Write, Record, and Edit Videos Faster Than Ever

1. Intro: High Quality Videos FAST: Videos is incredibly hard work, that's incredibly time consuming. And to be competitive with today's algorithms, you need to produce a lot of content. So how is it possible for a normal person without an entire production team to do this in an effective way? Hey, I'm Brendon, and I've published over 650 videos, three online classes, if you count this one. And after I practice this perfect video production system that I'm going to show you today, I made and published 76 videos in 75 business days. That's not working nights and weekends. That's not staying up until midnight, burning the midnight oil, living off Red Bull. No, Monday through Friday, 8:00 A.M. To 4:00 P.M. It. Today I'm going to break down my entire system for how to produce quality videos in a very short amount of time. I'll show you how I record them, what hardware I use, how I use lights and sound and everything to maintain quality, how I plan and write videos, to make sure I never run out of ideas, and also my post production workflow to get editing and posting done as fast as possible and never miss an upload. If you want to make high quality video production easier for you and faster, you're in the right place. 2. Class Project! Make a Video! : This process is for you to have a class project. So the challenge for you is to put everything we talk about in the class to good use. We're going to talk about things like how to position your camera for the best angles, how to make yourself good look good with proper lighting, how to make yourself sound good, with a microphone or just the placement of whatever microphone you have. You don't have to have something like this. And we get into things like editing and post production. I want you to do is take all of that information that we talk about, put it together, and make some kind of video. I don't care if it's 24 seconds long, and it's you just saying, Hey, Brendan, here's my class project. What do you think? How does everything look? Okay. See you later. That would be totally fine. But make some kind of video with whatever hardware you have, whatever microphone and lighting and lack thereof that you may or may not have. Post the video in the class project section and let me see what you're working with. I'd also be interested to see kind of a before and after. So if you're willing, do a little 15, 20, 32nd video now to say, Here's how I've been making videos or here's how I think I would make a video. What do you think? Then take everything you learned from actually going through the class, make another short video, and let's just see the difference. We could do kind of an A and B, before and after. I think that would be really interesting. And in the second part of the video, where you take into account what you've learned, just let me and everyone else who's taking the class know how the post production tips have helped you to expedite your workflow because maybe you used to do things in a way that was disorganized, that slowed you down. You didn't use all the tools that were available to you, and then what's the difference now that you know all that stuff? I'd love to know if you saved 50% on your production timeline. I probably cut my production timeline from 40 hours of work per video down to maybe seven or eight. So I've cut it down by whatever that percentage is, like, 80%, less. That's pretty awesome. Alright, let's go. 3. My Studio Tour Part 1: To my studio tour. Now I'm going to show you exactly how I have a studio in my house with two small kids running around with other things happening in life and show you all the tricks that I've found over the last six years to make this a high quality, productive space. One of the most important things whenever you're making videos, especially from home, whether that's a Zoom call or if you're making videos that you're going to actually produce and put out online that need to have high sound quality is just isolating noise and reverbs. So where we are right now in this hallway, we have a lot of hard spaces that allows the sound to bounce around back and forth. And that's why we're getting this kind of nasty echoy sound. Whenever we go inside, you're going to hear that it's a drier sound. It's much cleaner because I've done a lot of sound isolating. But even from out here, what I've has hung what's actually like a curtain rod from the ceiling, and then I've gotten the sound isolation blanket and it's got two sides to it. One side is soft and plush and that face is inside because it's going to absorb sound. The outside is a little bit of a harder piece and that rejects sound. So my goal is is to keep all the sound that's happening out isolated from ever getting inside my room. I also have a lock set up to keep people out. This is a great tip for your parents out there whenever you've got small children or pets or anybody that you don't want to get into this room and mess up your high powered camera or your laptop or chew on cables on the ground or anything like that. I got this little flip lock from Amazon, and all it does is it flips down and it locks this space off. Anybody who's tall enough to reach it can still very easily get in if you need to get in there for any reason. It's not about privacy. It's much more about just isolating any problems from happening. So whenever I'm gone for the day, I flip the lockdown, I walk away, and I know the studio is safe. Now let's go inside. See it works. That was accidental. Welcome in. The first thing you notice is I can't really walk in the door properly because I've got another sound curtain here on the inside of the room. And you can hear the sound just comes in here and stops. I've got carpet, I've got sound paneling on the wall, another sound curtain here. Everything is set up to just kill the sound and muffle it so that I can record anywhere in here. Make it easy. When we're inside the room, I also have a lock on this door. So when I'm in here and I'm working, I can lock anybody out who might just barge in whether I'm filming or editing or anything like that. This way, it gives me some privacy to work. Also for a little bit of motivation and inspiration, I've got a whiteboard I don't really look at it all that much because the sound curtain is covering it up and that's on purpose. I've hung another curtain rod from the ceiling here. Then whenever it's time to film, I let go my little zip tie hanging system. I hang it up on these little hooks, and then I move it over here in the way. So I'm partially covering up the sound of the AC, and then this just blocks out the whole entrance. So part of that is a visual thing because then it doesn't really look like I'm just in a bedroom. It doesn't have that obvious door in the back. Part of that's obviously the sound because the door is a hard reflective surface. It just lets the sound bounce off of it and everything sounds worse as a result. This way, it's really, really clean. This is also the backdrop for some of my videos. And if you want to have a video that looks nice and homey, then you can have things here in the back of your videos that are personal that reflect your own style, and then also give a little bit of ambience. It's typically a really good idea to have some light behind you. It gives the depth that you want in a scene to make it look nice. It gives it some realism and some warmth and it just feels more welcoming. For me, I always like these old style bank lamps with the green glass top. I looked all over for these and I found out my sister just had one laying around in her house. She gave this to me. Thank you, sister. Otherwise, these are just books that I have read or a I had this custom made by a Pennant company. This is actually based on an old photo of my dad when he was desert racing motorcycles and a little piece of advice that he gave me. This is also a bucket list item for me that represents the kind of values that I was working towards was someday visiting this racetrack and driving on his track. This is Spa, and it's a race track that's in Belgium. This is the most famous curve at Spa, probably the most famous turn, like, in the entire world. And I think this photo is really cool. It's taken by an automotive photographer named Larry Chen at night. So it's just like a trail of car headlights and taillights blurred together. So it adds a pop of color in the background, it's also inspirational for me. Then these awkward thing I'm actually not totally sold on are just more sound blankets that are mounted on the wall. Because I noticed that as I was speaking in this direction, I would hear sometimes sound bounce and bounce and I didn't like that kind of echo. I wanted to let the sound bounce maybe once, let it hit one wall and then stop after that. I hung these up, even though it does create a visual beltline along the wall. I don't think it's too distracting or too weird, but realistically, they're probably overkill for somebody who's designing their own video. This side of the room, I've got to keep sane and you're also going to start to see a little bit more camera gear and equipment and lighting and stuff like that. So this is my exercise bike that I bought intending to use basically every day, as it goes, these things don't get used as much as you kind of expect them to be used. But it is nice to have an option to move your body while you're working because you can take a phone or a tablet or something over here and continue to maybe write out a script or do some very light editing or some brainstorming while you're getting some movement in on your body. This kind of work, this line of work is very sedentary. And so it's wise to balance that out with some movement. It's better for you long term. I also think it's more productive whenever you feel better and decorations on the back wall that kind of reflect my goals and my personality. These are a couple of race tracks that are on my bucket list of things that I want to do. I've got Laguna Seca and CODA up here. And so these are places that I want to go or have been, and it's just been a really fun memory for me. So more personal stuff kind of in the background. I don't know if anybody even really notices that, but I notice it and love it. Now, let's start to talk about the conspicuous gear that you can see up here, like this giant light that's mounted up on the ceiling. This is just one of many lights that I have, and I'll go over all the lighting for you here in this kind of comprehensive section coming up. But what you want to do to get kind of proper lighting in a space and make it look as cinematic as possible, just as pretty as possible. Have light coming at you from different directions. If you just have light coming from a single source, it can look a little bit kind of monotone. And so this way, when I'm sitting at the chair, this is pointing right at the back of my head, and it gives me a nice hair light and rim light around my head and shoulders so that I pop and I feel separated from the background visually. This awkward thing down here on the ground is actually a light that I made. So I bought an LED strip light, and then I taped on the inside of a piece of aluminum, a right angle piece of aluminum, but then I mounted to some plywood blocks and basically made myself like a little vertical LED light stand kind of thing. You can change colors, brightness, all that kind of stuff. And whenever I flip a switch on my phone app, all the rest of the lights come on every light, but this one is on smart switches. And so with a single push of a button, all the lights come on very easily, and I'm ready to up is my toolbox full of useful camera stuff. Initially, when you start, I would recommend you not buying a ton of gear. But at a certain point, if you're doing this for a long time and you really gear and you like having the flexibility of different options, you mand up with a lot of stuff. And I found that a toolbox is a really handy way to organize all of that and have it easily findable. It is on casters so you can wheel it around the room if you need. I have found a spot for it where I like it and I've left it there. And then the top of it actually doubles as a top down shot. It's a shooting location for anything that I want to do up here. Right now, I just have my keyboard and my wrist rest for my PC. If I've got a little camera mount up high, I can stick my phone on it magnetically, do a really easy top down shot and have kind of a different perspective already set up and really easy for me. But inside the toolbox, not only is it handy for organization, but it also locks. So for security sake, or, again, for small children to not get into your stuff and mess it up, it's really handy. Whenever we went on a vacation and I knew the kids were going to be in the house, locked the door, put the key somewhere where they couldn't reach it, and I could sleep easy at night knowing they weren't going to mess up anything here. Have it organized just by kind of category of stuff that I need. This top door is labeled pens, but it's really kind of the catch all. So it's any kind of tool, small attachment, office supplies, fake money, you know, little bits and bobs and things like that that you might need to work on camera stuff, Allen wrenches, markers and pens, all the little things. Don't need to keep a spark plug in here anymore. The next draw down is all the data related things. So these are memory cards, they're SSDs, they're portable hard drives, and they're the kind of cables that are actually rated to do data transfer. So any old, let's say, USBC cable isn't necessarily rated properly to transfer large amounts of data. Some of them are only really good for charging. And so what I've done is isolate everything in this drawer to be things that are like data approved. So I can do high speed transferring, whether I'm editing a video or just transferring large files, it makes it very easy to have that on one place, memory card reader, drive for my larger drives over here, my Ninja drive, memory cards that aren't currently in cameras. These are just extras, all that kind of good stuff. The next door down is related to power, everything I need for batteries and charging. So I've got larger NPF style batteries for monitors or portable lights. I've got battery chargers for my camera, battery backup banks, whenever I need something that's more portable, I've got different kinds of wraps that allow me to wrap up cords if I need to do that. Bare battery charger for my laptop. Then I also keep spare camera batteries in here only when I know that everything is fully charged. So if things aren't fully charged, they don't belong here in the toolbox. This is like the ready to go zone so I can run and grab every it needs to be charging, it'll be out of here into a different location. Then this deeper drawer is everything audio related. And as you notice, audio is a really important part of making videos, and it's not an easy thing because depending on where you are, you need different equipment to record there. Like, when I'm home in my studio, I'll show you here in just a minute. I've got two different microphone setup that are really only good for a stationary kind of setup. They're not meant to be walking around lightweight things. But you notice even right now, I've got two microphones on. I've got a backup microphone. I've got a primary microphone that feeds right into the camera. This is great because we're walking around the studio you really need different things to fit different situations. I started off initially with just the camera microphone. Then I added this little ditty, which is a