing riverside will ask you is, are you using headphones? Because if you are, it won't turn on the audio cancellation where it tries to reduce the other person's noise feedback. And if you're not using headphones and it will turn on that thing that you are accustomed to you when you use Zoom or other video chat programs to prevent any audio feedback from getting picked up. The other person's microphone. Headphone wise. Again, same deal here. Literally anything is better than not having headphones. So AirPods, say the headphones that came with your, with your phone. The ones that I use are the Sony studio headphones. They've been solid. I've swapped out the pads. The headphones themselves have lasted forever. The pads wear down, but you can just buy a new pair of your pads and swap it out. And then a couple of other options from road and a couple of other manufacturers. Again, same deal. We'll have that, more of that linked below. So, yeah, get a pair of headphones. Again. Same deal here. Literally anything is better than your computer. 5. Equipment: Lights: Now, next step with gear. You might think, okay, I'm talking about camera, but no, I'm not going to talk about camera. I'm going to talk about lights. Because the other thing is if we're going in the chain of like, we want to have cool, nice audio check. We want to have a good image. One of the keys to having a good image is making sure that there is enough light and we have a nice bright image and a lot of scenarios. We can improve the quality of even a mediocre webcam inside your computer. If we add some nice light and make sure that the room is well lit. So it's worth investing in a couple of LED lights. Led lights have gotten phenomenally good quality and really, really inexpensive. So Elgato, pretty much anything from Elgato is really good there a little bit on the pricier end. And because they have a little extra bells and whistles, like if you want to be able to control your lights from your phone over Bluetooth. Or if you want to integrate with a stream deck and control your lights or have different lighting effects. Elgato has great options for that. The ones that I buy our newer lights from Amazon, they have a variety of different types of LED lights, different styles. You can buy whatever kind of size or color temperature you want off of Amazon. For the most part, you'll be fine with a 5600 K or that's rated for daylight. That's what this room is lit right now. That's our normal white clean light that you are used to. If you want to have something that has a little bit more effects, maybe if you're going for color effect or something and your background, you can opt for a light that has multicolored control, but pretty much anything from Amazon. And the newer lights, they work great. You do want to make sure that you get a light panel and not a lamp. So they have two different types of LED lights now that you'll encounter. And the light panel is going to be the flat grid of LED lights. Usually it might be behind some sort of diffusion, so it's often to light up. Those are gonna be great because they run quiet. There's no fan in them. They don't get hot. You turn them on. They light up the room, they light up your face and they work great. The LED lamps look more like traditional bigger bulbs, but they have a fan built-in. So we don't want to use that for podcasts recording because the microphones can pick up that fan noise and then it adds some background noise to our audio recording, which we don't want to have. We want to have nice clean audio. So using lights that don't have a fan is key in order to make sure we get that good quality. 6. Equipment: Cameras: Alright, And lastly, the thing you are probably waiting for cameras. Yes, This is the video podcasts, so we do need to have a camera in order to record the video podcast. Obviously, Step one of having the camera would be the camera built into your laptop or your computer, or you could also use your phone or tablet. Both riverside has support for those two options with using a phone or tablet, you can either use the option where you just record your entire episode via the Riverside app on your device. They have apps for both iPad and iPhone. Or you can turn your smartphone into a webcam by using a couple of different app options and a couple of pieces of hardware. I'll have that linked below, also have some videos on how to do that, which is on my YouTube channel. So the links for those below, I'm not going to get into the details of how you can turn your cell phone into a webcam, but that is an option. The other option is just going to buy a webcam. That's gonna be kinda good middle ground where if you want to take a step up in improving the quality of your built-in webcam. Or if you are on a desktop computer that doesn't have a built-in webcam, this would be your main option. So you can buy a webcam which will improve the quality, but there's still affordable enough or it's not gonna be like a crazy investment. So you can get a really good webcam for about two to $300. The Logitech Brio is probably one of the best webcams out there. There are a couple of new companies coming out that are targeting, creating high-quality webcams for use cases like this where it's like, oh, we're all on Zoom a lot. You're doing a video podcasts. You want to have a nice-looking webcam, but you don't want to invest in a lot of heavy-duty camera gear to get that good image. This is the middle ground. So those new webcams are out. I'll link to those in the course resources or you can get some of the new Logitech webcams, which is a good middle ground for better quality without breaking the bank. Now, if you want to go to the next level up, you can invest in a mirrorless or DSLR camera. This is going to be the camera that gets you that nice soft out-of-focus background is going to get sharp, crisp images is gonna be the best looking quality camera that you can get. Now, there are a couple of things to keep in mind if you are going down this route and investing in it, you want to make sure that it does support for K video recording. If you are going to go this route and invest in a whole cameras, mirrorless or DSLR setup doesn't really make sense to put all the money into that and then get a camera that doesn't support for K video recording. So most cameras support that now today anyways, but just make sure that you do get a camera that has four K video recording also because Riverside supports it. So again, you always want to get highest quality possible future proof for everything that supports for k, like YouTube, youtube sport, sport, kay? You should record and for k. Because, why not? Other thing you want to keep in mind is audio input. The route we talked about before, where you would put if you've got an XLR microphone and then you would run a run that into a device that plugs into your computer. If you're using a separate camera, you could run into potentially issues of the audio not fully being in sync if you're using a separate camera and a separate audio source, ideally, you want to run the audio source into the camera and then plug our camera into our computer. And then our audio and video source are coming from the same source. So they are going to be in sync. So you want to, when you're looking for camera, makes sure that it has an audio input. So if your camera has an audio input, then you can plug your microphone directly into the camera. You might need a few other pieces of gear in order to adapt it, to plug it in. And then you just have your one audio and video source that's going into your computer and you'll know that your stuff will be in sync, your audio and video will be in sync. And then similar challenge that you have with an XLR microphone. You need a way to plug your camera into your computer or to get the video signal and audio signal from your camera inside your computer. So you want to make sure that it has an HDMI output or that it has USB support. So more and more cameras have been supporting where you can plug into the USB, plug it into your computer, and then it will recognize it as a webcam. Because manufacturers discovered that, yes, people have been using these high-end cameras as a webcam. So you want to make sure it supports either one of those. This is changing all the time and also all the camera options are changing all the time. So check in the course resources again, I'll have more up-to-date links there to the best options and the best cameras out there that support this. I don't want to say it on this course because it's always changing. If the camera you get doesn't have USB support or the USB support might not support the full resolution of the fork. A HDMI output will be the way you want to go from the HDMI output of your camera. You're then going to plug that into your computer. And that's where our final device, a thing that we need to adapt the signal comes into play. So we're going to need to get an HDMI USB capture device. You can get a very cheap Amazon knockoff one. These were about $20. This one just supports HD resolution, so it goes up to 1020. I'm sorry, it goes up to 1080. So it doesn't support full for K. But you can get some other devices, the Atomos Connect. I believe it supports up to four K resolution. That one's about $40. You can pick that one up. And then there's also the Elgato Cam Link which supports for K, very similar to the other two I just mentioned, but for some reason that one is $129 are just opt for the Atomos Connect, which is a good middle ground from a name-brand manufacturer and pretty affordable. So you would just plug your HDMI into that device and then you plug it into your computer, the USB on computer. Obviously, you might need to get a USB, two USB-C adapter depending on what kind of computer you have. And then this just shows up as a webcam and you just change your webcam source to this device. And now you have your video and assuming you have your audio running into your camera, you have your audio source as well. And so that was a high-level overview of how we can improve our audio and lighting and video. But this stuff's changing a lot. So check below for resources that I'll have. They'll have some of the more current information and links directly to products that I recommend. 7. Studio Gear Breakdown: Alright, so now I'm going to transition this over, hop into our studio and go over the gear and that we have set up inside our studio and give you a nice gear break down. Alright, let me do a breakdown of the gear I have set up for my podcast setup here. Sometimes it changes. This is what I'm going to with right now as I'm recording this. So I've got basic computer setup, obviously with Riverside loaded. I've got a Mac Mini that I'm using to process everything. I like the Mac Mini because it's pretty affordable, inexpensive computer, and it also does not have a fan. I've got a MacBook Pro. I've had it for a couple of years, but once stuff starts cranking up on that, the fan just like Jackson. And then I can't use that for podcasts recording because of the background of the recording and you just hear. So I love having families computers, the newer MacBooks and laptops and stuff that are better processors and are more energy-efficient. Fan seems to be less of an issue with that. But yeah, that's why I like running the Mac Mini. I mean, at this point that's kinda the only option I have because my other computer is too loud for audio inputs. I've got the road cast or pro. This is going at a USB straight into the computer and I have it set up for multi-track so I can just individually either pull the entire mix out of it or just pull an individual mic or audio source if I need to. Sometimes I need to have a colon or something with the phone. I could also pull that as an audio source. So I like this because it's very flexible for stuff like that. Also have audio cables running out of it directly into the camera. So if I'm recording something straight to camera, I can use this as an audio mixer, then feed it directly to the camera, so it has the audio inputs. Also, I could run the audio from here straight to the camera. Then the camera goes into the computer. And I can just choose the audio source from the camera. And that way I don't have to worry if there's any sync issues with the audio and video because it's both coming from the camera, the sink should be better. Sometimes if you run into sync issues, having a different audio source for your camera, that's one way you could try to fix it. And then with a microphone and I've got the road pod make which is good enough for the stuff I'm doing right now. If I'm doing something that's a bit more of a voice-over recording and not doing just a straight-up interview. I'll pop this on it. It's just like a when soccer, a audio diffuser to help block out any of the air puffs or Ss and stuff that just improves audio quality a little bit. The other thing you probably noticed with the camera, I have this setup on a teleprompter. It's a bit overkill, but it is really nice to have the screen replicated in front of the camera. So when I'm talking to the person, I can just stare straight into the