Zoom h1n. I think a lot of people end up with this kind of microphone. It's very handy, it's high quality, but it is limited in some ways. Then I bought lab mics, and I bought extra dead cats, and I bought wireless microphones, and I bought another microphone for my laptop, and on and on and on until you just have too much gear, hence the box full of gear. But this way, whenever it comes to doing some sound recording on location, I can just take my dedicated soundb pack the elements that I need in here to get the job done and then take off knowing that I have everything to get high quality sound. And then this giant drawer down here at the bottom is a big enough drawer to catch everything else that doesn't fit somewhere categorically. But it's also things that I use frequently enough that I need to keep them handy. Things like zip ties, my rocket blower, a larger tube light in case we need that props from past videos. Go Pro Mounts, things like that. And now the part you've been waiting for, which is the gear corner where the magic happens, where the camera is, where the lights are, where everything is going to actually make the shot that we're wanting to see. The reason I'm showing you the ceiling at first is because I wanted to show you additional things that I had rigged up here so you can kind of see more behind the scenes before I get up close with all the things that are happening with the physical camera itself. The first thing is, I bought a couple Premade sound panels. These are nice because they're a little more low profile than the homemade ones that I have, like here and then back also inside the closet. But these I hung from the ceiling directly above where I'm talking because I noticed that when I talk, I would have some sound reflect and come back down and give me a little bit of an echo. And so this way, I'm getting basically no echo. Maybe you can tell the difference. If I talk here or clap versus I talk over here, if I talk here and clap, Now, my voice is still going in that direction. So it sounds a little bit better, but mostly when I'm facing that direction, I felt like that gives me the kind of really quiet sound isolating that I really wanted. Also, conspicuously. Look at this thing. This is a big light that I have mounted with a big light dome on the front because I wanted additional light to come from this side of the room and I want it to be really soft. So whenever you have a big light source, like a window, like a big light dome like this, the light is typically softer and more natural looking than if you have a spotlight. Watch when I close these blinds and just show you the spotlight here on my face from this light doesn't look very good. This light and that light only it looks kind of harsh and dim in here. Now, if I pull up my app and I turn on my video day, everything else around me turns on, and it gives me a nice warm, soft light, the kind of light I'm looking for. I realize this looks freakishly bright, but you'll see I show you some more footage from me sitting in front of the desk, it looks very natural. It looks really good. And these are things you have to just play with and adjust in your own life and your own situation. It's one of the downsides to shooting in front of something like just a window because the light in front of a window is changing all the time. Clouds and trees and dust and cars driving by and everything completely changes what your light situation can look like. So it's not a deal breaker by any means. But this way, I can shut off the light and have a really consistent kind of light source and like, quality whenever I'm filming in here day, night or otherwise. Start here and move our way around. This giant board is not something that anybody else needs in their own life. I also have a car channel. And so these little scores where cars that I've reviewed and scores I've given them on how good or bad they are to drive. This is something that I do strictly for funzies. It's an awkward kind of thing in the room, and I wouldn't recommend it for you. I think it needs to be a more natural space, but I use this space for dual channels and dual purposes, and so it's got to live here despite being kind of awkward. And speaking of awkward. You have a bunch of gear, you've got to end up putting it somewhere. So I use these garage hangers, and I hang up things like the tripod where you are right now. I hang up car suction mounts. I hang up monopods and light stands and mic stands and everything that is long and awkward and doesn't have a great space, otherwise, just so it's within easy reach. This is the best and most frequently used tripod for me. If I have small things, this is a mantis Pod Pro, I believe, it's called by a company called PGY tech. It's really easy to use as kind of a logging style camera. You can flip it out and use it as a tabletop tripod. It's super flexible and easy and small and compact and can fold up and go with you anywhere. Not quite pocketable nice and small and compact. And as you can see, I'm pretty obsessed with sound panels. So I made these larger sound panels out of wood and extra material I had laying around. And so these kind of isolate my voice as I'm talking into this corner of what is a closet. This was a bedroom. And so this is a closet that I just took down the closet door to, and then I set my camera and some other gear here far enough back so that whenever I shoot into the room, I get the most depth possible. What I don't personally recommend is sitting up against a wall like this. I think it feels cheap. I think it feels claustrophobic. I don't like the vibe that it gives you. I much prefer to have the camera in the far corner of the room, sit close to the camera and then give you all that behind you. Do you see how different this feels, then I'll just move it by hand here, then how much different this feels? Do you see how much more perspective you're getting and how much more open it feels? There's no hard and fast rule as far as how you set things up because maybe you want to accomplish a different vibe or maybe you're always on the run, if you're a travel creator, if you can't have a certain setup all the time, then I understand having a different vibe depending on where you are. But for me, because I can set everything up and have it be in a certain place, I like the more open, welcoming feeling that this gives. 4. Elements of Great Lighting: My primary stance. Whenever I'm personally filming a video, I like to sit here, pull the microphone over to me and get the best audio quality possible. Then if I have any notes or anything that I need on the computer, it's also right here. This is also where I edit. My filming and editing locations are just in the same place, makes things very easy and consistent for me. Let's talk about the overarching themes when it comes to how to set up a studio space and how to make your life easy as far as making high quality videos with the least amount of effort possible. Keeping things really consistent for your audience. The biggest single principle for me that accomplishes that goal is keeping things consistent and the same as much as I possibly can. That means the lights are always set the same. They're in the same place. I activate them with the phone, they all come on, I turn on the audio. It's the same place and the same quality in the same settings as always. I'm not refiguring that out with every single video. The camera is always sitting behind the teleprompter, ready to go, I've got a secondary monitor here, the Ninja recorder that also records for me, and then another field monitor here so I can see myself and make sure I'm framed properly and the lighting looks good and everything is happening the way I want. So the philosophy is really based around ease of use, having a redundant recording system. So I have two versions of both the video file and the audio file. And that way, I don't have to then perform twice. I don't have to record twice because maybe I put a lot of energy and effort into a 60 minute long recording just to find out, oh, the camera ran out of battery or ran out of memory card or something else like that. That's a huge downer for me. So let's get it right the first time. Let's get it done. Move on to the next process of editing because most of us are solo prenurs. We are the ones who are ideating, recording, editing, producing all these videos. And so we need to make our life as easy as possible and minimize all those different steps. Otherwise, you end up redoing a lot of stuff, and that gets very frustrating. I think the best way to maintain a high level of quality is also through lighting and sound. So let me give you a tour of the room's lighting and sound in the way that I would have it set up specifically for filming videos. Saw this hair light before, which is the one that shines directly on the back of my head when I'm sitting over here. And then the little stand light that I made is set to this nice blue hue so that in the background, you just get a little bit of illumination. There's no, dark corners in the room, and everything looks pretty nice. Then this back corner, we have my bank lamp that's also hooked up to that Smart outlet. So whenever I just hit the button on my app, boom, turns on, ready to go. My little fake tree and my ego YouTube emblem here. Just to make it and, of course, we have the monstrosity of this giant soft box up here on this big light that provides much of the key light for my face, even though there's another key light back in the closet itself. But this is a very powerful light. This is an Amaran 200 X. And so it's able to provide a ton of light. It's set way down. It's on like 10% right now. But it's just enough fill light on the opposite side of my face so that I feel like I'm well lit and clear and easy to see. Then the two remaining lights that are up here are this one, which just shines on the back wall. Wanted to give the back wall of the studio a little bit more of an open welcoming feel. Initially, whenever I first started in this room, I had basically no lights on anything but me. I didn't have the background lamp light. I didn't have that light shining on the back wall. And so it kind of felt like I was at the entrance to a very long, dark cave. And if that's the vibe you want, no problem, you can do that. For me, I wanted things to be visible, a little bit more well lit for people, so they didn't feel like it was some scary black hole of a video. And so that also lights up the background because it gives a little separation between the background and me. If you shoot into a space that's totally dark and you're well lit, it doesn't look like there's any separation between you and the background because there's no background. You're like a cookie cutter cut out of just a dark screen. That's an Amran 100 D that's set on Max Power. Then the most important light of all is this key light right here. In video production terminology, a key light is just the important one that faces the person. Ideally, your key light is as big and as well diffused as possible. So people do that by bouncing it off of something like a big white sheet or you can just buy a physically big light. You could also use something like my big dome to do that. But for me, I found that I needed the light source to be here inside the closet to be facing me directly as I film videos. And so I've gone through a couple of different lights in the past. But what I've done is hung up this little diffusion plastic panel in front of it, and the light itself is just there. It's already a somewhat diffused, circular light that's meant to be used as a key light, but I find hanging this diffusion fabric in front of it just gives it a little bit more of a soft glow. 5. Crisp Audio You Never Have To Re-Do!: Now let's talk about audio because this giant boom arm is pretty hard to miss, right? You've got the big fancy microphone on it. This boom arm goes out super far. There's lots of weird stuff on it. So let me explain the reasoning behind all of that. For me, whenever I started, I had small microphones that were just mounted on top of the camera. But the problem is whenever a microphone is far from your mouth, but the problem with any microphone that's mounted far from your mouth is it's got to pick up the sound after it bounces around the room for a while. Whenever you have microphones that are close to your body here, like in a lav mic or close to your mouth here in terms of a microphone like this, there's really no space for the sound to go, but directly into the microphone first. And so the sound is a lot cleaner and less echo. Just using really cheap microphones. If you keep the mic close to your mouth, it's a total cheat code for making your sound quality better. Of course, if you hold the microphone super close to your mouth like this, it sounds terrible. Probably want to keep it a decent distance away, so you don't have too many plosive sounds. You don't get too many mouth noise sounds. That's kind of yucky. But listen to how the sound changes as I move the microphone away from my body further and further and further until it's just an arm's length away. I'm still talking loudly. I'm still pronouncing the words with the same volume, but it sounds totally different than whenever I bring it up close to my mouth like this and it's able to isolate the sound better. That's not post processing. That's not some AI noise reduction type of thing. That's just proximity to the microphone. From camera mounted microphones to then having microphones that were mounted a little bit closer to me to then desiring even higher sound quality. This is a very well known microphone. It's a sure SM seven B, and it's one of these kind of podcast style microphones that are meant to be talked to right up close. You get your mouth right up on the little foam. Mine still smells like the person who I bought it from because I bought it used from Facebook Marketplace. But outside of that, it works wonderfully. You could also use a much cheaper microphone. It's an alternative to that. That's a Sen his E 835, like the one I've got here. I've rigged it up on kind of a universal tripod, and you can have this in your shot the same way that is. It gives you the proximity that you need. It gives you the consistency that you need. But over and above that, there are things hidden here that give you even more consistency than just buying a high dollar microphone. One of the tricks to producing a lot of videos at a high quality really fast is having high quality gear that supports everything that you're trying to do. Both of these kinds of microphones are what are called LR microphones. That's just the kind of connector that's used make this connection to your audio recording device, and it's this big thick cable with these different little ports connecting everything together. It snaps in there and it's very locked into place whenever it's in because it's a professional style cable. The reason that you would use that over something like a little tiny cable that plugs into a small cheap microphone is, A, it's not going to fall out. But, B, this larger cable is a higher quality, and it's less likely to allow any other interference in through the audio system itself. And so this way, you know that the sound you're recording is just purely your sound. It's not getting interference from other devices and everything nearby that's going to kind of give you some buzz and some hum and some nastiness. We see where we're going with this, though. The more complicated your gear is, the more other gear you need to support that to then get it back into your camera, right? Because I don't have an XLR