camera and I don't have to look down and then remember to keep looking down and looking back up. So it's very nice to have thing. I didn't get the teleprompter just for podcasting. We use it a lot for actual scripts and teleprompter line and reading off scripts. But because I have it here, I'm like, alright, I'll use it in the setup. I got it. So I might as well use it. And that's just connected to an iPad which is using Air display on the Mac to add it as a second monitor, I have it replicating both monitors. In an ideal world, I would be able to have Riverside, the guest video duplicate, and then just have them up here while I have my notes down here. But there isn't a way right now to split the screen or have two screens up in Riverside. So I'll just duplicate the screen so at least I can kind of see them up here and I don't have to keep glancing up and down. So also with the microphone. So I've got the red pot Mike. I haven't hanging off of a shock absorber stand because without this, if it's mounted to the table and I do stuff like put my hand down. You can hear the vibrations pickup in the mic. I like having this shock absorber because it will neutralize any kind of table shakes and stuff and you won't be able to hear it in the microphone. So it helps a lot with the audio quality. And this is just a basic microphone arm matches the table picked off of Amazon. And then I've got my Sony studio monitor headphones, which I've had this forever workout really well. And I'm able to just have it directly connected to the road system. And also the audio output from the computer is running through the road. So I'm able to monitor everything, like the guest audio coming directly out of here from the road system. And then I got my coffee. Have liquids by your electronics at your own risk. Yeah, and that's pretty much it for the setup. Aside from the soundproofing and stuff, which I went over in another video. But that is my setup that I have going on here. Oh, and the camera. It's overkill for this, but it is the Panasonic BJ H1. I'm just using it for this because I have it already set up, but I'm using it for other videos, overkill for this setup. But I've used everything from the webcam on your computer to the Panasonic GH for that I'm recording on right now. Really doesn't matter that much. I mean, just get the best camera that you can afford and start off there and just build up from there. And so that's an overview of the gear so you can get links to everything I just mentioned. It'll all be linked down in the course resources. And that is the overview of the gear that I'm using for podcasting. Alright, equally important to having good equipment is making sure that your room and your spaces setup both for high-quality audio and high-quality video. So I'm gonna go over the next lesson. How we can set up our space, both quick and easy things that you could do just to rearrange your space to make it look and sound better. And then if you want to invest a little bit of money into sound proofing and making the space look better. I'll have the bigger option that you can do to cover that as well. So that'll be in the next lesson. 8. Soundproofing Your Space: Alright, so now let's talk about setting up your space, your recording space, so it sounds good. It looks good too. Now this is a little bit of finding a balance because if we were just doing an audio podcast or an audio recording to get the best sound quality where we don't have a lot of reverb from walls. The sound is nice and rich and deep. Nothing is bouncing around. The ideal location for that is gonna be go to your closet and record your audio in there because you have so many clothes and so many soft surfaces that the sounds very damp and it's not gonna be bouncing around hard surfaces inside your closet. However, if you were to do a video podcast inside your closet, that would look the kind of weird. Why are they recording inside the closet and less that was like your your stick. So we want to find a balance of dampening the sound enough so it's not bad. But also like there's some acceptable levels there where it's like Okay, it's not gonna be super distracting and we're doing the best we can with what we got. A couple of things that we can do, make sure you're in a quiet space. So I mean, if you're in an office space, make sure it's somewhere. You can have a door closed, shut out outside sound. If you're at a house or something, go have a separate office room or some other space where you're not gonna be disturbed and you minimize outside noises, whether it's just other people in your house or other people in the office or traffic or cars or whatever outside. Also, you want to soften hard surfaces. So for a very basic explanation of sound science, if you think of sound as like a bouncy ball and basketball or something, it's going to want to bounce off hard surfaces. If you try to bounce the ball off of grass or something that's softer, It's not going to bounce. So same deal with sound. We want to try to neutralize or avoid hard surfaces like walls and hardwood floors. Because if we have hard surfaces and we speak, the sound can bounce around and then we have a little bit of echo or a little bit of reverb and our microphone. And we want to minimize that as much as possible. So some quick fixes, a figuring out what space of green recording be putting up. Basic things you can do is just put up like blankets on your wall ending how permanent or how temporary you're recording setup is going to be. You can put rugs down on the floor in my studio overview, I'll go over it. We have some ikea rugs that we put down. That's like the cheap, easy solution. We also have carpet tiles that we got if Amazon and put that down too soft and the hardwood floor in the space, you can also pick up some foam tiles. These are super cheap on Amazon and kinda configure them to add some foam area to break up the pattern so this won't bounce sound as much as just having a hard, solid while or table. Other thing you want to be aware of where those sound panels can come in really handy is if your computer is right in front of a wall, you then want to try to move it away from the wall or add these right behind your computer or your recording setup. Because if you are right in front of a wall and he starts speaking, then it's going to bounce right back. And you're going to have that same bouncy audio issue as well. So if you're up against the wall, you can put some of these right behind your monitor and that'll help dampen the sound when you speak. So those are a couple of quick, easy things you can do for helping out your audio. The other thing you got to consider is, what's your background going to look like because you're recording video, so you need to figure out the lighting on yourself and what your background is gonna look like. So when it comes to your lighting, we covered a couple of lighting options and the gear video. But overall, you want to make sure that you are not sitting in front of a window because that will turn you into a silhouette. So you don't want any huge bright light source is behind, you know, windows behind you as much as you can avoid that if you do have Windows, you can also use Windows to your advantage. And if you place your camera in front of the window, so you can use that natural light to help let your face. That's an option you do have to be aware of though, if you have consistent recording times for your podcast or if you use different times and you have to worry about the sun setting and your light drastically changing while you're recording. That's something to overall thing about in general, if you have some podcasts that is like a talk show or as like a very long podcasts and multiple hours long. If you record it like in the afternoon, you do have to consider, like by the time you finish recording, it might be dark in your space if you were using a lot of natural light as your lighting source, having LED lights or some sort of predictable electric light helps because it guarantees that consistency in your lighting setup that it's not going to dim as the sun fades. Other quick thing to consider as well with your camera. And this applies to whether you're just using your webcam as the source, is you want to try to get your camera level at or slightly above your eyeline. If you had a laptop and you just plop it down on your desk, It's going to be looking up at you. And that's not a very flattering angle. Same thing applies to your guest and so I'm actually going to have a video linked below, but it'll be a quick 60, 92nd overview of just how you can set up your space quickly, assuming you have a laptop and just some basic headphones and microphone, how to just reconfigure your space, given tools that you have to improve your sound quality and improve your lighting quality. So that'll be a separate quick video that I have because it's designed to be a quick video that you can send to your guests so that they can prepare their space. And using assuming that they're not going to go purchase anything else, using what they have. It'll be a way that they can prepare for the recording so they have the best sound and video quality with their tools. But you can also check that video out, which will have simple tools and hacks that you can use with your own setup without having to go purchase additional stuff. If you do in a purchase additional stuff and you do want to just have maybe you are doing this like in an office or you want to have a little bit more of a permanent setup that helps dampen the sound. I'm going to transition to another walk-through that goes over how we sound proved one of our rooms to the best that we could. Kinda figuring out that middle ground area where we spent a couple $100 to soundproof it blacked out outside noise, dampen the sound inside, but didn't do a whole build-out where we like. Didn't do a full thing of soundproofing, which is the mid-level DIY option. So we're going to transition to that right now. Alright, now let's take a look at soundproofing a room, taking it a little bit the next level. So this is a space where I record both videos and podcasts. This side is for podcasting. So this is just a regular office and here's some things that I did to help soundproof it. And this is what you can do to soundproof room or an office space if you're doing a more permanent setup, this is not a setup that is an easy take it down and set it up when you're recording an episode. One thing with the walls that I did is I got the sound blankets. So these are from auto mute, and these are just big sound panels that help dampen the sound and help prevent any reverb or any of the sound bouncing off the walls and picking up on the microphone. Then make a few different kinds. These are the larger sound blankets. And then over here I have two that are covering the window. And they're designed for Windows because on the other side they have a solid sheet that helps keep outside sound out. These are designed for walls and just help break down the reverb inside the room. Since this was already an office space, it has dropped ceiling tiles. So those are good because they help to dampen the sound a bit. Then I had a laminate wood floor and so I bought these carpet tiles from Amazon DIY tiles. You just lay the carpet them down yourself to have a little mild adhesive on them. And so I stuck those around the whole room help dampen the sound. And then I also purchased super cheap blanket from Ikea to cover out the rest of the gaps in the room that I couldn't cover with Carpet Just because I need to open the door to get out of here. That is an easy one you can do in your own space. I'll just keep this folded up and then what I need to record all unfolded and cover up any hardwoods surfaces, but it's like a $20 rug. And so this one's an easy one to get and help dampen the room. And then lastly, the other thing that I put on the windows and this one is more recent. I was still getting some car sounds and sounds from outside on the street outside. And so this is the most permanent thing that I did, but I bought these vinyl sheets and so they're called mass loaded vinyl and they're intended to be put on when you're building a room on the wooden slits before you put the drywall up to kind of have it behind and so it would be hidden there, these thick heavy-duty vinyl sheets. And they really do dampen the sound and keep outside sound out there designed for walls. I didn't use them for walls. I cut them out to cover the entire gap on the window and just nailed them in. They don't look great. There not a temporary I mean, I can I can take them off the wall, but I leave them up permanently and they've they've helped cut out outside sound a lot. So if you're building out a semi-permanent space and you have an issue with sound coming from neighbors or the street or whatever. And if you really want to help reduce that sound, mass loaded vinyl has worked out great as a solution for that. So that is a little bit of a tour of how I sound proofed the studio. And these are sort of like if you're looking for something semi-permanent and next step as far as how you can sound proof room, these are some ideas that you can use. Animal have everything linked in the resources so you can go check it out. Alright, so one other thing to just kinda check and see how everything looks and sounds before you actually record with a real person or you're doing an actual show, just load everything up, get your set of going, hit record on your camera, or even just within Riverside, you can record a session with no guests their record some time, talk a bit of how you would normally speak, and then once you hit stop play that footage back and see and listen to how it looks and sounds. Just to give yourself a test of like, okay, like is this the baseline? Is this like what it should sound like? This is what it should look like. How can I prove it? How can I make it sound better? But also just to make sure that like just recording yourself and then playing it back is the best way to confirm like, Okay, I'm not hearing anything weird or my gears working correctly. I'm not having any audio stuff because the time that you don't want to find out that you have any audio issues or lighting issues or camera issues is when you have a guest on the line and you hit record and then you realize, Oh no, there's some issue with my audio setup or like I should have added more blankets because this room sounds very echoey. So just double-check everything before you actually do a real show and hitting record. Playing it back is the best way to do that. Alright, so now we've got everything set up, ready to go, time to jump into Riverside and start producing our video podcast. 9. Creating a Riverside Account: Now real quick, if you haven't created a riverside account already, Let's jump through the process and said you have Riverside account and also a code that you can use to get 15% off any monthly plan that you choose if you choose to upgrade to a monthly plan. So just go to Riverside dot fm and then you can click Get started right here in the front or in the upper right. And then you're just going to put your info in. I'm going to use an alternate e-mail address. And you can also sign up with Google or Apple as well. And then you just answer some questions. And as you can see, there are a bunch of options that you can use Riverside for. And they got to click onboarding video, but you don't need that because during this course, then you're here in the dashboard and we're gonna go over how to set up your studio and all that stuff in the future lesson. But you've got your account set up, so there is a free level and we're in the free account right now, you can record up to two hours a month. And if you export anything, it's going to have a riverside logo on it. And also I believe it's going to cap you out at only doing 720 P recording and exports. So if you want to unlock the full ability to do for K, We're recording time export without Riverside logos, then you want upgrade to a paid account. And so if you go over and click on Upgrade, Now, you can choose whichever monthly plan you want to pick. The promotion code, Joey, that'll save 15% off whatever plan. You pick. A easier way to do that if you already know that you want to get a paid account and even sign up for one yet is you can just click the link in the course info and that'll automatically apply the code to whatever plan that you pick. So that is how you set up your Riverside account. Now in the next video, we're going to cover how to actually build out your studio and get ready to record inside Riverside. 10. Creating a Studio in Riverside: Alright, so let's go over setting up Riverside for the first time. So I have logged in, I'm at the dashboard and now I see my studios. And studios kinda really just need one studio for your show. It's not like you need to make a studio for each time you record or each guest you invite. The studio is kinda is going to be where it houses your recordings. It's gonna be the outward identifier. So kinda call it, name it something after your show. It's gonna be DRL you give to people. But once you set it up, once, you can reuse it forever. So I just have two studios for two different shows I was working on. But really you just need one studio PER show or use case maybe. Let's make one right now. I'm going to call it the amazing video podcast show. And then you have the option if you want the recording type to be audio and video or audio only. This is a course about making a video podcasts. So we're going to have the video option on. And then we're gonna go into the studio or you can just click Save and set it up and enter it later. So now we have the joint, the page that you get when you join your studio and this is always going to come up every time. It will save your name, so you'd have to type in your name every time, but it will confirm if you are or are not using headphones. And you want to use headphones, ideally, every time if you choose, I'm not using headphones, then it's going to add additional processing to do some noise cancellation. So when the other person speaking, it's going to turn your audio off so that you don't there's no audio feedback. I would prefer that to not have that extra processing by the computer that it doesn't need to do. So wearing headphones means it's not going to do that extra processing. And your audio is going to sound better. And you have less of the risk of the audio being picked up by other microphones. So bottom line, for headphones. And then over here on the right, you can confirm your settings for your camera and your microphone. So I'm using the road the road cast are set up for my input. I could also change it and use my camera input, which is USB digital audio, same as my video input. And then the speaker is where you want to hear audio. So it could either be your system default or you can choose where you want to output it to. Then you just want to confirm all of your settings are good. And down here it also does mention that you're joining as a host. So I will be joining as a host, but it could be joining as a producer. And as we explained earlier, the different settings between the host and producer. Host is someone that can be on camera. Producer is someone who has control of the studio so they can start and stop recording. But they're not going to appear on camera or they'll their camera will appear. As you can see that I'm switching. Their camera will appear as a guest and they're Mike can turn on and off, but they're gonna be a little bit more behind the scenes and it's not going to be recorded. So you can hear them if you need to. Like, you know, if you need to talk to someone, your producer, and they're able to monitor everything. But they're not someone that's going to be a participant in the actual recording. Some back to host and then just double-check everything. Looks and sounds good. And then I'm going to click join the studio. And so now my camera is, I can see my camera appearance here. I can also see my audio levels are already coming in right here. And this is the space. So it's got the gap right now for my guest invited and I'm waiting to invite or waiting to join. Just a quick overview of the interface here, we can come back into the settings of RStudio. If we click the Settings button, I can adjust my settings again if I need to, I can turn on echo cancellation if I need to. That's the option. If I were to pick I was not wearing headphones. It would turn on echo cancellation, but I would prefer it. It does not, does not do that. If I want the video to appear mirrored or not. So if there is text behind me or something for whatever reason, I wanted to turn that Marion off. But doesn't notice here it doesn't affect the recording. So it's going to record my camera and the normal way. And then I could change my name if I needed to. Coming down here, these are the settings for the studio space itself. And so these are the name of the show or the name of studio space. So a studio type you can choose whether you want to set it public or private. And this is, comes down more to audience. And if you want audience to be able to watch your show as you're recording live. We'll get into that in a future lesson. Just kinda some extra options you have where you can have audience. There's another level of audience members and also a colon option. We'll cover that in a future lesson. But right now the default is set to public where if someone had the link, they could watch the recording live. And they also knew what time you're recording. Or if you wanted to totally disabled that you can click Private, then waiting room is something that I usually turn on and that's similar to Zoom. If your guest joins, it'll pop up with notification and then you can let them in. If you have some stuff to do before they come in or you just don't wanna be surprised with your guests popping in right away. You can turn on waiting room. And so that will put them in a waiting room, give you an alert and then you can let them in. Psalms can turn that on. Coming down to recording. So this one is super important and these are the recording settings that the studio is going to use. Again, if we just wanted to record audio only, you can turn that on here. It's a video podcasts, so no, we're not going to do that. You can turn on noise reduction if you wanted to. So if you were in a noisy space or your guess was in a noisy space, and you weren't going to run this through any other additional editing or processing systems afterwards. And you just wanted to try to get the best audio out of this recording session as possible. You can turn that on, but ideally, you want to keep that off and you can try to adjust it later. And then we have selected our audio sample rate. So I like to choose 48 kilohertz to get a higher sample rate. And then down here, we can choose how you want to record. I would not offer the recommended if you have the bandwidth and you know that you're a guest, so you're going to interview has the bandwidth, but this is optimize in the sense that it's going to be lower resolution on the video, but that means it'll be smaller file sizes, which would be a quicker upload for the video. So as it says here, that the, your guests are recorded a maximum of 728 p, which is pretty low for HD space. So if you've got the space, if you've got a fast internet and you know, your guests tend to have fast Internet. I would go for advanced quality. And it's going to record. We have two options here. We could either max out the recordings at ten ADP, which is regular, standard HD video size. Or we can go up to four K, which I tend to do. I have fast Internet. Usually people have talked about fast internet and we'll get, we'll go over what happens on the Upload and from their end, it does take a little bit longer to process on the backend of Riverside, but I've got time, so I'm good with that. So as long as the camera supports it now it's not magically going to make someone recording on their webcam, which only does 720. It's not going to magically make their footage appear better. But if someone has a fork, a cam are connected or if you have a Fourier, more like most likely you're gonna be the one that has the fork, a camera connected. Then you want to be able to record in that full resolution and get all of that data and get everything recorded. So I like to have that selected, but choose the best option for you. If you're going on, if like, YouTube's your huge target, YouTube supports for k, and so I would opt for going for k Also the future proofs you one more thing, rollout and they have higher video resolution support. Your podcast episodes already. Good to go because he recorded it in for K. If you're just recording this because you want to pull social media clips from it, that maybe 1080 would be good enough for you or even optimized, or if you know that your guests are going to be in places that have poor internet than, than optimize might also be the best option. Then also you have this option. I'd like to turn this on to. I'm a big fan of backups where in addition to because the way Riverside works, it's recording local copies to each person's computer and then uploading it in the background. And so the local copies of records are much higher quality. But also just like this option where it will also record Internet. It all co-wrote a backup to the Internet of whatever streaming. So it'll be lower-quality, but at least it's something so worst-case scenario file, it gets crafted to the file doesn't upload or the person like logs off and never finishes uploading the file, you still have some form of the recording backed up from what are recorded on the Internet. So I'm a fan of backups. I like to have that. Other options here is live streaming. I'll get covered this in a future episode of like additional options and things you can do with Riverside. So I'm not going to cover this right now. And then advanced, we have a couple of options here. This is if you had if you had a throttle urine and out if you had something that you had to adjust when Riverside is uploading stuff, you can turn this on to control when stuff is being uploaded. But there's really not much for reason for this unless you have specific use case, so I'll just keep it on auto. And those are our settings for setting up our studio space. And that's what I like to use when I'm setting up the studio space. 