plug into my camera. So how do we put all this together? Well, we do that with this little beauty. This is a Zoom field recorder. What it does is it allows us to plug in a couple of different LR ports into it, and it records to a microSD card that's right here on the side of the recorder. Then you take the microSD card remove the audio file from it and you sync up the audio file from this with your video file that you recorded from your camera. Now, the editing program that I use Final Cut Pro does that automatically, so there's no extra work required for us because it can match up the waveform of this audio with the actual camera recordings audio. So the only extra time that we're actually spending is putting this card into the computer, getting the file copied over, and doing about 20 seconds of work in the actual editing soft over and above that, the big reason I love this over and above other kinds of microphones that I've used, even the ones I'm using right now to make this video for you, is that this is powered all the time. You see, I've got space here for this power plug to be in here all the time. So no matter when I come in, when I want to record, I just power it on, and I'm ready to go. There's no question of whether or not I've got the batteries charged. Do I have fresh As in there? Do I not? What's going to happen if I talk for too long? Am I going to run out of battery? One of the things that I love to I've done with everything possible in this studio is give it permanent power. In my opinion, everything in your studio setup, having permanent power is such a quality of life improvement. It means your camera and your gear isn't going to die mid recording. It means you're always ready to record. It means you've got a level of consistency that's unmatched anywhere else, and that is a game changer and a life might have noticed with my little recorder, I've got two XLRs going in here, and I told you, I've got redundant audio happening all the time whenever I make videos. That's because not only do I have this little daddy here ready to be recorded, but I've also got this microphone here. This microphone is a shotgun style microphone. And so it's got this long tube at the end that's made to kind of isolate the sound pickup pattern. So it's pointed right at me when I'm sitting at the desk. It only hears me, but it's out of the shot. So if I wanted to have a little bit of a cleaner shot that doesn't have this big thing right up here by my mouth, talking all the time, then this gives me that option. But it's also run down and plugged into that same audio recorder. This way, I've got two audio tracks, no matter what happens. Somehow, some way, if something came unplugged with a microphone blew up or whatever, I wouldn't have to remake a video. I've always got two versions. Hence, the big crazy arm and clamp system that I have here up in the ceiling that comes down avoids the light here so I don't have a shadow cast on the back then it's hung down and pointed right at me. This is also the microphone that I would take with me if I was going to travel and wanted really high quality audio. So I made kind of a family documentary where we interviewed my wife's great grandfather and asked him a bunch of questions about his life and what it meant for him to grow up the way he did and what happened throughout his 90 plus years of living because we're thankful to still have him with us. And so I thought, we've got to capitalize on this wonderful man and his stories while he's still here. And if I'd have had this microphone then, it would have been really handy. Instead, I was juggling between different kinds of microphones, battery powered things, and other ones, and that ended up making the audio quality lower and the editing process much trickier because I almost lost crucial audio of him that we couldn't have gotten back otherwise. When you can have a high quality microphone that's very directional plugged into permanent power, you will not have that issue. So these are my audio babies. We've gone through my wonderful light babies. Now let's talk about the actual camera setup itself, how we get the shot that we want to get. 6. Camera & Video Production Equipment : Is my beloved teleprompter. And what it allows me to do is hook up a cable from this down to my laptop, and it projects whatever I have on my laptop screen here on the projector. Watch. Let's do it. No matter how long we've all been doing this, we still need reminders. Is the audio recording? Audio recording? I've recorded several videos where I didn't have it. So this way, whenever I'm looking at the teleprompter to see a script or an outline or anything that I want to reference in a video, have to look down and see that. I also want to make sure that whenever somebody watches a video of mine, I immediately confirm what they've came for with the video. If I title and thumbnail something to make a promise, I want to confirm that immediately. So this is a reminder for that. The way this teleprompter works like every teleprompter is you have a screen on the bottom side. That projects an image that then reflects on this piece of glass and the camera is behind here. It shoots through the glass. Whenever you're seated, I'll show you my view when sitting here to make a video, whenever you're seated, you can just see the words that are on the teleprompter. And as long as you look straight down the middle, you're actually looking down the barrel of the camera lens, too. So it's really cool. It's a way that you can look at your text, you can look at your notes. You can do it fairly and conspicuously, as long as your eyes aren't darting back and forth as you read along, and it's a really cool way for you to cut back your actual production performance time because you're just reading along or referencing your notes without having to stop, look down at your phone, look down at a piece of paper, and keep going. And conspicuously, both of these setup on height adjustable electric standing desks. Maybe that's overkill, but again, I'll explain the thought process behind it. This is not essential for you and your setup, but for me, I found that it was. So I found that this first standing desk that I had fits perfectly inside this closet space. And then as I have my teleprompter mounted there with two by four under it to get the kind of angle that I want, it's really easy for me to push up and down those buttons and adjust the whole camera up and down however I need to get just the right height because when I first put it in there, I didn't know what height it needed to be. And if you had it on a tripod, not only would you have to have a dedicated tripod that's just living in there all the time, but it's pretty difficult to properly mount this whole teleprompter arrangement on a tripod. Very long. It goes all the way back there with that metal bracket, all the way here to the front, and it's a big heavy, long system. So this way it just sits securely on the desk. It's always in the same place. I reach around and turn on the camera, hit record, and we're ready to go. Another quality of life improvement that I thought of was awkwardly angling this mirror with these strings, and I'll explain exactly why that's there. I know it looks so silly. The mirror is there because whenever I'm seated at this desk, and I can see myself in these monitors, and I know that the monitors themselves are working properly, that's good. But it doesn't tell me if the camera is still recording because, again, I want two video files. I'll go over these in more detail here in just a minute. Want the camera internally to be recording, and I want this monitor to be recording, but I can't actually see if the camera has continued to record or not because it's buried behind the teleprompter. It's got a flip out screen, as you can see, but it's not visible and usable. Watch what happens. Whenever I turn on the camera, you can see the little flip out screen is pointed up. So when I'm sitting here at the desk, I can actually look right here into the mirror and see if the camera is still recording or not so handy. It's so silly, but it totally works. You can see whenever I hit record, I've got the little red box around the outside of the flippy screen, so I know yes, indeed, we are I show you the camera and ns combo, which isn't actually as important as it used to be, I want to show you this kind of combo because I think this is a bigger hack for your life and a bigger help for you than buying a more expensive camera or a fancier setup. The way that we have highest quality videos is through good lighting, good audio, and a good performance, a good production on our own end. So why the two monitors? Why all the crazy wires back here, and why is it worth going through the hassle and the headache of this complication? Well, the beautiful thing is that this is called A Ninja five recording Monitor. I personally have it plugged to another device that's also made by the same company that allows me to switch different screens and do different live streaming and stuff like that. But for the purpose of this video, we're going to only really talk about what this does as a recording monitor. It's an extremely powerful tool. It costs less than most lenses, especially full frame lenses, and yet it gives us such flexibility because what's happening is my camera is turned on, it's ready to record, but it's feeding out the video feed from the camera directly into the Ninja. Then whenever I turn the Ninja on and get it to ready to I can hit this record button and it will record the same video file as what's happening in the camera. You can also set it up to record audio files from the camera or from other sources, however you want to have it set up. But this way, I've got that redundant video recording session happening and it records this big SSD that plugs into the back here. You could also mount something like this on top of your camera if you wanted it to be either a larger monitor just to see things, or for me, you can have it set up as more of a production studio setup. But having the flexibility both to see yourself clearly because I obviously can't see myself here outside of looking in the mirror and having the extra video file is really huge. Then the video file goes out of the Ninja over into this extra monitor because as you can see, whenever I flip up my laptop screen, I'm getting ready to make a video here, I can't see the Ninja screen anymore. This way, I can verify with these guidelines here on the smaller screen, am I in the view or not? Am I centered? Am I off to a third? How do I want to position myself? How does that look? So this is the view that I get of myself whenever I'm filming a video. I can see really clearly, am I centered in the frame what else is happening in the kind of background behind me? Does anything look weird? Did I forget to clean something up? Did I shut the door? Is the curtain ready? Is everything set the way I want and like? And then, as I film, I can make sure everything is still looking good. Oh, look, I've got a crazy wild hair. Let's fix something, or I can look behind my shoulder and see if somebody's coming. Either way, it's super handy to have. And then this is the view of the Ninja itself. So right now I still have set up on that kind of switcher screen, because if you wanted to, you could have multiple different inputs like your computer screen, your iPad, another camera, things like that, and then switch through different scenes by pushing these different buttons. For me, I haven't been using it that way lately, so I just have it set up on this one main screen. And then whenever I want to record, boom, little record button, I get the red recording screen around the outside. It's very, very easy. Now, it's a cardinal rule of mine to not move this camera that's behind the teleprompter because it is set the way I want. Everything is right. It's all perfect. Why would you move something if it's perfect? But because I love you so much for being here, let's go ahead and pull it out and I'll show you everything the way it's set up and how it makes my life easy. The three ed into this camera whenever it's back here are number one, and most importantly, probably the dummy battery. This is the shape and size and connection of just a normal Fuji film battery, which is the kind of camera that I use, and it plugs in there telling the camera that it's got a battery in there, but it never runs out of power because it's plugged in all the time. Next is the HGI cable that goes into the Ninja recorder, which we just talked about. And then finally, an audio cable that comes from my audio recorder and gives the camera a signal. Here is my primary A camera. This is a Fuji film, XH twos, which is the more video focused camera that they have right now. It is an APSC sensor, so it's not a huge, fancy full frame Sony sensor. I think as of time of filming, the camera is about $2,000, 2,200, something like that. So it's expensive. It's professional, but it's not crazy expensive. I think cameras continue to get better and better. This is probably least important part of the equation in terms of getting a good image. I think generally the light in the lens is more important than the camera, but we'll talk about this camera and why I chose it. So I've been shooting with Fuji for a long time now, and so I'm comfortable with the system, the menus, how everything works. And this one was the most video focused camera whenever it first came out that Fuji film offered. It does have a little flippy screen, which is really nice because if you can see yourself while you're recording, then it's pretty handy. My teleprompter blocks that. But also the ports it has on here are professional. So I've got a full size HDMI, audio inport. You could do permanent power through the power charging door, but I've heard that you risk burning up the camera doing that. Hence, the use of the dummy battery that goes down to normal battery so as part of the feature of this camera that I love is it comes with the option to use this accessory fan. You have to buy it separately. But basically, this is a cooling fan that screws onto the back of the camera, and it's actually powered by the camera. So you can see this little contact here plugs into that little spot there, and it's a fan that actively draws air inside here and blows it out the back to give the back of the fan here where a lot of the processing power is happening a cooling effect, which makes it overheat way less. I haven't had it overheat, which again, then doesn't interrupt your recording time. To put it back on, we just hold it down on use little screws at the same time, get it nice and snug, and it's ready to go. The camera knows when the fan is installed, and you can also change some settings on there to have it just be blowing all the time. Or like me, I have it set on auto. Whenever started making videos and taking photos, I knew nothing about cameras, and so it's taken me years to figure out the look that I want and the settings that I want and to make everything just right in terms of my own opinion. And so I shoot with the camera on a pre saved manual mode. If you're just getting started, an automatic mode isn't the end of the world. I think that you can get by doing that. But once you learn the camera a little bit better and you know what you're looking for, you pretty much have to use a manual mode. And just for reference, I record in four K at 24 frames per second. Now, let's talk about the lens. Because the lens that you choose to make videos with determines so much. It changes the kind of feel of the video. It changes how it's cinematic or