11. Riverside Interface Overview: Now let's take a look at the controls here. If you've used Zoom or any other video conferencing tool, these are going to feel very familiar. Obviously a big fat red button here, recording Start and stop. Microphone. If you hover here, you can quickly adjust what your microphone, camera and speaker inputs are so you don't have to go into settings to change any of that. You can just do it all right here. You can also click to turn on and off any of these things. And then also you can screen-share too. So if you want to share your screen or if your guests wanted to share their screen, you can enable that here. The nice thing about screen-sharing is it also records as its own track. So in addition to having your video track recording and your guests will have their video track recording. Anyone that shares their screen will also have that as a separate video track. It's great later on for editing if you need to agree to have that option. Over here, we have the invite people. So I like to just keep this link, this link on is the nice thing about having that studio space is you have this link but regenerated and you don't have to make it every time you want invite a guest. So I've got my templates setup when I invite a guest and I keep my studio link in there, and it's always the same. I don't know if the change at every time. So that's super handy and super cool. So you have your link, you could just send it out. And the link is generated based on what level you want to invite the person out. So you can see here, by default it's going to be guessed. That's most likely what you're going to invite them as. You can invite them as an audience member, which I'll cover in a future lesson of what you can do with audiences. If you want to do a live recording or invite people to your recording, then you can invite them as a producer. And so again, that's someone who will be able to control settings in here, but it's not the Riverside is not going to record their audio and video. You'll be able to see and hear them from the backend on our end back here in Riverside, but they're not going to be recorded. And they can control the settings and stuff. So it's helpful if you need a second person in here to control the tech stuff and worry about marketing clips and stuff. That's what the producer role would be for you also down here on the bottom leaves, that's where you'd end the meeting or stop the recording. And then other thing I'd like to do when I come into the session as name this session. So later on I can come back in the recording space in Riverside. I can quickly figure out what I was recording or what that session is. If you click the little down arrow, you can see what settings everything's recording at. So we've got r because I turned on for k, it's joined me, That's it for K at 24 frames a second, the sample rate over here, this is the other thing I love about riverside as it gives you so much info about your technical specs and your guests. And the guest one is key because this is how I troubleshoot guests when I know that they're Mike is not like if I if I hear their audio and it sounds like I see a microphone in their frame by their audio sounds awful. I'm like, I don't think your microphone is properly configured and I don t think you picked the right microphone when he signed in here. This is how I can troubleshoot that and figure out what is wrong. So when I'm logged on, but I know my settings are, but when the guests logs on, I'll get the same exact info box. I'll be able to see their levels and I can adjust the levels here if for whatever reason they were really loud, I could see what kind of input quality they're getting. I can see how they joined because there is iPhone support and other devices support. Then I can see what the same thing I have here. I have the USB Video Input. I can see that. I can see that my microphone right now is set to my USB Video Input, but it could be set to my road Castor. And I can see the speakers or what they're set to. Usually with a guest, if I see they're wearing AirPods, but maybe the audio doesn't sound that great. I can look here. And if I see like MacBook computer, microphone and not AirPods, I can be like, Oh hey, can you check your mic inputs again because I don't think you selected AirPods. So this is great for troubleshooting and figuring out if the guest in fact has connected properly to the microphone that they should be on. Love this, for that, that for you. And also down here again, I can turn echo cancellation on, but if you're wearing headphones, you don't need that. And then I can also click preview recording. And this shows me a higher-quality image, like I mentioned before, where you might see a lower quality image in the video screen because it's just giving you a lower-quality preview image. If I wanted to see like what it actually looks like, you can just click preview recording and you'll get a higher-quality image. I don't really use that, but it's there if you need to. So this is not as exciting because it's only me in this room right now, but as more guests would arrive, I'll be able to see the options appear here. And then also, if anyone's in the waiting room because they had the waiting room enabled, I would be able to see them here and then I can click the little check box and let them in. Alright, so that's the main kinda overview of the basics of everything. Now there's still a couple extra things in here that we can cover and extra bonus features that riverside has. So it's got a live media board. So you can load in video clips or audio clips of sound effects or intro songs, it whatever you want. And as well, a lot of cheering. You can play the sound effects. These are the ones that come loaded default with Riverside, but you can rename it. Or you can click and add your own media files, whatever you want. And also down here you can see that as a preview, preview mode, so I can click on it and listen to it and no one else hears it. And then if it's on live mode, people would hear it. I'll be honest, I really don't use that much, but I just don't do those types of shows. So this, I feel like really come to more into play if you are kinda doing more of a live type show or more of a conversational chat show. And you want to have some sound effects or music or something that you want to be able to queue on command. Right here. This was where that comes into play. And it's really cool that it has it. If you are also trying to do a show and you really didn't want to do any editing. And you just wanted to like have your intro music lined up and all that stuff. You could hit the record button, play your intro music, and then start your show right away. And then by the time you're at the point when you are done with entire recording, your whole things done because you already played your intro music and all that stuff and you don't have to worry about taking it into another program to edit it after. So if that's something you want to do, you got the tools to do it right here. And also the nice thing is the sound effects will also record as their own track. So again, afterwards, if you wanted to go into editing and maybe you wanted to get rid of sound effects or if the sound effects cut off the audio of someone else or you couldn't hear them and you want to hear them. You can fix that later in editing in another program, which will also be covered in part two of this course. Then lastly, there is a chatbox here. And so you can, if your guest was maybe having a speaker or microphone issues, you could type a message to them and communicate with them. Also, this is a way you can communicate. Just, you know, if you need to send a message or something while you're recording, or maybe your producer needs to like post a message for everyone to see who's recording, but they don't want to interrupt the actual recording process of the show because people are talking. This is where you can send a message and also we'll go into it in future lesson. But audience can have permission to submit messages here in the chat area. So if you were doing a live recording or had a live audience, this would also be a way that they could submit questions through texts without actually having to be on the show. Last thing, covering Riverside, the entire overview of how this interface works. This one you don't really have to worry about too much, but just as you're recording this little cloud icon up here. So as you are recording your episode simultaneously Riverside as uploading the original media of your guests in the background to their server. And if the US has fast internet, this will happen pretty much in real time and there won't be much of a lag. But if they have slower Internet, then it might take a little bit of time for that to upload, but you can see how that's going. So as you're, when you're recording, this little cloud icon will show you a percentage of how much of the media has been uploaded. Obviously as you're recording, it will never be 100% because you're still recording. But if you see, when I'm recording into my guess That's fast Internet, it'll hover around 99 per cent the whole show. And then when I click stop recording, by the time everything is a couple of seconds after their upload will be done in the background. So this is an indicator where you can just see how much of your guests as uploaded in the background. And I'll go over in a future lesson what will happen with your guest if they have really slow internet and they need to leave the upload happening. I'll cover what would need to be done in the future. They don't have to stay on you don't have to stay on with him while their stuff uploads. I'll explain what you can do. That is for real, the end of our overview of the Riverside interface. In the next lesson, we will cover bringing actual guests into your studio and actually recording your video podcast episode. 12. Riverside Roles Explained: So first off was talking about the different levels and the roles you creating the account and logging in. And most likely you are going to be the host. So that is someone who your camera and audio and everything is going to be recorded by Riverside and you have full control over your recording session. The next level down is the producer. So this is someone if you want to have someone else in your recording session helping behind the scenes, monitoring everything, having control over turning the studio session on and off, and bringing in live Colin people, which is the thing we'll cover later. The producer has that control, but their camera there, audio is not going to be recorded. Guessing people, the guests, and you can hear them and see them if they turn their camera and mic on. But they're behind the scenes role not going to be recorded. Now the other level is the guest, and this is the other level that would probably be using most of the time. Anytime you invite someone to be on your show, they're going to be a guest. So Riverside supports recording up to eight people total, but that would be one would be you, the host, and then you can have up to seven guests. Their audio and video is going to be recorded. But they're not going to have control over the session, over like starting and stopping the recording or all that stuff. They can just control their own microphone and camera. And that gets recorded. As we talked about earlier, the advantage Riverside is that gets recorded on their computer and then it gets uploaded in the background. And then the other level that we have in Riverside is audience. So let's say you have maybe a more informal show or something that you have. You want to have audience participation in different levels. Like you want them to be able to watch the live recording of the show. Maybe you want them to be able to participate in the chat. Maybe you want them to have, be able to request to turn their camera on and have a live call-in type show. That's the level of audience member. In a later lesson, we'll cover how to do the live call-in or just kind of what that entails. But just know audience member is sort of like the name implies. They're an audience person they can watch. But by default, there camera, the audio is not going to be seen or heard or recorded as just a way for someone to watch the recording of your show. Also, they're not gonna be able to see anything until you hit record. So it's not like they'll see the behind the scene stuff that happens before the show starts and you start recording your session. So that's a high-level overview of the different levels inside Riverside. Now talking about prepping and inviting your guests, Most of the time would I like to do is the nice thing when you create a studio space in Riverside is you have a link that you can send to people and you choose what level the person will be granted when they click on that link, whether it's a guest audience or producer. I like to send that out and just keep it in my e-mail template for the guests that I'm going to invite. That link doesn't change. So I just keep it as a template. I emailed a guest, it's got the link for them to join. And also I put in some tips of what they should do to prepare for the show. Basically technical stuff of like, hey, you should make sure you have headphones, you use the best microphone you can. Here's how you should present in your computer. You can get on Ethernet that would be ideal over Wi-Fi. Make sure you don't log off as soon as we're done because it needs to upload in the background just a whole checklist of things that they should be aware of, which I will provide to you as a template that you can use when you send to your guests. So you can check that out in the course resources. Also, There's gonna be a video down there that you can send to your guests. That's just a quick two-minute video that gives them a visual demo of quick and easy things they can do to prop up their laptop, position themselves so they have better lighting, things like that. So they look their best. Your show looks at best or show it looks in sound the best because your guest is properly prepared. So that was a quick overview of the different roles inside Riverside and how you can prepare your guest. Now let's jump back into Riverside and go over how to navigate, how to move around and how to set up your recording session. 13. Recording Your Episode: Alright, now we've got our studio space set up. We theoretically have our guests join inside our studio space. So let's go over recording our podcast episode. So back in studio space, I'm here alone in my studio space. So let's just cover the basics. So once we are ready to record our guests disjoined, we have checked the settings, make sure that everything looks and sounds good from both our end and their end. To go over that in the previous lesson, as far as all the little technical things you could check down here. Once we're good to go, we're going to hit the Start Recording button and it'll give us a countdown for the recording. To start. I like again to give this section a name which I like to do beforehand. Then I mentioned this in the previous lesson, but now we can see it here in real time. This is the uploading screen, so you can see how the speed's going over here. So let's say your guest had to go or you have to go or you're on slow internet. Riverside will give you a link to go to and it will upload the media that they have saved and their cash in the background. I think it's Riverside dot fm slash upload, but don't quote me on that. I'll have, I'll put it in the references. But Riverside will also tell you because also if someone leaves before it's finished uploading, Riverside will give you an alert like, Hey, you didn't finish uploading, go to this link so we can finish up waiting for you. They got you covered. We're recording. For the most part. Usually have a conversation. You just want to talk. You're making the content you're doing, you're doing your episode. You just want to focus on your guest and not all the technical stuff happening. That's also why you have a producer if need be. If you need someone else to help focus on the technical stuff. But when I'm recording and doing an episode, I'm just talking, I'm looking at my notes. I don't think about Riverside. The only thing that I am doing now and this is a relatively new feature is this mark clip function. So let's say my guests said something cool or something interesting and I'm like, Oh, that's a good sound bite. I want to mark that moment and the recording so I can make a social media clip to share about it later. I'll just hit that button and that will just mark that moment. You can see here created a added a timecode stamps to that moment and the recording afterwards, which we'll cover in the next lesson, that moment now is marked in the recording and I can much more easily go find it and then create a social media clip to share that moment. And I don't have to remember later like, oh, what was that moment where that person said something or I don't have to write down the time on my app or my phone to make a note to come back to it. It's automatically done in Riverside. And there is a shortcut for it to the letter M on your keyboard. You can just hit that. And that will also add a marker. And if you're really inclined, you could also program it as a shortcut on your stream deck. Same with the recording and stuff. I believe there is a shortcut for that. So if you wanted to keep everything on stream deck, you could also program a shortcut for that to mark the moment in the clip. The other thing that you might use Riverside for is, and we covered this in the overview of Riverside lesson, this sound effects. So if you have kind of the show that is more maybe like a, like a like a talk show type format. And you like to have, you know, you won't have sound effects. Or if you want to do a show and you don't want to worry about all the editing stuff later. And you want to play your intro music as part of your recording of the show. So it's like one and done. This is where you can load, this file is up and you can play them and have it all come back. You can also play videos as a riverside video that they have already in the system that's loaded up and ready to go. And yeah, if you want to play video clips or have something queued up for you and your guests to see and talk about. You can do that here. Stop this very dramatic video. And so you got the sound effects and stuff here. And you could also just bring in your own media files. And this is queuing up clips and stuff that might be something a little bit. It's a lot going on in your head if you also have guessed and stuff. So that's really a producer comes in handy to have someone to queue these clips and play them for you. And that's also why the previous role exists in the first place to have someone else run these things for you. And then also if you have, I will cover live streaming and audience in a future lesson. But if you didn't have people joining to watch the show and they had the ability to ask questions via the chat. You can have the chat window open so you can see incoming messages either from the audience or again from your producer or someone else sending messages so that you can address them, but it doesn't interrupt the recording process. The other thing I like when I'm recording is by default it kind of shows us split equal-size view between my camera and the guest camera or guests if you have multiple guess the shows I do is just typically one guest. I don't need to see my camera. When I'm doing the show, I like to see the guests camera. So if you click, the guest will have a similar icon on their video. If you click the Expand frame, that will make their frame fill the screen more so I can see their image more. And I have it connected to my teleprompter right now so I could just have a bigger view of their video and feel like I'm speaking to them directly a bit more and everything is virtual. So you want to be able to mimic as much in-person as possible and making them full screen is one way. Also, you can turn off the sidebar if you don't need it and collapse it. And again, another way to get a little bit more screen, real estate screen space. So the, the person, the person's video feed can fill the screen as much as we can squeeze into here. And yeah, that's really hit record. What Riverside to do its thing and you host your podcasts, That's really all there is to it. It's not the recording part, probably the easiest part once you got all the technical stuff set up and ready to go, the recording part is pretty easy. You just got to have a good show and have a good recording. Once you are done with everything, then hit the stop button. Riverside will finish uploading the background and you see that it has a little alert, Hey, keep this page open. Please don't leave. And same deal. I remind the guests like, Hey, please don't leave. Wait for this thing to finish uploading. And then once it does finish uploading, you get a little confetti celebration and you're good to go. Then. Yeah, it's a simple kind of like zoom. You can either hop out and leave or just end the meeting for everyone. They call a meeting, even though it is a podcast recording session, then it will automatically redirect you to your recording and the clips that we just marked. But I will cover that in the next lesson. As far as now, we recorded our episode. How do we export the entire episode? How do we export the individual clips and how do we export our different tracks that we just recorded among all of our guests, which is the magic of Riverside. So that will be in the next lesson. 14. Exporting Your Episode: Alright, so we recorded our podcast episode. Now let's go over how we export it out of Riverside. So this is from my demo session from the last lesson, but I'm a hop over to the actual studio that I use. And so also if you were to log out and come back in, you'd see your studio listing, but we don't need to go into the studio if what you're trying to find recordings, we can go right to view all recordings and this will show us our past recording sessions. So this one I just recorded for the latest behind the upload episode with diarrhea. And we can see here I marked as seven clips when I was recording of like, oh, that's cool. Moment. This is the full recording of the episode and also you can see our guests and what made sure everyone was fully uploaded. So we can confirm that here. Riverside has a little snapshot feature. If you wanted to share that you recorded with someone on social media, you could do that here. And then also we get our individual tracks of each individual person's recording down here. I'll go over that the individual tracks in a future episode. Let's just cover this one, exporting our full episode as it was recorded. So I'm gonna hop over to our floor recording. And if I hit play, it will load everything up. It's like uploading in the background. So then just don't like disappear right away. Me telling people to not disappear right away. So you can hop around. And it also gives you a little warning here like hey, you're not looking at the full quality version. You're looking at a lower-quality preview version. So don't be alarmed if you thought it was higher-quality and it doesn't look higher-quality. That's why. Then we'll hope can start editing. Then it'll ask us, okay, What type of shape do we want to make? So are we looking to grab a clip from this to share for social media or are we looking to export the full thing for publishing? This case, we're gonna go over full length export and we're going to want it in the regular 16 by nine, which is our typical rectangle size video that you would see on YouTube. We're gonna go over that for the next lesson. We'll go over how to export segments of it for social media. So we want the full length. We've got our a video upload into the background player here. We can trim the we can trim the start and stop if we want to trim out, maybe because I was still prepping before I hit after I hit records are kinda turn that part out and made them like, Hey, thank you. And then I was still recording. I want to turn the handout. I could do all that here. These markers are the parts that I did mark where it hit the end button. So we can still see them. And if I really wanted to jump to one of those clips like let's say I change my mind. I don't want to export the full episode. I actually want to export the clip. I could do that too from here. Right now. I don't want to have support the full episode. So let's say, Okay, you could trim it if you want to. I'm just going to say I want to export the whole thing. The whole thing is good to go. Let's cover these options on the right that we have here. So we can do tracks. So I can select if I multiple guess or if someone was doing a screen share. And maybe I'm like, I don't want to have the screen-share at track as part of this Export Video. I can turn it off, so you can turn it on and off. You can turn someone's video on and off. And the cool thing about riverside as will automatically update these layouts based on the guests that you have. If you have multiple guess and you needed to shift position, you can reorder the priority here so that they show up in a different position. And then also, let's say I wanted to hear someone or hear sound effect or screen-share but not see the video. You can click on this and it would still have their audio but turn off their video. So you got lots of options here. I can change the size of the canvas again, which you gave me the option when I went into the clip in the first place, but let's say I changed my mind and I want to change it. You could do that right here. But I'm not going to change it. I can come over here, edit the layout. So let's say I wanted this to be full screen grid could do that. Or if I want the gaps like it is here, could do that. If I like rounded corners, rounded corners on. Also, let's say I don't want it to to crop our video. I wanted to keep it the full width that it recorded. I could keep the aspect ratio. Full-frame AI, shared ai and split AI. So this is using AI