not. It really dictates so much whenever you've got a camera with an interchangeable lens system to pick the right lens. And this camera that I'm using to shoot this video with you and I here together with is using a 13 millimeter lens, which on a crop sensor camera is about 20 milli equivalent, which is extremely wide. Think about camera lenses like this. The smaller the number is, the wider out we're going. And then the larger the number is, the more we're zoomed in. Really going to compress everything into what looks like a telescope. Everything's going to be shoved together in that image and be really, really tight. Now, in the most basic sense, the way you choose the lens is you decide how close or how far away you are from the camera and what you want the look to be. If you have a very wide angle lens like this one, it's going to be a faraway perspective. Even though right now, we're probably 16 " apart, mean you in the camera lens, we're very close. It feels like I'm talking right up on your nose. It actually looks pretty far apart whenever you're watching the video. The opposite would be true if you use something like a 50 millimeter lens. You'd have to have the camera really far away because it's going to automatically zoom in so far on you. The beauty of that is that you get more natural separation between yourself and the background. So if you want that kind of picturesque, really blurred background look, you've really only got two options. You either use a very fast lens that has a very big aperture, something like an F 1.2 lens, F 1.4 lens, something that has a really big opening for light to come in that will then allow you to separate yourself from the background. Or you have to use a lens that has a big number associated with it, like a 50 milli lens or a 75 millimeter lens that will compress the background and separate you from the background. These are all personal preference things. There's no right or wrong answer here because as long as the video is communicating what you want to communicate, that's the critical thing. For me, I do want a little bit of that, blurred background look. But I also really like wide angle lenses. I don't know what it is about feeling Can sense the environment that someone is in. I think I really appreciate. I don't necessarily need to see, right up into your pores of your face. And I also like the fact that it feels a little bit more natural. Like, we're in the room together. You know, we're hanging out, and this is a natural field of view that you might see with me. And so I picked still what is a very wide lens, but slightly more narrowed in than the one I'm filming with here. So this is a 23 millimeter lens, and it has a very bright, big aperture. It's an F 1.4 aperture, which means it's capable of letting in a ton of wanted to do that. I want it to be letting in a lot of light. I want it to isolate me from the background behind me. And so I have it set at a pretty darn fast aperture, too. It's set at basically F 2.2. One of the side effects, though, whenever you open up a camera to let all the light possible inside of a lens or for me, a lot of the light possible is that you might then have too bright of an image. You have so much light coming in because you want the blurry background that now you have an exposure problem. Then you have two options. Turn down the lights so much that the room kind of feels dark, but the cameras brightening things up or you do what I did and put what's called an ND filter on the front of the lens. This is a variable ND filter, which means as I spin it, it changes how much or how little it actually darkens the light coming through the lens. It's like sunglasses for your lens. We're kind of getting into, like, video basics and what it means to operate a camera here. But that's okay. We'll dip our toe in the water just to make sure that this is clear on why I use the gear that I use. The long and the short of it is when you set things up this way, you aren't making compromises in other ways that make the image look worse. Because if you want to do something similar, you wanted to have a nice big bright aperture also separates you from the background. There's other ways that you can cheat your way through that. You don't have to use an expensive lens filter that goes on the end of your lens. You could do something like crank the shutter speed to be much faster. This is part of that whole equation when it comes to using a camera called the exposure triangle where you have ISO, your lens speed, and your shutter speed that all control how the exposure of your image is formed, so it's free to crank your shutter speed way up. Shutter speed is typically set to 148 or one 50th of a second because I'm filming in 24 frames per second. So that's kind of the rule of thumb. When you pick your video settings and you pick to shoot at 24 frames per second, let's say, you should double that to get your shutter speed. It makes the camera motion kind of look natural. It lets things blur whenever they move fast. It doesn't have everything frozen in space. So that could cut down on the light that we have that's excess light entering the lens, but it does make the motion look kind of strange and digital and unnatural. I'd rather things have a more cinematic movement to them than cheat in. Alternative would be also to just crank the lens aperture close and shoot at something like F four because the lights are pretty bright in here, so I don't actually need this much light. What if I just shot at F four? Well, then what you're doing is you're closing down the blades of the aperture and you're making just this tiny little pinhole where the light can come through, which means it's not going to give you the same kind of boca, that background separation where the background is blurry and you're nice and sharp. And so it kind of ruins that look for me. Why would I have bought a fast lens if I wasn't going to use it? And so my goal with this was to get a very consistent repeat cinematic, classic kind of look that doesn't look too digital. It looks pleasing to the eye. It looks nice and sharp, and it accomplishes the mission of communicating clearly, because really what I'm doing whenever I make videos is sitting in front of the camera and communicating an idea. It's not too artsy and too crazy where I need to do something any fancier than this and get into crazier lenses or fancier filming techniques. But I also want it to feel premium. There's nothing wrong with shooting videos using your cell phone or a much cheaper camera than this because overall this setup is right around $3,200, by the time you factor in all the bits and bobs that go into it. And $3,200 is a lot of money. So if you had a cheaper camera, you can accomplish a similar thing. I just wouldn't feel quite as nice and quite as premium as this. But that's absolutely a matter of preference and your interpretation of the kind of message you want to communicate. And as camera technology gets better going forward, it's less and less important to buy big heavy expensive gear. Granted, this is just an APSC camera, so you can spend way more. You could spend $6,000 on the body of the camera and $3,000 on the lens, and you could get really, really crazy and have a tend $12,000 setup before you know it. So in a way, I've gone less crazy than a lot of people do. But as these smaller cameras keep coming out with bigger and bigger sensor, can get by with a lot less. So one thing I want to really communicate, even though I've shown you all this stuff and all the crazy things in the studio is that you don't have to have a tremendous amount of money spent and gear installed to get a decent looking video. Worst case scenario, you set up your phone, you face towards a window, you get a microphone that's close to your mouth and you're set to start. Or better yet, maybe you go outside and you sit at sunset or golden hour or blue hour you go on a walk and you talk to the camera that way, talk to your phone that way. And you get beautiful cinematic lighting. You get the ambience of the place that you're in, and you get a little bit of an exciting, random roll of the dice of what's going to happen in the background. You know, something interesting could happen while you're recording, and that adds to the allure and the interests of your video. For me, I think the biggest hack that allowed me to go from producing one or two videos a month to four or five videos a week was getting a consistent setup, though. So even if you can only afford a small camera or just using your phone, get a light, get a consistent microphone kind of setup, and have a place where you go and sit to record I think that repeatability and that lack of having to fiddle with settings every single time that you record, re remembering everything, every time you record really cuts down on production time. 7. My Sub-1 Minute Studio Setup: Before we get into the next section and I show you what post production looks like as far as taking the recorded media out of the camera and the audio recorder and putting that in the computer and actually doing stuff with it, I want to show you what the overall setup process looks like for me to walk in the door, sit down, and begin making a video. I'm proud of how good it looks and how fast that overall process is, so I want to show you what's possible. Alright. Let's get ready. Start the timer now. Come with me this way. We got to turn on the main lights. Costing me time. And ready to go? How long was that? Too long. 8. Edit Like A Pro: 5 Tips: Alright, now let's talk about post production. What happens after you've recorded a video, and how do you make it into something that's actually worth watching as quickly and as easily as possible? I'll show you everything from the way that I transfer everything into SSDs and how I use those backup drives to make my life easier, how I actually edit the different programs I use and the tricks that I found. It's way simpler than that probably sounds. That description sounds kind of complicated. It's really not. The trick is to stay organized and find the tools that are right for the job, and you can get done editing faster than you ever dreamed. Let's record a little seion of a video here to use as a test edit. Come along for the ride. Let's make a little video. Hey, I'm Brendan, and you're watching this test footage to show what it looks like to make a video. I and you're watching this test footage to show what it looks like to make a video. In real time, we're going to record some audio here. We're going to record some video, and I'll show you a few things that will make your post production life a whole lot easier. I didn't say this yet, but I do use a Mac computer for editing. I had to learn how to use a MAC to even learn how to edit videos because I was originally editing on an iPad or my phone because people and everything they mess up what they want to say. They'll clap. Or they'll snap their fingers a couple of times, so it's really easy to see in the actual sound wave form where they've messed up and how they've kind of recuperated from there. I don't personally do that because I find that I can just watch the video through and cut that section out, but we're going to keep going here. So I was originally editing on my phone and on my iPad because I bought a little editing program that's called Lumafusion It's like 20 bucks. I think now they might be a membership, but at the time, they were just a flat fee. And so I would take the video footage, transfer it to my phone, edit it on my phone or on an iPad, and then export it from there and upload it to YouTube or whatever platform you're using. Then over time, I saved up enough money to buy a MacBook Pro, and it's been totally amazing, and I've got way more powerful editing tools through using Final Cup Pro, which is a real professional full size video editing software. The other major editing software out there is Premiere Pro, or in more recent years, it's become more and more popular to use DaVinci Resolve. Divinci Resolve is like a pro level colorist tool. And ironically, despite that professionalism, it's also got a free version. So if you're coming from, let's say, you've got some kind of computer already and you want to use a real video editing software, Resolve has a free version that you could totally use to make videos now. And then if it's worth it to you, buy a license and get the full version. But if you were having to completely learn from scratch and you're really into, let's say, color. You wanted a lot of powerful color editing tools, and you're willing to learn more than the average person. I think DaVinci Resolve is really awesome. I went with Final Cut Pro because I feel like it's powerful enough to do everything that I want to do, but it's also easier to learn than something like DaVinci Resolve. Was. Maybe not everybody thinks that way, but I think that way. Typically in these little periods there where I take a break and take a breath and maybe cough, you'll see the audio waveform gets really low because I'm not talking. Those are pretty obvious times when you know that you need to cut something out. You can even get familiar enough with just looking at an audio waveform to see the volume level of what's happening in the microphone to know what's happening when you recorded the video. Think it's useful to edit immediately after you record because you still remember stuff like that. Like, Oh, yeah, I cough three times. That sucked. I had to cut that out, and, you kind of can see that happening as you look at the video file after we're all done. But I've used Final Cup Pro now for three, four years, and I think it's totally fantastic. No regrets. Absolutely love it. If you want some extra little tools and plugins in things, you can buy some stuff, but they also update it every year or two, and so you get more and more features added in there. So I found that the things I've held off on and not bought have oftentimes been added for free afterwards. And the beautiful Final Cut Pro and aventi Resolve is that they are one time purchases. The ridiculous, silly thing about the Adobe Suite of creative tools like Premiere Pro, which is a big video editing platform, is you have to pay every month to continue to use them. I think that's ridiculous. I don't like that. I want to pay for something once and use it forever. So I'll get off my soap box on the video editing software you can use, but for now, that's what I use. And probably forever. I can't see myself changing anytime soon. So I can see as I record this video, not only are my notes up here in the teleprompter, which is great. I can verify that this is recording. I can verify by looking up in my mirror that that camera is recording. And then as I record and have a little break in between each section, I can look down at my audio recorder here and see, not only do I have a little red light, but I've also got the waveforms appearing for both channels. So this is one microphone channel. This is the other one. They're both happening. Everything's good. Part of this test video, I'll explain to you why I have three or four different SSDs laying around on the desk and I'll hooked up like a big octopus with all these wires everywhere. For me, it's all about organization and keeping things really clean. I have one SSD that is the backup catch all for everything that's not work related, if you will. It's personal projects, it's side work that I'm doing for companies. It's everything but my core video production work. That's this one drive. I have another drive that is strictly and on B Roll. So it's like my library of sound effects and music and B