to select which speaker is talking and automatically change the camera angle. Alright, so with the AI mode, if you were to play it back now, you're not actually going to see the AI work in real time and switching between camera angles. It's something that will happen after you export and then you'll be able to see the AI at work. Switching. The camera angle is based on who the primary speaker is. At that moment. So you've got three options if you want to pick the AAE speaker mode, but I'm going to stick with just split screen for this example. Then also we can choose our background. So we got a couple of other stock options for background if we want to choose a different background or no background. And then we can also upload our own image for the background. Then lastly, we can also add a logo. So if you have all your own logo that you want to add as to brand your recording, you can add a logo here as well. Alright, so if you wanted to upload your logo and apply it as just to brand the stream. And then you could also drag and drop and replace it somewhere else. So there's a nice extra feature that you could add and bring into this. Yeah, so that's a nice couple of options here to adjust the way that this will export. Then once you are ready to go, you can just come over here and click Export, and then it will get options for how we want to export it. Another nice thing, you can click normalized audio levels, so it'll do a basic mix. Let's say someones audio is a little low or someone with little high, you can add this and have it adjust the audio levels to try to process it or try to equalize the levels processing wise, Let's say you did record and someone, it's audio did have noise in the background. Maybe there was a loud AC unit or something. You can turn on. Noise processing after the factors is nice because that was an option when you are recording to turn that on, but you can still turn it on after it to do some processing. And then also remove watermark, which is on by default. If you don't want the Riverside logo to appear on your video, which most likely you don't. You can turn off the watermark. And then here we have the option of how they we want to export the video. So in this case, because both cameras were recording either at ten ADHD or 720 HD, There's no reason to export this at a higher-quality or high resolution. I mean, maybe for k If you really wanted to, because it's kinda zooming in on the HD video. But there's not much reason for, for K. So you can just export this as HD, but also if you really wanted to, you can export it as four K and also you could export it as 720. I don't know why. You're just like you should just export it as HD, just do HD. So then once we got our options selected, and before I go here, if you really wanted to change the name of your clip, you can come here even though the clip is actual episode name. And that way the filename is better. So then we would hit Export and you won't get the file right away. It's got to be some back-end processing and they will e-mail you to let you know when the file is good to go. If you want to export just the audio from your episode which you would need to upload to the podcast hosting platforms to give it a WAV file. What you're gonna do is come over here to tracks, click the tracks, and then for every person on the track, you're going to click this use audio only icon, and that will turn everyone off. And then when you come up here to Export, you now have the option to just export a wave HD file. He doesn't really make sense because That's a video term, but wave is a higher-quality file. So you're gonna want to export this as a wave and not MP3 to get the highest quality quality audio. And then you have the same options of you want to. If you want to have it normalized the audio levels and remove any background noise. And then you'll click Export and it will send you the email once the export is ready. In the next lesson, I'll cover how to get those clips that we marked, edit them down, change the formatting and get that exported for social media sharing. 15. Creating Social Media Clips: Alright, so we covered how to export our entire episode that we will later then publish to YouTube or Spotify or iTunes. But now let's cover how to export shorter clips that we can then share it to social media to tease, promote, get people to watch our show and share out some of the best moments from our episode. So in this case, when I was recording my episode, I was marking key moments and I liked real time while recording. By hitting the M Biden are hitting the mark click button. But even if you didn't mark anything while you're recording, It's alright, doesn't matter. You can still come back and find key moments, great clips and share them on social media. So I'm back in my recording session for this episode. And over here are the individual clips that I marked. Because if I just happened to any of them, it doesn't matter because also on the left side, I can hop in and go to any section that I previously marked. And so it just grabs a 30-second section prior to the moment that I marked because obviously when you hit the mark clip, It's because you heard something that he liked and not necessarily something in the future that you haven't heard yet. So thirty-seconds from behind before when you heard the moment. But that maybe that doesn't work or you might want a better section. So if you hit other markers and maybe if you marked a part that you did like and then you marked the end of that part. You could mark your output to that clip, to that section. But in this case, that's not the case. So we're just going to drag our clip section to the movement. You can see that it already updated my duration for this clip from thirty-seconds to five-minutes. So I'm just going to drag this clip back here and we have to play button distress. How has sort of and you can drag your start point and then when you hit play, it will automatically start at like what things have you found? You can try it up in a new place, tests and like go back and forth between the camera and like make sure it looks good. And so it takes a little finessing, but you kind of find that start point for the clip that you want to share. I definitely like having the actual setup ready to go is very, very key. It saves us come look at the audio waveforms to kinda see moments of like when there's silence and when someone talks to get a better sense of when your mental start sharing that clip. Distress. How has sort of structuring your video evolved? Or I wish there was a way you can zoom in on the timeline. We've got an hour-long episode, so it's gonna be a little stretched and hard to sort of like fine tune that start and stop point. Alright, so let's just say remark or clip that we like is the exact angle lighting. And we want to export that. Definitely like having that moment. So again, we've got pretty much exactly the same controls that we just had when we exploited the full episode. For this case, we'll probably want to do like what's going on, Facebook or Instagram or something. And it will Polly want a square format, putting it on TikTok or in reals or story will want the nine by 16 format. And the cool thing is we get that same Smart layout option where we can either have this dual split-screen box. We can use the AI to automatically shift between angles and the actual setup ready to go is very, very key, saves a lot of time and mental switch angles and also to try to frame, I don't know if it actually does reframing with AI. I don't think it does. So the AI mode and this vertical work only if your angles or center framed and you're not going to be cutting off your guests because their camera was like non centered. And then also we get those same split-screen options with AI. But again, I'm going to, but again I'm gonna go with the stacked version. And then also if you really wanted to have this maintain aspect ratio, you could, I don't want to. We have the rounded corners. Same deal. We could also add a background image or change the background image, and we can add a logo if you wanted to brand it. So same deal. We've got our clip and then we can come over here and go to Export. And then we have our same options of what resolution you want to do. For social. Definitely just do 1080. You can try to normalize your audio levels, remove background noise if you need to, and make sure that the watermark is off. And then we hit Export. And same deal, we will get that same email from Riverside once our file is ready to download. 16. Exporting Individual Tracks: Alright, now in this lesson, Let's go over exploiting our individual tracks. So this is really where the magic and the power of Riverside comes into play. If we're recording with like other programs, it's kinda, kinda mesh or audio or video all into one file. And if we want to be able to extract the individual recordings after the fact, it's either impossible or really hard to do. But with Riverside, as we're recording individual files for every guest and every screen-share feed. And so we can download and take those files and edit them later. And the magic of that is like, let's say people were talking over each other. Or let's say we need to just take a sound bite from one person. But if there was some crosstalk, we have this isolated audio files and we have those isolated video files. They options that we have in editing are like pretty much limitless because we have high-quality recordings of each person's individual camera that we can do a lot of stuff with after the fact in editing. So the way we get those files is if we come down to a recording session, come to the bottom and we have the option to download, either adjust the audio. So we got the WAV file. You download an MP4 version of that. But if you want to download video for editing, you're going to want to download the constant frame rate version. It's going to equalize both of these video clips to the same duration and same frame rate. So when we do line them up, they're going to be in sync together. So you're going to want to click to download both those files to get those individual files. And then you'll bring them into your editing program of choice, where you can then create your own layouts. You can manually switch between whatever angle you want to. You don't have to rely on AI, which might get it right, might not get it right. In editing, you have a 100% control over everything that you want your audience to see when they watched or listened to your episode. You could also take your audio files and then edit them either further, run them through equalizers, mix them, enhance the audio, all that good stuff that will take place in another program. Now in addition to downloading the original high-quality files and we're recording the worst-case. Let's just say also that maybe your guests left and they didn't finish fully uploading their video. Or it's rare, but sometimes it happens, maybe there's just some bizarre technical issue where you don't get the full high-quality video uploaded and you can't download it. Not to, not to totally worry, but in addition to the high-quality videos, Riverside also has the backups. So when you're doing your stream, basically, these are gonna be lower-quality. It's gonna be what was recorded live during your stream, but still better than nothing just in case something happens, you can't get the full audio or video of the high-quality. You'll have the internet backup so you can download the MP3 audio file or the mp4, which would be the audio and the video that was recorded during your stream as backup. So good to know that it's there. So if you want to bring your edits into another program, do multi-camera editing. Manually switch between the angles. If you want to take your social media clips and add captions on top of them. So when people are watching your social media clips like this one, and they, you know, instead of just seeing the clip like uploading in the back, they now see some cool text right here of what you and your guests are saying. If you want to have transcripts of your whole episode where you can transcribe your entire episode and have the text available for both accessibility and also just helping people discover your episode because they can search the text. If you want all of that stuff. You're going to have to take this into another editing program, the one that I've been using more and more and more. And because also it is very easy and you don't need to be in editing master or have huge editing knowledge to use. It is D script and it has also built very handedly for doing cool stuff with podcasts and multi-camera podcasts. And part two of this course, which is a follow-up course. It will be coming out. I'll be going over how to take all this stuff, put it in the script, and do all these cool things I just mentioned, like being able to set it up as a multi-camera switch between angles, setting up your social media clips, adding burned in captions to better share it on social media and get better retention when people are watching the eclipse because they like reading stuff and it will suck their eyes in