Roll footage that either I've shot or I've downloaded from places like Story Blocks or different sources online that you can pay for a membership, and you're able to download, like, picture of someone chopping an onion, and you just download, like, a little video file for that. All of that lives on this one drive. So when it comes to editing, I have everything that I need in a library of stuff to search for all in one place. That I own it safely because I paid for it or I've made it myself. And so I can repeatedly use that stuff, or I can have a consistency in my look and in the things that I use, and it's all organized. I just picture it like having different shelves. I've got different shelves up on the wall that hold lenses or cameras or gear or whatever. I have different shelves in my mind of storage SSDs that accomplish different purposes. The third SSD I have is one that I edit off of. And one of the things that you will come to find if you don't already know is when you're editing video, end up using a lot of storage. The video files themselves are large. The editing files can be very large. Then after you're done with it, do you keep everything? Do you get rid of some stuff? Do you store it forever? What happens if the video platform you're using goes down in the future? Do you lose all this hard work that you've made? Really, for me, it's about keeping it consistent and organized, having enough backed up to where I know that I've got I want going forward in the future. But I don't keep literally every single clip I've ever recorded because then people end up with, like, huge crazy storage systems that I don't really personally think is worth it. I just keep the final product to the end video file after it's all the way done. After I've done everything I want to do with it as far as using it online, and it's probably been three to six months after that and I know I'm done with it. Then I'll come back through and I'll delete all the different clips and effects and things that I've used that I've saved on this drive just to clear up space, just to give myself a little bit more room. If you don't do that, if you don't manage your data appropriately, you're going to end up needing 20, 30, 50 terabytes of storage, pretty quickly because it just takes up a lot of space. It's only shooting relatively small video files. Depending on the settings that you have on your camera when you set it up, you can have tremendous video files. If you're shooting in eight K, if you're shooting in really high bit rates, which means lots of information packed in there as far as the visuals of the file go. If you're shooting in raw formats, if you've got a camera that can shoot raw, it is obscene how much data you need and how much space you need for that. So for me, I try and strike that balance between what looks really good, what's a file that has enough data baked in that I can actually adjust things in it and make it look the way I want to a degree while keeping it absolutely as minimal as possible. Me, this is one of the huge advances that have been made in recent times as far as video production goes because we've got new file formats that we never had ten plus years ago. When I first started doing videos six, seven years ago now, really the only format that cameras could shoot in was called h264. And so it was a compressed format, and it was easy for computers to work on, but it took up a lot of space. Then as things changed as computers got better, as cameras got better, this new format came out called h265. You might also hear it called HEVC. The beautiful thing about this format is it's a much, much smaller file size than h264 was. Notice I said was really no one's using that anymore. Harder on your computer system to edit, but it retained a ton of information in the visuals of the video file itself. So it gave you enough flexibility to make some edits and color adjust and brighten it or darken it or whatever you wanted to do without ruining the file. So it was huge percentages of video file space saved by switching to h265 as long as your computer could handle it. When Apple came out with their M one line of chips, was really the turning point for a lot of people that made it possible to edit with h265 formats. Before then, the way computers work, the way their graphics cards and everything played nicely together, it could do the old format, but it couldn't do the new one. Now, as long as you have a new enough computer or something that has this kind of processing power in it, you can totally shoot on h265 all day long. You can edit it easily. It's not difficult. And here's a point of contention I have. Whenever people talk about editing in pros production, and they say, Oh, my computer can handle it or it can't. One thing I never understood before I is what does that mean? What does it mean when your computer can or can't handle something? What happens? How do you know if it can handle it or not? Well, in practice, what that meant was I actually had bought the previous generation before I came out, before the Apple Silicon chips came out, and it enabled the use of that kind of video file. I had bought the previous generation of Macbook Pro. I had it for a week, and I tried to edit with it. And the thing that happens is you put your video file in there because you put your little SD card in, and you just try and watch the video. You don't try and do anything fancy just literally see, like, did it work? Is it playing back what I thought I recorded? And it can barely even play the video file. It stutters around, it jumps. It has a hard time even playing it. And then if you try and color correct things, or you try and add some text on top or you add some sound effects or some other footage or you start to get more complicated in your edit, it completely just, burns down your computer and your computer doesn't work because it could freeze the whole program. It could only play back like one or two frames per second because it's working so hard. It's like, Burt, Burt, Brett, that's my impersonation of playing back one frame per second. It's impossible to edit because you can't see what's happening. People used to have a bunch of workarounds. They used to have to create proxies and do all these crazy things to make their editing process possible. And now the fact that computers have gotten so good, they've caught up with the complexity and the depth of the video files we get from our cameras, that means that you don't have to go through all that rigmarole anymore. It's very simple nowadays. As long as you have a good enough computer or a good enough tablet, they can edit things well, typically good enough means very expensive, high graphics performance, high capability, then all you do is plug in the memory card and get to editing. Now we've done enough recording here to give us a kind of video file that we can start working with and create an example of post production with. So we're going to stop the recording and I'll show you the whole post production process that simplifies your life. I'll tell you a realistic timeframe as far as how long this whole process takes because sometimes whenever you make a video and you kind of cut and chop things, then maybe what took me an hour can look like it only took a minute, but I'll actually show you what time it is right now. It's 1:37 P.M. And we'll stop the video here, and then I'll show you the whole process, and we'll compare the time afterwards to see how long that whole process took. Okay, read what this looks like for me with these different elements of the video process is, I stop recording on the Ninja. I turn off this other monitor because I'm done with it. We don't need it. I stop recording on the external audio recorder, turn that baby off, pop out the memory card. Audio is ready. Then I can turn off the Ninja because we're done with that. I can turn off the teleprompter. We're done with that, unplug the HTMI for it, turn off the camera, grab the memory card out of it, we should be ready to go. Now, both of the audio files are going to be on this little microSD card. Right now, only the camera recorded onto this. If I need the backup version of this video file, all I have to do is rip out this SSD, plug it in, and we're good there. But I always start with this one because it's a little bit easier to use. And so we'll see if it's all on here, if everything worked. If it didn't, for some reason broke or the camera turned off or something, we've got the backup. Okay, let's get going. The recording media that your camera uses will vary depending on what you're using. In a phone or whatever, it's just internal. The memory is inside the actual phone itself. But when you're using a camera, it's got to record onto some media. This particular card is called a CF Express type B card. All you need to know is it can record a lot of information very quick because the camera manufacturers understand if they're feeding a certain amount of data into the memory card system, they might overwhelm something like a little SD card. You might have to switch to different recording media depending on the camera you're using or the settings you choose for that camera. I find that the data transfer speeds are really just for when you're recording, but also whenever you're transferring files over. I really like that. Speaking of all the data transfers and stuff, one of the reasons why I also use SSDs is because to pay for internal memory upgrades on an Apple computer are ridiculous, like borderline criminal. The way you get around having to pay exorbitant fees to get two or three or 4 terabytes inside of a computer like this is you just buy an SSD for 100 bucks or 200 bucks or something like that. You plug it in, your life is much easier. The reason I have this monstrosity with all these different cables and stuff behind my desk because all these separate SSDs feed into that one device. That one device has one cable that goes into the computer. Opens up all my ports as much as possible, which is really nice so then I can plug in whatever else I need to. Now we're going to look at the video file first. We're going to get this thrown into the laptop to what we're working with. I'll do a screen recording of the laptop for you so you can see exactly everything that I'm doing how and why. You can see over here on the far left side my different SSDs. I've got three different SSDs. Then I have the new little memory card that I just plugged in, so I'm going to click on that. I'm going to go into the camera files and see the stuff that I just recorded today for you. This bigger one, this more recent one, I know is the one that we're talking about here 22 gigabytes. We're going to do a Control C to copy it. I'm going to go into my editing drive. The way that I set up my editing is I start a new little folder for every video that I make. So, in this case, I'm going to start a new folder. Whoops. I hit Paste instead. We're going to paste right now because I accidentally hit Paste. But what I was going to say is we're going to start a new folder and call it example editing footage or something like that for this particular video that you're watching, put everything in there that I will need for editing that video. Because whenever it comes time to actually edit, what I want is the video files, the audio files screen recording, any media possible that's going to go into making that video into a thing, I want in one place. If you end up having to look a bunch of different places to put together these video files, it becomes kind of hectic. It becomes a problem for your video editing software oftentimes. And so this way, everything goes in one drawer, if you will, in one folder. I kind of think of them as, you know, mentally in my mind. I think about like a physical location where I've put a bunch of stuff in it, like the time that we've talked there, we've got about 10 seconds left to transfer all that data, super fast transfer speeds. Absolutely love that. It's really annoying whenever you don't have that because you might hit paste and then you sit here for 20 minutes or an hour or something for your video file to move. It's really enlightening and amazing to happen that quickly. All the video files here now. Now we're going to hit New folder. Today is the ninth. I put the date because I want everything to be chronologically organized. Example editing footage. We're going to take what we just shot, drag it into there. I missed it the first time. It's there. Then we also need to get the audio in there. We can eject this we're done with it, safely eject your media always. Protect yourself. Don't corrupt your media. That would be bad. If we plug this in, it's going to appear right down here. I've named it Zoom F three because that's the name of this particular device. I can see chronologically the date that I've modified all these recordings. These are from past videos. Then today, I recorded these two things with you because I've got two different files for two different microphones, and then you cuts an audio file, it transfers over in 5 seconds. Superfast. Have enough now to be dangerous and to start editing. One little practice I have that I think is really important for you to consider adopting is to create a system of knowing whether or not you have put cards back in your devices. Have you put a card in the camera or not? Are you ready to record or not? Have you put a card back in your audio recorder or not? For me, what I like to do, maybe it seems illogical, I like to put the memory card always back in the recorder. It's in there, it's ready to go. Another funny practice I have, though, is making sure I don't put the memory card back in the camera because before I start recording, I'll often open this back up and make sure that I have enough space on this to record whatever length video is I'm going to make. Today, because what we've been doing together is quite long, I need a lot of space on the card that's in that camera, but if it was on this card, I would need a lot of space. I might pop it in here, go through and I've got enough space I'll just go ahead and record a short video. Or oh, no, I need a lot of space. Let me delete it now before I reach over and put it back in the camera because by the time I sit down with the lights on and the microphone running and everything ready to go, I want to make sure I can execute on the plan, which is make the video. I don't want to run out of media in the middle of a shoot of a recording. That would be bad. It's even worse if you don't see that it's happened. Like your camera just shuts off or stop recording, and then you find out 30 minutes later you've been talking to no one. That's a big bummer. So for me, it's a weird mental checks and balances that that makes sense to me to put this in here. It makes sense to me to not put that back in the camera yet because I want to verify it first. Everything else goes back in my little drawer here on the desk. I shut the drawer and I'm ready however, that makes sense to you, to make sure that you have recording media ready to go in the places that you needed to be, create some kind of routine around that that makes sense in your own mind. I will save you hours of headaches. Alright, so now what we've got in the computer is the video file, which has audio, technically, but it doesn't sound very good. Watch. Looks like a phone, glasses, drink of water. Fine audio. It's not the best. So what I prefer to do then is come in here and pick one of these audio tracks and sync it to the video file. If you use Final Cut Pro or another program that does that automatically for you, it's tremendously easy. But let's go through this process together so you can see. If you've never seen video editing before, this is going to look like the NASA Space Center control station to you. But it's really not as difficult as it seems. This isn't a video today that I'm making with you to show you how to edit. The goal is to show you how to expedite the process. So what I want to do is show you the means at which you can use the same process regardless of the editing software you're using because I think that's the biggest takeaway and that's the way that helps the most if you're doing Final Cut Pro, you'll follow along with me step by step. But even if you don't, you can do most of these things, and it's going to save you a ton of time and energy. With Final Cut Pro in particular, you have to have a file structure here whenever you edit that seems very arbitrary to me. I don't know why they do it this way, but you have to have an editing library where everything has to go into. So it's not just like it's on the computer already. Can't we just start editing? No, no, they want you to have a library. So I particularly choose to have one library per YouTube channel that I have per quarter of the year. So you notice the title I've chosen is ir quarter 2025 library. Then I've made all these different videos inside here. And inside that library, this particular program forces you to create a new event. Today was an event. We made this video together. We will start a new event. We file new event, and we're going to name it 1925 example Edit footage. One thing I didn't show you there that's important whenever you're editing. I know I promised this wasn't how to edit video, but here we are. In basically any video editing software that you're going to use, you have to choose the environment that you're editing in. Even though, this was a very illogical though we already shot the video in four K at 24 frames per second, that doesn't necessarily transfer over immediately into your video editing software. You can still choose to do something different than what you shot. Seems kind of strange if you're a beginner. Seems like why would you ever do that? Like, why are we even choosing another thing? Why is there one more thing to figure out. But there are times at which you might want to manipulate the format a little bit. For one thing, you might manipulate the format because maybe you want to make a vertical video. Maybe you're making something for social media. You can make the format of your editing file vertical right off the bat. That's pretty cool. Obviously, we're sticking with a four K format in four K resolution with the frame rate that I've chosen, 24 frames per second. I know it says 23.98, but that's basically 24 and all this other stuff, we just let it be automatic. There's a good chance your video editing software just chooses this stuff automatically based on what you give it, which I think is ideal for most of us for anybody who's doing this at home, especially for a beginner, if I plug something into the computer, I want it to just match it automatically. I don't need to make that choice. But just so you know, this is a thing that you may have to choose, try and record it in the same format, the same frame rate, make your life easy so that then when you come in you've picked the thing that you want. Really, what we're doing whenever we're choosing this video editing environment is what I called it is you are setting up the way the output of the video is going to be. If I record something, let's say in the camera at only ten ADP because I want to save some file space or because the camera overheats, if I record in four K. So my hack is like, let's just do it in 1080. But I still want to give the social media platforms or give the end result in four K, you can cheat the system a little bit. No, I want to edit in four K. I want this thing to be done in four K whenever I'm finished editing it and baking it like a cake. So just put it in four K form. That way, it'll come out as four K. You're not technically increasing the quality at all, but everything that's stored as far as information with the file will be four K. Probably too much information there, depending on what you're looking for, but I didn't want to skip over that screen and not explain what we're doing there. All right, so a simple recap of what we've done so far. Taken the video file and the audio file and put it into an SSD in one little folder. So I've created a little lovely basket, and I've said, video file, audio file. You two together will be my ingredients to the cake that I'm baking, which is the video, whenever it's all said and done. Then we've opened up our video editing software. We've made a new spot for us to edit here. I Final Cut Pro, they call that a library, and then an event within the library. And then there's a project within the event. I think, in theory, let's say you were filming something like an event like a birthday. Maybe you'd have different projects within the birthday. Like, here's us planning the birthday, and then here's us doing the birthday party, and here's us cleaning. Know, I don't know why there's so many levels to this. If it was me, it'd be like one level, but that's how they've organized it. I think if you had a really complex video that you were making, it'd be nice to have different kind of sections there. But for me, it's totally overkill. Now, you notice, we've got no video files. We've got no audio files. We've got nothing here. How do we get this stuff in here and actually start editing? Well, it doesn't know that it has access to the video and audio files yet. I'm making this into a video editing tutor. Sorry about that. We're going too deep. The process we're trying to do here is expedite everything. So what you need to learn is some keyboard shortcuts for your video editing. Whatever that looks like for Premiere Pro Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, all that stuff. You've got to learn some keyboard shortcuts cause even if you don't know them all, it's nice to know some of them. I've memorized a handful of them. The one I probably use the most often is Command I, which is import because what we need to do is take those video files from the SSD, import them into Final Cut Pro to say, these are what we're editing. These are the things we're going to manipulate in here and give you access to so we can change them. So now it's got to find the right SSD. We've got to find the right file or folder. I picked the whole thing because I want all the audio and video together. I hit Enter, and we've brought that all in here. And it's automatically divided it up into audio files and video files. You have to manually sync your audio and video together, then you can bring down your video file into the timeline. The timeline is where we edit, and you could bring down the audio file into the timeline, and you could try and match them up. You can look at the waveforms, little audio going up and down and just try and pick peaks and valleys that match. You probably get pretty close. I didn't say this yet, but I do use amc. Not quite. We're close, but we're not quite right. I didn't say this yet. I didn't keep fighting with it until it is. I didn't say yet, I use Ac edding? I got to learn. That's pretty good. If you did that, then you'd want to mute the video track because you think that separate audio is better than the video tracks. You don't want them both playing at the same time. You want one or the other. Pretty clean, pretty good so far. We don't want to do that. I'm going to select all this, delete it. We're not doing that because you can do that automatically. Here's a big time saver. With Final Cup Pro with some other programs, you pick the audio track you want, you pick the video track you want. You just highlight those two. Then for me, I right click for you if you're using a different editing program, it might be a different process. But I've selected them both, and I do synchronized clips. Now it says, Would you like to rename this clip, which I typically don't. Also, would you like to disable audio components on automatically mute the video clip for us. So it's only taking that nice clean audio that we recorded separately through the big fancy Marshmallow mice Marshmallow Mike. We hit Okay. Now, it's doing all that work to perfectly synchronize them, to make sure they're perfectly in line. Everything works well. We hit E, another keyboard shortcut to get it at the end of our timeline, which is all the timeline right now. It's the only thing we have in there. And boom, we're ready to one audio file, it totally sinks. It's amazing. So that's time saver number one is automatically sync your audio in video files. Time saver number two is to create presets for yourself. Now, my goal is still to create as little presets as possible. I want the camera to shoot in such a way with the right setting, with the right lighting, with the look that I want that I'm doing zero visual editing whatsoever. Most of the time that's true for me. Sometimes if I get too much or too little light in through the window, it's weird or maybe I did change a setting on accident. It looks a little bit weird. So like, in this case, maybe I want to be a tiny bit brighter. I can come in and adjust the lighting a little bit, make it a little bit brighter by and large, I want to do no editing. One way that I haven't found to get perfectly finished product yet is with sound. With both audio and video, you can create presets to just slap on there and go from your starting point to your ending point with pre saved settings. I don't typically need to do that with the visuals, but I always need to do that with the audio. For me, I've got a preset that I've made over time that's set up that has multiple different audio adjustments in it. It makes it a little bit louder, it adds a compressor, it does a few different things to the audio that I think sounds good, that I've learned through watching way too many hours of tutorials, reading about audio, learning about audio. Over time getting to the point where I think I can hear what better audio sounds like. And all I have to do now is drag that onto my timeline, which is the whole entire video file. We haven't cut anything. We haven't separated anything yet. We're doing these corrections now first. We put that on there, and it's automatically applying all of the audio presets that I've chosen in the past. Equalizer, gain, compressor, all that jazz. It's going to sound really loud because I have the volume up all the way. Yeah, Brendan and you're watching this test footage turn it down a little bit. What it looks like to make a video. In real time, we're going to record some audio sounds great. So step number two is to do presets. Set number three now is huge. For anybody who's out there who records themself, who wants to remove any of the gaps, any of the awkward coughing and silences and things that happen whenever we're recording ourselves talking, this next step is clutch. What we're going to do is export this file as if it was done as if we were going to just publish this to wherever we're going to publish it to. So I'm going to export a four K file. I'm going to export it right back into that same folder that we started with the example editing footage folder, and I'm going to call it example edit to recut. Because the next hack, hack number three is a program that I found called recut which removes the silences from your videos, and it Chef's kiss so incredibly helpful. Because what happens is, if you've got a big long audio file like this, it's a 15 minute long file, 15 minutes and 18 seconds. A lot of that time is me recovering from coughing or sitting and thinking or drinking from a bottle of water, and that makes for a terrible video. We want to cut out all of that BS. The problem is, it can take a lot of time to call that out, especially if maybe you're not that good of an audio presenter yet. You've got some pauses in your speech. You do some umming and g and some thinking and pausing and it just sounds bad. Let's just call it what it is. It sounds bad. The way that we get around that is by using a program like Recut which, again, is a one time purchase. You buy it, you use it forever. Always works. It's very easy. And I've used it I don't even know how many times now. Probably three or 400 times. And every time I'm happy that I've used it because it saves me so much time. If you don't use a program like recut that automatically will remove the silence from your videos, it's pretty ridiculous how many cuts you might make. I recently made a video that was about a two hour long recording without editing. When I put it into recut and it went through and cut out all the silences, it was over 1,600 cuts that it had made. So initially, before I had found that program, I went through and manually, went through and looked at the waveform and cut out all the silences and sometimes moved my words a little closer together to make it sound a little bit better. I did all that by hand to go back through here and start making cuts every little waveform jump. And cut out every little silence by hand is a ridiculously arduous process. It would take me probably 4 hours to cut through a normal length video. So, had it been that video that was 2 hours to cut through, it probably would have been eight to 10 hours of work just cutting out silences. Recut does that in seconds. I know it sounds like I'm like, in a recut ad right now, but I'm really. Editing is so manually intensive anyway, that to do something as menial as cutting out silences is not worth doing. I know there are other services that do it, too. I think there's some online based kind of video editing software, AI programs that you can upload your video to, and it will cut out both silences and Us and ums. I still kind of like the fact that recut is simple enough to not cut out any audio because for me, I still want to choose maybe I want to leave a little bit of in between words in there because I've chosen to set it up that way, I don't want to rely on a system to choose for me because I like having that control, and our videos done exporting. So let me show you exactly what that looks like to use recut. We're going to open recut. It looks like this whenever you first open it. It also does screen 9. The Best Way To Export Videos: Say the video is finished. We've done everything we've wanted to do. We've added the effects and the color and things that we've intended to do here. How do we finish streamlining this process? Well, for me, whenever I'm done, I'm going to export it and again, put it right back in that same file folder system where it started from. That same example editing thing. And the way that I like to have a moniker that I know which of these files is the finished one is I always start with an underscore so that the file name is all the way at the very top because typically our computer sort things by file names. I've got an underscore and then version one because sometimes need to do multiple versions. It's an unfortunate reality, but maybe your computer messed up and it didn't edit everything you want. Like, it left something out or it got something corrupted or whatever. Or maybe you found out that you made some mistakes that you overlooked in the edit. In any case, this is my first go through of this video. It's my V one, my version one. Then I create some reference to what the actual video is. So my edit example, and we export that. We wait for this baby to export, and then we can watch it through. I'm at the point now where most of my videos are only ever a V. I'm careful in the edit and I know it's going to look like. But