a good way. So that'll be part two of this course. Once you export your clips. And the other cool thing is at the time of recording, this is not live now, but Riverside is coming out with a feature where we could directly export these tracks straight into D script. It is not live right now when I'm recording this, but by the time this course has published, it should be live. And so you'll also be able to directly export these clips 2D script. You won't have to do that downloading thing I just showed you. But that will be in part two of this video podcasting course. So stay tuned for that. So in this lesson, we exploited our episode, we exported the clips, we were able to pull social media clips. I will go over in the next lesson an overview of where you can publish it. I'm not gonna go into detail of how to upload and publish it, but I'll go over a high-level overview of some platforms you can use to publish both the audio version of your podcasts, which would be on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and the video version of your podcasts, which would be on YouTube. And depending on where you upload it, which I'll cover in the next lesson. You could also get it on Spotify as well. So that's it that is coming up. 17. Publishing Your Podcast: Alright, so we've done all the work, we've recorded our episode, we have trimmed it. It's looking good. We like the way that the layouts are looking. Now. Best part we want to publish it, send it out to the world. So let's talk about publishing our episode. Now. Before we publish our episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, we need to figure out where we're going to host it. And so now a quick word about hosting in general. So all of these platforms, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts. They don't actually host your file, your file of your audio recording or of your video recording. What they do is they are just a directory that is gathering links of files that are hosted elsewhere. So when we talk about hosting and I talk about files, basically, we have our audio file, we need somewhere online that is going to store that file. So when someone subscribes to your podcast, that file is then delivered to them off of whatever online storage service we're using. So Apple podcasts are not storing your files. Spotify is not storing your files. They need the file to be stored elsewhere. And then through a URL that's called an RSS feed. That feed is telling them, Hey, this is where that file is stored. Hey, there's a new episode out, it's stored here. This is all the info for that file and this is what you need to use. The very short explanation of. We need somewhere to host our files, whether it's our audio files or our video files, that we then connect to Apple podcasts, Spotify, all the podcast hosting platforms, which tells them where our files are. There are a couple of widely used standard podcast hosting platforms. Some are free options, some are paid options. I'll talk about what the main ones are, what integrates with Riverside and which one I personally use. But it works. I don't have I don't have a bone in the game on that one. Alright, so the main one is gonna be Anchor. Anchor was the podcast hosting platform that Spotify purchase and out as Spotify as podcasts hosting platform. So before when I said Spotify doesn't host the podcast, technically they don't, but you can host them on anchor, which is owned by Spotify. It's a little circuitous. Anchor is free to use. You can upload your podcast audio file in this section that I'm talking about, I'm mostly referring to audio files. So you can upload your audio file. But anchor did just rollout video, podcast support, but only on Spotify. So everything with anchor is going to be very Spotify centric, which depending on what your goals are and what you're looking for, it could be really good, or maybe it's not what you're looking for. But free unlimited hosting. They do support being able to connect it to Apple podcasts and Google podcast and all of those additional podcast platforms. But a lot of the data and stuff and the integrations are gonna be from Spotify. If you're thinking about monetizing your podcast in the future, they do have an ad network that they're rolling out and that you can participate in, you might need to qualify for it. I'm not a 100% sure on that one, but also, I like to think about future-proofing. And when you're hosting your podcasts, which platform is going to seems to have a roadmap of futures that are in line with what I'm looking for. So if you're starting out with a podcast, you're not going to have a huge audience to monetize. But if you're thinking about monetizing, then maybe you want to look at a podcast platform that has features that are coming that will help you monetize or help you tap into an existing ad network. Then they also are now rolling out video podcasts. So Spotify bought the joe Rogan show and I had a video element to it. And so you can play the videos within Spotify. Now the rolling that out to more people to be able to upload their video episodes. And riverside has that integration built in. So if we go to our recording page for our episode, we went through the whole process of exporting the clip and then we had to wait for the email for it to come in that it was processed. Down here I have that clip that was the full episode, but instead of it being a draft, now, it's showing that it's ready. So if I go back into this clip, I don't have that same editing bar that I did before because now the clip is rendered and it's ready to download or export or do whatever we want with it. So I can publish directly to a handful of platforms right from Riverside. I don't have to download the file and re-upload it to the platform. It will integrate right here. One is Spotify logo, logo, but it's through anchor. Currently it's saying it's not supported from myLocation, but this is rolling it out. And by the time you watch this course, it should be rolled out in your area. So if you do go with anchor, one-click right here, you can publish that episode, right? To anchor. You don't have to download it and go through the whole thing. The other thing that it does integrate width is transistor. Transistor is just audio, but it's another popular podcasts hosting platform. They're known for having pretty good metrics and a pretty open policy. Also, if you want to, if you don't have an existing website and having a website that is paid for people to go to that you want to direct them to. That might be another factor for you to consider what hosting platform you go with if, if, if having a website for your podcast is important to you. So transistor does provide a website. And pretty much all these platforms, they're going to connect with every major podcast hosting platform. Including Spotify. So don't think that if you wanted to have your podcast on Spotify, you have to go with anchor. Podcasting is a very open network. And so pretty much hosting on any of these platforms will let you connect with any of the other platforms. The only asterisk to that is if you want to have a video of your podcast playable on Spotify, right now, you have to host it on an anchor. But besides that, just talking about the audio of your episode, because most of these platforms are not, do not support video. It doesn't matter which one you choose. You're not gonna be locked out of any other platform because you chose to host on transistor or bus route, which I'm going to talk about next. And then we'll talk about it now. The last one I'm dimension as buds sprout. I ended up going with this one for where I host my podcast behind the upload. Mostly I picked it because it seemed to have pretty good metrics. And it had some good abilities with as far as adding additional metadata to the episodes. When you upload your episode, you're going to add, you're going to need to add podcast art, your description, your title, all that stuff. But as Brad had additional support for captions and chapters for podcasts players, that's important. So I like that. It was kind of picking straws and let's play the wrong analogy for it. But it was, it was kinda between this and transistor. But there's really no, they all do ultimately very similar things. I didn't need a website, so that's probably the reason I didn't go with transistor. But Bootstrap does give you a basic landing page for your podcast if that's also of interest to you. Yeah, So you're gonna need to get set up on one of these things to host the audio of your episode and then integrate it with all the podcasting platforms. And then lastly, because we have our video of our podcast, you're going to want to put it on YouTube. As I mentioned at the beginning of this course, you do currently doesn't have any specific support for designating a video as a podcast episode or adding an episode numbers or other specific metadata. But I would expect that to change in the future. So keep an eye out for it if it does roll out, I'll add an updated video here to the course about specifically YouTube and podcasts. But right now the best thing you could do is upload your video. If you haven't done so already. Create a YouTube account, it's totally free. I would create a brand account and I'll have some links to my website explaining the difference between brand account and regular count. Upload that. And the other thing that you have to do too is verify your account because if you have a brand new YouTube page, it's going to cap out your upload limit at 15 minutes unless you verify your account. And that's super easy to do. Basically, they just need to text your number and make sure that there's a real number. It's just an attempt to try to cut down on spam. Super easy, super free to do, verify your account. And then you could upload videos up to 12 hours in length, which your podcast should definitely be under 12 hours. So, yeah, upload to YouTube. Same deal. You're going to need some YouTube art, your title, your description, but all the stuff that you already are putting on for your episode on whatever other podcast hosting platform you pick, you're going to put it on YouTube. For YouTube, you'll download the highest quality version of your video and then upload that to YouTube. As I said before, YouTube supports up to four k videos. So that's why Riverside is great because if your cameras sports at your guests cameras supports it, you can print out high-quality for K video right from here. So that's publishing in a nutshell. The other aspect of this is exporting all your social media clips and then publishing those on whatever platform you choose. Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter. I think that's it. Yeah, I think I covered all of them. There's probably something I left out wherever you want to post it. That's where all the social media clips come in. And that is also the other reason that riverside is awesome is you now have videos to share on social media instead of animated waveforms. Alright, that's published in a nutshell. Before I wrap up, I have one more video just kind of highlighting all the extra stuff that you can do in Riverside that just didn't fit into the rest of this course. But it's worth, I mentioned, so you're aware of the other cool things that you could do on a riverside account. So let's check it out. 18. Riverside: Live Streaming and Live Audience: Alright, this last video, Let's talk about all the other additional stuff you could do inside riverside that didn't really fit inside recording a regular show. But it's cool to know that it's available and maybe it gives you some ideas for other ways you can host your podcast show or a producer podcast show. Three things I want to talk about in this video. One is having a live audience during your podcast recording. The second is live streaming and your podcast recording or just live streaming in general from inside Riverside. And lastly, the Riverside iPad and iPhone app. So first off, let's talk about having a live audience for your show. So maybe your show is a colon type show, kinda like the radio morning shows where they have people calling in to talk about stuff. Or maybe you just want to record it in front of a live audience. Maybe you have a patron or some other type of reward system. And one of the options is, hey, you could participate in the live recording session of our show. You can ask questions or you can request to turn on your camera and audio and have a live Kotlin. So those are two different options that I just mentioned. First up, how to get the audience inside our recording studio. If we go over to our studio page and we go to invite people, this is how we invite our guests, but instead of guests, we change the permission level to audience. Now we have a link to our studio for an audience member. So you just copy the link and invite people that way. Or if it's a small audience or you know, who's on the list, you can put all the emails in here and set this to audience. So just a refresher from for roles as far as what audience can and can't do audience, you don't can't see or hear their camera. They can see and hear you as the host and