the wisest thing for you to do, especially if you're in the beginning of this process, is to export A version one and then send it somewhere else. Get away from where you are, get away from the computer or the tablet or something. If you can put it on your phone or your TV, wait a couple hours, maybe a whole day, and watch it there. It will be like a different video to you. It'll be a new experience. But doing that and changing your environment, giving yourself a little bit of time, and rewatching it in a different format helps you to see more clearly awkwardness that you might have, the cringiness that I probably have, any mistakes that you make, the fact that maybe you put some text up on the screen, but you only flashed it there for a half a second. And even though in the edit, you thought it was long enough, turns out it's not really long enough. Could you read that if you didn't know what it said? Does it make sense to you? Is the audio actually all messed up because maybe you added some music and it's way too loud. You can't hear yourself talk now or you can't hear the sound of the music that you're supposed to be recording or I don't know, whatever your videos about. It's important to have the right context. And granted, you can have someone else watch the video, too. But if you don't have that person in your life or maybe you don't want to have that person be volunteered to watch the video for you and point wrong edits or anything that's awkward, then doing that yourself is a way to kind of expedite the quality process. The problem is, for me, and I think for a lot of people, oftentimes, you've gotten to this point and you've worked so hard and it's such a relief to hit Export. You're like, Yes, I'm done. Let's export this thing. Let's start to get those results. Let's watch what the video view numbers are online, whenever I put it up or whenever I deliver it to the client or whatever the process is that you're using this video for. And we're so excited to move on that we don't do another check through and another walk through. And I can't express why it doesn't help you as much to just watch it back in the video editor because we could just sit here and hit play, and we could watch everything that we did and see it on the screen, and it would be technically the same thing. But the results that you get from watching it back in a different environment are probably twice as much as watching it back within the editor. Just a strange trick of human psychology. Plus, maybe it helps too, to not see the timeline to not see the edits that you make coming up because you're a little bit more of an honest first time viewer or an honest client in that way that you are surprised when something changes or something happens instead knowing your own thought process. So now whenever this is done being exported, what it looks like in our little file organization system is we've got everything all in one place, and I know some people will add more folders inside of this folder. Like, they might have a folder that says audio, another folder that says video, another folder that says sound effects, another folder that says music. They have everything kind of broken out even inside of that. I only really do that if it is a really big, intensive editing project. Like, if it's over an hour long video, if there's a lot of different elements, if there's a lot of supporting media that I need to import to make the video possible, then I think it's worth it to kind of segment it out like that and have your system organized within the file. But for me, typically for most videos, this is enough because what do I need whenever I come back to this? I probably just need to find the final edited example because that's my V one, the finished product. What's that look like? We can get in here and start watching that and go Hey, is this what we're looking for or not? You know, is this really the finished product? Is it great? Does it suck? Let's watch through it? Or maybe if it's just absolute hot trash, we want to start over. Maybe I want to find the recut file or the recut version of the XML, something like that because I want to re edit it. That's an option. And what it looks like if you need to, I'm going to export another version of it just so you can see what it looks like whenever you have to have multiple versions of a finished product in here. So I'll do V two, edit example. Then whenever we go back into our folder system, we can see, Okay, there was our first try V one. There's our second try V two. We probably want to end up using the V two version. If I was going to clean this up over time, I know that all I really need to save is whatever the latest version is. Like if it's six months from now and I go, I don't need these files anymore, I don't need the basic audio file and the first unedited video file and the recut version and the recut XML, all this extra data that I'm storing for essentially no reason at that point, I come through here, I select everything I don't want, and I just delete it. Boom, move to trash, very easy. It's all gone. I've saved a bunch of space. This way, you're left with just what in the end, at least for me, that's all I need. Because I'm not making a feature film. I don't need to come back in there and find all the individual bits and pieces two years later. And also, that's the reason why I have something like my B roll folder. Because if I needed B roll for the middle of the edit, then I can come in here, do a Control E, pick my Broll SSD, take the B roll that I need. Let's say it's a sound effect of a horse galloping, import that into the project. We can put that or post production and it's in there, I don't have to have all of the media for that particular video in the one file that we have set up because for me, frankly, I don't need to pull it off of this other SSD. It's already there. It's already organized. Because of my SSD system, I don't need to make 10,000 folders dictating each media inside this one. That can be a personal preference thing. The takeaway here, maybe that's hack number six or a previous hack but continued, have some organization system that makes sense to you. Where your media is coming from when it goes into a video edit. Because if you don't do that, your life is going to be full of headaches. What happens is if you delete an element of a video edit while you're still editing it here, the video editor is searching for it because you gave it a place where it was, and if you move it, rename it, delete it, then it can no longer edit that piece of media. You have to keep it all in the same place while you're editing. Only when you're done editing you get rid of something like that, otherwise, it's stuck searching for it and it will just not work. It can't edit that. It's like you've removed an ingredient out of the cake, and now the cake is missing the salt or whatever the sugar. You can't have a cake without sugar. It's like, Hey, I've got a big black hole here. I don't have that audio file or that video file you told me to edit. It's gone. And so it will basically be an incomplete edit, or the video editor might just shut down and be like, Sorry, dude. I can't edit this file. I'm out of here. Burn not so having some kind of organization system prevents those kind of problems from happening, know where your files are, know where they're going to and coming from, and just keep that routine consistent. Whatever it is you pick, if it's files and folders on the computer itself, if you use SSDs like I do, keep it organized. Because then when you run into problems, too, or run into errors that you might make, which we all do, you know where to track down your steps. You know, it's like when you lose your keys or your phone, you're like, Where did I have my phone last? I had it in the car. Then I came inside and I didn't have it, and you go back and look in the car. When you have a file organization system like this, you know where to go looking if things go wrong. Here that. I did my little file cleanup thing, like I was showing you. I deleted the extra files before I was done with the video. What a rookie mistake. It was a total accident. I overlooked the fact that I was still working on the video. I deleted everything, but the final version, but it wasn't the final version. It was like a preliminary export that I had done. Why did I do it that way? Kind of a goofy thing. I was also working with a client. The client essentially asked for me to add some instead of having this very malleable, editable timeline to work with, I didn't have any of the original files. I didn't have any of the recut files. I had nothing except for the final version, and I had to go through and try and edit that. And so that was a much trickier thing for me. But because I had my system, I was able to track things down, work backwards, and still make it work and deliver it, and no one was the wiser. It was totally fine. So all these things are probably a little daunting at first. It feels like a lot, developing a system. Where do you put files? How do you learn how to use the camera and the computer and all these things. But as long as you find a system that works for you, it's going to totally save your life. 10. Your Endless Idea Factory: Let's talk about how to plan, ideate, script, otherwise, prepare for making videos in a way that perpetuates the idea process that makes sure that you never run out of ideas. Things are always fresh and you're always on the lookout for the next video that you can make because most of us have a certain output that we wish we could make, whether that's for clients or for social media use, whatever your goal is in the end, we've got to actually get these videos done and have the idea behind it be good enough that it's worth making. I started here at the desk to show you this is not primarily where I ideate. For me, the juices flow better when I'm outside, when I'm out in the world. Sometimes at night, sometimes in the shower. And so sitting here at a desk probably seems like the way that we can ideate the best. And if I'm going to actually sit down and hammer out a big long script, yes, I want a full keyboard. But by and large, we don't do that here. Sometimes our best ideas come elsewhere, and that's why we need a system to capture the ideas, one that can go with us elsewhere. So first, I'll show you my ideation system and how I can capture ideas no matter where I am in the world, to make sure that they're all organized and findable and prioritized in the proper way. And then we'll get into kind of how to do that in the most productive way. Just because you have an idea doesn't mean it's able to be made into a video quickly. But if you use my system, then it. System that I use for this is notion, partially because it works on a computer just as well as it works on a phone or a tablet, it's also extremely powerful and customizable. I think of notion like Excel but for words. You can create templates for yourself. You can build yourself the program of your dreams to check all the boxes that you need and look the way you need it to look to be as productive as possible for you. Granted, there's a little bit of a learning curve there, but you're here because you're not afraid to learn. You're taking this class, you're watching these videos because you're not afraid to learn. You're learning about cameras and editing and everything else, because that stuff doesn't scare you. You realize the end result will be effort. It's so fun to be able to express yourself creatively. And so we need a little bit of structure to help us to actually accomplish that. The other benefit of something like Notion is it's really an all in one place for all of your video ideas and scripting and templating and performing. I know some people will use something like a notebook or they'll use, like, a really basic Notes app in their phone, and that seems fine on the surface. But the problem is, when you don't have a template of things that you want to maintain as far as quality levels or maybe a quality deliverable to your audience, you might miss that. And then also, you can't necessarily translate that to making your filming, recording production life easier. Everything that I have here lives in notion, and it can be on my phone, it can be here, then I can immediately put that on my teleprompter and go. What I wrote sitting on the toilet in my phone, thinking about some video idea can 5 seconds later be on my teleprompter screen and being made into a video. On the same process, there's no copying and pasting and formatting and no, no, no, as quick and as simple and as smooth as possible is what helps us to produce better and more videos. A digital approach may not be for everybody. If you have to map things out on a whiteboard, if you want to measure things and tactile feel what it looks like to process something together, I can get behind that. I totally understand and I relate with you because it's very satisfying to do it that way. And for me, even though it is more satisfying to use paper and pen and rulers and graphically think things out and develop images for it, this is the way that creates the most production for me. So that's why I've chosen this. I won't be heartbroken if you don't use notion, if you don't template your system, if you don't do things digitally, even though those are all important hacks to make this happen, but I will be heartbroken if you don't use some kind of got to have some kind of repeatable idea capturing system that helps you to deliver on your ideas because otherwise things just get lost. So for my main YouTube channel, this is my ideation system. I call it hopwood carry water because there's that kind of adage that says, Before enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water. I think for me, it's a reminder that says, when we very first start, we've got to stick to the fundamentals that make us successful. Then even after we become successful, much better at what we're doing, the fundamentals don't really change. We are better at them, but the processes remain constant, and it's just a simple reminder to keep going, keep focusing on those basic. Built this whole system in Notion loosely based off of a couple other people's templates that I've seen. If you Google something like Notion video template and YouTube or other social media platforms, I'm sure you'll find a bunch of other examples that you can kind of go off of. But for me, I've taken several different ones, probably three different ones, four different ones, and I've customized them all to make sense for me. So this is kind of my home view because frankly, this is the most important way that I can view this information, and that's a simple list where I have the kind of basic title of the video or the idea behind the video. That's the first thing I see. The next thing that I focus on is the priority behind it. And so for me, prioritizing the videos that I think I like the most or the ones that I think people were going to resonate with the most is the most important or if there's actually a deadline behind it, Oh, I've got to make this video by Valentine's Day. Maybe it's a video all about Valentine's Day and what people do and how they spend money or something. I don't know. Then if Valentine's Day is coming up, then I'm going to bump up this priority number to be as high as possible. For me, 15 is the highest priority that I have. Zero is obviously the lowest. But this way, anytime that I'm making a new video idea, I simply choose a priority number and it helps it to auto sort in my list here. So when it comes time to sit down and make a video, even if I'm not red hot and