any of your guests. They won't be able to see the producer. And also they won't be able to see anyone until you are recording. So when you're not recording and you're like backstage or in the green room area, the audience won't see anything, they won't hear you and your guests. So that's where if you're backstage area, where you can have your guests come on, you can talk to them beforehand before going live. I said going live quotes because I mean, going live is however you want to interpret that. But basically once you hit the record button inside Riverside, if you have an audience joining you, That's how they will be able to. They'll be able to then see anyone who has their camera or audio on, who is the host or the guest. Audience won't be able to see themselves. You'll be able to see the numbers as far as who is a guest and who is how many audience people are watching. There's this little icon here would be two and the audience, then you'd have to guess. This would be in your studio area. The other thing that an audience can do is they can request a live call-in so they can put in a request to have their camera and microphone turned on and basically joined your live show temporarily. But you have full control over accepting that in by hate accepting them to come on and then also when they leave, kicking them out nicely. But when they are just turning off there, they're called from the audience's perspective. And I'm here in the support docs. I think all of these below, I don't have enough people to do a fake live call-in show right now. But if an audience member is watching, they'll have the option to click Start live call-in, and then they'll little requests for you will pop up. Hey, they're requesting to call in. Do you want to accept or deny it? And so if you accept that, then their camera and Mike will turn on and that will also be part of the recording for that episode. And then you can turn off there their mic and camera. So another option, live call-in. You can have that also. You don't have to have any live colon, but you can just have a live audience watching you record. The audience can also participate in the chat area. So if you remember in our studio area, there is the chat section. So if you do have an audience watching, they'll be able to type in and ask questions. So that's another option too, where like maybe you want to have your show recording and you want people to be able to type in and ask questions but not turn on the camera. Because for whatever reason that's just not the type of show you're doing. You can put a half people typing questions here. Second thing I want to talk about is live streaming. So kind of a similar vibe here, except with this, everything is still self-contained inside riverside or audience is watching in Riverside, they're asking questions and Riverside maybe they're doing a live call-in on Riverside. But let's say you still want to use all of the features of Riverside, like the high-quality recording, the independent video and audio tracks. But you want to stream your broadcast out to another platform like YouTube or Twitch. So Riverside does support live streaming. If we head over to our settings and over here, our live stream tab, we can see all the platforms that Riverside supports and custom platforms as well. So if you're using a streaming service like switchboard, where you send out one stream and it broadcasts that too many streams, you can connect your own custom platform here. Or if it's another platform that is not supported here in Riverside, you can add it. But the main one you'll probably want to use is either YouTube or Twitch, possibly Facebook, and also LinkedIn, which has been rolling out more live streaming recently. So for YouTube as an example, if you create your YouTube account and then you head over to the studio and then you start a new live stream. Youtube will give you. You come over to stream key, select Create new stream key. And the nice thing about that is it will save the stream key so you only have to set it up once and then you don't have to do it every time. But basically a stream key is kind of like a password for your live stream. So you wanna keep that secret because if someone else has the stream key, then there'll be able to hijack your stream their own things to your channel, which you don't want. So you'd copy your Stream Key over and put it inside the stream key section here. And then you would copy the stream URL and put that over here. And that's all you would need four live streaming to YouTube. And it's gonna be a similar deal for Twitch and all the other platforms. They're all going to have a dream URL and a stream key. So once you get your Stream Key setup and you can stream out to multiple platforms if you want, you just turn them all on. Once you got that all set up, similar deal to the audience setup. You have to hit Record and the studio to start the stream. And then once you start, you'll see a preview of your stream coming here. And then depending on your settings, if you have it set to automatically start the stream once it gets a signal, by default, it's off and then you'll have another button here that'll just say Start stream. And that'll start your YouTube stream. If you're doing this for the first time, you should change your privacy and set it to private or unlisted to do a test live stream just to make sure you get the hang of it. No, it'll be able to see those if it's unlisted, if they have the URL. So that's a good way to share the URL to other people on your team. That they can be the test audience. But it's not going to be on your YouTube page, so it's not really public. So that's a good way to test out your live stream. The other thing to keep in mind when live streaming is there's going to be a delay. So live streaming, it'll buffer the video so that it has an optimized streaming experience for viewers. Just also the nature of how the signal is going around. It's not instantaneous, like we're used to on Zoom and like you'd be used to in Riverside. So the best-case if you come over here and stream latency is basically another word for delay. Normal latency is going to give you a delay of about ten to 20 seconds. Sometimes I've seen as high as 30 seconds, depending on the Internet connection. So from when you start streaming now to when someone who's watching it on YouTube, they'll see that moment 1020 seconds later. And then if you have people commenting on YouTube, that there'll be commenting on stuff that happened 20 seconds ago. And then by the time you see it in the comments happens in tenuously, but you might see a common you'd like, wait a minute, what are they talking about? And I was like, oh, because that happened like 30 seconds ago by the time they saw it and write out the comment. So just keep that in mind. That that's one of the issues with live streaming. And what your goals are of like why why you are streaming it, and what you could do inside Riverside. Because if you're inside Riverside, it's gonna be pretty much near real time, especially if you're an audience, are gonna be watching that real-time, recording it, real-time interaction. And the chat that you can do is going to be much more real time. So just keep that in mind if you're streaming to these other platforms. If you go to ultra low latency, that'll knock it down to about maybe five seconds of a delay. But it's still going to be a delay. Nothing is gonna be as real-time as watching it and interacting with it directly inside Riverside. Lot of tangents that you can go, we can go on here. But I'm just wanted to give a little bit of an overview of the live streaming features. I'll have links to Riverside support docs that kind of explain more about it. And if you have any questions about it, I do a lot of live streaming stuff as well, and I've debated doing a live streaming course separately from this. Hit me up. You can let me know in the comments for this course are over on Twitter at C4 T7. Now, last thing I wanted to touch on, which does nothing to do with live streaming, is riverside has an iPhone and iPad app. And you can pretty much do everything that we've been doing on the desktop. Inside the app. You could record, use the camera's. Your guests can download it and join using either platform. You're a producer, could use the iPad as the control device, or you could use it as a separate device to control your session if you prefer having the iPad. Other option that I've heard people doing is they connect with their phone as a separate device, but now they basically just use it as a separate, a second camera. If you want to hack your way to having a multi-camera recording session for you, even if you just wanted to record yourself multi-camera, or if you wanted to have your recording multi-camera, you could have your computer setup and then add on other devices like your phone and use them as second cameras. So a couple of options there. Like I said, your guests can also download the app and join if they want to. I usually don't mention it to guess just because they would have to download another app. There's no web interface for them to go to Riverside.com and join the stream. They would have to download the app. So it's up to them if they asked me if if there is support for joining the call, are joining the podcast on their phone, I'll mention, yeah, but you have to download an app. But I usually don't mention it at the start Just because I don't want to add the extra step for them to download an app when they don't have to and they can join on their computer. And it'll most likely be better quality on their computer. Because if I have a guest joining from a phone trying to hold it, that's going to be more uncomfortable than them just plopping their laptop down and recording from that. So that was a little bit of a grab bag of different topics. We got having a live audience recording with Collin if we so choose live streaming out our recording session to any other platform that we choose and using Riverside iPad and iPhone app. Next up, the grand conclusion to this course. 19. Conclusion & Editing Your Podcast: Alright, made it to the end. This is the end of the first part of our journey and creating a high-quality video podcast, we learned all about how to use Riverside, how to set up our gear, how to set up our studio. If you wanted to take it to the next level, if you want to add burned and captions to this social media clips. If you want to have much more fine control over which camera angles switches, or creating any type of custom layout. You so choose of how you display your different podcast guests. If you want to reshuffle the order, let's say you recorded your intros and outros later and you want to add that at the beginning, or you want to add a teaser soundbite at the beginning, your clip and then add some intro music and an intro video. If you want to do any of that stuff, then we're going to need to go to the next step, which is editing our podcast in another platform. And the platform that I've been using a lot lately. And I really like, and this is coming from me who I've been editing professionally for ten plus years is D scripts, which is reinventing how you edit video and treating it like a Word doc. So if you know how to use a Google Doc, you can now edit video. So in this next course that's coming out, we're going to cover everything. We need to know about how to take in our footage from Riverside, which now has an integration with D script and how to build that out as a composition or a project inside the scripts and do everything that I just talked about, adding those captions, creating social media clips, creating transcripts that we can then publish online. Reshuffling our order of the episode, cutting out any bad tag, coming out gaps, all that good stuff is going to be in part two of this course. So be sure to follow me here on Skillshare and stay tuned for that course as far as other things go. If you have any questions, anything came up in this course, love to hear your questions here are your thoughts, so you can let me know and Skillshare in the discussion area or hit me up on Twitter at C4, T7. I also have a pot. I do a podcast behind the upload, so be sure to check that out and subscribe, especially if you like this stuff and if you're doing this because you're looking for video marketing and topics, then you'll definitely like the podcast. The other thing that I do have is a newsletter. You can sign up for that as well. I also have a YouTube channel. So if you like content like this, I put out a lot of similar stuff for free on YouTube, so be sure to subscribe. And if you didn't like this course, I would much appreciate it if you left a review here on skillshare. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I will see you in the second part of this course when we learn how to edit. But if you're watching this right now, it means it's not out yet and it's still being shaped. So if you've got any questions or anything you want to see, now's the time to reach out to me to let me know so I can be sure to include that in part two of this course. But until then, have been podcasting.