fired up about making something in particular, I can sit down and open this and go, Okay, priority wise, that's the video I should make next. Let's jump into it. Boom, there's no question about it. I can get right to work and everything happens as quickly as possible. I like to have a percent written as far as how far along the video idea is because sometimes I've got a priority level 15 video, but I've got a 0% written. And what that tells me is, I really want to do this, but I've essentially done nothing for it, or maybe it's 20% written. So I have the idea, maybe a little direction, but nothing else. And so I know there's some work behind the keyboard to be done before I'm actually ready to film. If I've 80, 90, 100% written video in here. Then I know I can basically sit down and start recording right away. That way, it communicates to me instantly, am I ready or not. If we start a new video idea, we start to see the real power behind using Notion for this because it reminds us of the template that we really need and we've chosen to follow over time. I think templating is one of the biggest hacks you can do when it comes to video this is the 7.1 version of my video template from fir quarter of 2024. I've had tons of iterations through this thing. But for me, we're going to call this example video notion. Now, I have a bunch of what's called properties down here below. You don't necessarily have to have so many ways to sort the information that you're writing when it comes to a video. These have come and gone over time. Sometimes I add or remove a few, but the constants that are there are really the priority and the percent written. I feel like that helps me to know how far along a video is and how ready it is to film as quickly as possible. To recommend any properties, it would be to have some way to sort your information by those two things. So right now, let's say this is a high level video, and we're just starting to write it, so it's 10% written. Then whenever we scroll down, everything else that you see down here is a template that I have made with important qualities of the video or ways that I want to communicate to the audience that are consistent in every video. These are all reminders to me of how I want the video to be structured, of things that I want to accomplish, things I want to include, processes of the video production that I need to check off before we keep going. I've made a copy of this template actually available to you. So if you want to start from here, use my exact template and then go and create your own from there. By all means, start here, make a copy of it. I'll go into your own notion, and then you have this framework to go off of and create your own template system. For me, I like to have a source or an inspiration from where something comes from. Maybe it could be a conversation with a friend. Maybe it came from an article, in which case, I would post the URL here and link it, so I knew where it came from. Maybe it was something on red it or somewhere else where I can clearly source where this idea came from, why I'm inspired to do it. It could be my own idea. So I link that there. And then one of the best practices as far as making online videos go is to immediately start ideating what the title looks like, and if you can choose the thumbnail what the thumbnail these are promise to the audience. These are deliverable to them that entices them to come and spend their time with us. These are the most important thing. It's really easy to skip over this. I oftentimes do skip over this. But if I wanted to make a really intriguing video, it doesn't matter unless people know that it's intriguing, unless the idea gives them a reason to click on the video. In a very cheesy examply way, I could say, best idea ever, video or best Let's pretend like this is a standalone video that we're making right now. Best video production system ever or save hours making videos with this system or how to use notion to make faster videos. That's sort of the topic of what we're talking about now. So if this was a pretend standalone video that I was going to put online, those are some potential idle ideas I could go through. I also have a character counter in here because apparently by the numbers, a shorter title typically performs better as long as the idea is concise and specific for people. It's got to be intriguing, concise, very specific and give them a promise of what they expect to be delivered. And so under 70 characters, I've heard is a pretty ideal range, so I have a character counter here that says, How many characters are in this all these are well under 70. They're pretty concise. They're very short. They're not like, how do you know if your production system is the best one for you today in 2025, that's going to get cut off, it's too long, it's too long winded, like I am. Is helps me to be concise. In the thumbnail, I like to have a few ideas of what a thumbnail could be. Maybe I could have me sitting with laptop. Whoa, me sitting with laptop, green showing notion or me pointing to my watch saying you'll save time or me holding a camera and laptop looking happy maybe left side, right side, a before, after. Left side, sad, confused, holding camera and paper, right side, happy, holding camera and laptop, showing notion. This way, whenever it comes to designing a thumbnail or even if you're really smart, you'll design the thumbnail now at this point, if you've got the option to make a thumbnail. Because what that does is it helps you to really strategize what your video is going to be about. When you've created the packaging first to this is what I'm promising my audience. How do I then execute on that promise in a way that's full of integrity that will make them feel really satisfied after they watch? Developing a title and a thumbnail that go together that makes sense, that's intriguing for the audience, and then making the video that follows up on all those promises and executes them really well is like Chef's kiss best practice Makes the most sense. Now, once we want to get into the video and actually start making something that's intriguing for someone to watch, the most important sentence in the video is the hook because you have seconds to promise someone something and also deliver on what they've already been promised. The title on thumbnail is promise number one. So the hook needs to say, not only are you going to get what you thought you were going to get here, but also let me hook you a little bit more. Let me do one of these methods that helps you to realize that not only is this an interesting video, but you have to figure out what's going to happen in this video because it's intriguing to you. So there's different options of ways that you can tap into somebody's intrigue. You can tap into their core fear. This is like a little drop down example box. You know, for me, I make personal finance videos oftentimes, and so it's are you concerned about your financial future? Are you set up to retire early? What about the high cost of college education? You know, What's a fear people have around money? Another angle on the hook is, do you want to hear something completely insane? Because typically, as long as someone doesn't think that you're insane, they do. That's kind of an interesting opener. I agree with my notes here. You just have to be careful because it actually needs to be insane. You can't be like, Do you want to hear something completely insane? Saving and investing money is good. And it's like, yeah, dude, of course. Like, everyone knows that. That's not completely insane. You know, you have to really follow up on that promise. Hook number three is similar. Can I tell you a secret? The possibility there is that you actually open up with somebody and you share something that's intriguing, that's a little bit vulnerable that feels like you're taking them on a little tiny, short storytelling journey that grasps them and makes them realize that, Hey, this guy is actually worth my time. I've clicked on the right video. He's gonna execute on what he promised, and he's gonna tell me this cool story. Another version of a hook is why is nobody talking about this, which is probably not true. Like, people probably are talking about it. That's why they clicked on the video. But hence the effectiveness of the hook, you're going to relate to them and go, Yeah, why is anybody talking about that? You could open a loop by saying something in kind of interesting way. It could be an analogy that you want to talk about in the video, but it could also be something totally random. Like, imagine a city where gravity is optional, and you can float at will, and people are like, What? What is he talking about? Like, even stopping the scroll and stopping the immediate sense of, can I get out of this and into something else by making them just imagine a silly city for a minute might be enough to keep them around. It's really just about buying the first five or 10 seconds of the video person's time. If they're watching that and they're willing to stay for more than five or 10 seconds, odds are they're willing to stay for potentially minutes. And then my personal last example is, this is why you this is why you can't focus. This is why you keep getting rejected. This is why you look so tired. You're presenting them with their own problem of shoved in their face to say, Let's talk about this and let's try and fix this together. Now, these examples make sense for me because of the videos that I make. But the important thing in here is that you prioritize the hook. For me, having this be in big green text that's obvious that makes me really think about it says, I need to have a hook because my temptation is to just start talking about the video. I think the topic is worth talking about, but I'll often overlook the importance of the hook and not realize that I need to spend more time and energy on communicating the importance of that thing and grabbing someone's attention. So this is prioritized for me. And really, part of the hook is confirming the click. That's why I have this sticker over here so I can see am I going to confirm the click or not. But it's saying, Can I reassure you that you have come to the right place that I am going to solve the problem you have today or I am going to execute on the promise. Maybe you're doing fishing videos, and you claim in the title and thumbnail that you're fishing off of Niagara Falls because of the photo click on the video and you're fishing in the pond in your backyard. Well, that doesn't make sense. It seems like he promised one thing and delivered on a separate thing. And so maybe that's really confusing to them. But if you immediately say, In this video, I'm going to show you the difference between fishing in a pond versus fishing at Niagara Falls and what different gear you need to have to fish inside of the biggest waterfall in this state or whatever your promise is. Then they're going to go, Okay, it makes sense. I'm here for it. He's confirming what he has promised me, and let's go find out. At least for me in my niche, it's important to give somebody a little bit of assurance that you are who you say you are. Maybe you can do that by showing something. Like if you're the fisherman example, maybe you getting out your gear and showing you cast or something else is going to say, Oh, yeah, he knows what he's doing. I can trust this guy he casts better than me. Maybe for me, Hey, I'm Brendan. I've been studying personal finance for a long time. My wife and I became millionaires last year, yada yada yada. But somehow just exert that you belong in this place. I don't think it's important to give a big long rant and be like, you know, I've been fishing for 46 years. And when I started, it's like, they didn't come for that. But just make it apparent that you're someone worth listening to. It's part of the three act structure. What we should have been doing here is setting up something that is a problem for us, something that is a question that we need answered in whatever kind of storytelling format that is for you. For me, sitting here at a desk looking into a teleprompter, maybe it's literally saying, how do we fix this problem with our finances? How do we figure out how to do X, Y, and Z? Because people aren't doing it and it's very difficult. What that regardless of your format, is it tees up the next act, which is the confrontation. So in any three act structure, you have kind of the hero's journey. You have somebody who is starting and wants something. They have a goal in their life. If that's for all of us, we've got a goal of health, wealth, and happiness or whatever it is. Maybe for you if you're the fishing channel, maybe you want to catch the biggest fish possible wherever you are. And maybe that's the conflict that you introduced in the beginning of the video. Then in the middle of the video, you might want to common fishing tactics that people think would actually help you. Well, let's test the top three things people say we'll catch bigger fish. I'll use that kind of lure, and I'll go out at sunrise. Then you test that out and you find out, oh, it's not actually helping me. Well, this really sucks. I'm very disappointed. It's the low point in the video of, well, somehow we have to solve this problem. Somehow, we've got to overcome this challenge and change and grow as people. And if we're following that three x structure, then then the goal is to reach a point of climax and say, Okay, now we're at peak level of challenge. We have done all this research to try and figure things out. Now let's go and try and win. So for me with personal finance videos, maybe, Hey, it's counterintuitive, but we should do this thing over here, or it's not popular, but the answer is that. Maybe for the fishing channel, it's like, Hey, I experimented with 50 different things. Here are the three that actually do work to help you catch the biggest fish in your area. And that's where we get into Act three, the conflict resolution, the climax, and the conclusion to say, Yeah, it's not what you think it is. It actually turns out to be this. We went through this journey to figure that out together, and here we are in the conclusion. As simple as that sounds, actually pretty difficult to do. And that's why I've kind of highlighted it here in these three acts. So I set up a challenge. I set up the conflict and I set up the resolution, so I remember to do that. That's part of the beauty of this whole templating system is you remember to hit these points that you want to hit. And it's almost annoying how important this three act structure is to us. Almost every good movie, story, book, anything you've ever heard of, has a three act structure. You know, dating back to something as simple as, like, the odyssey, to action movies, to romantic comedies, they all follow this structure. And it's evident when a movie doesn't follow that structure because you kind of feel lost in the middle of the movie or the book, you're like, What's happening here? Why do we care? What do they want? What's the challenge? What's the resolution? What does it mean? And you just sort of feel like it's pointless? This gives a real intentionality to the videos that you make. And as long as you do that in a way that brings the audience along and is clear to them what's happening, and you've really clearly laid out the stakes for them and the resolution, and you've helped them understand it along the way, then it's a great way to make videos that are impactful for people. For me, I've got these reminders here at the end. Whenever the video is done, I want to be reminded to thank people who have chosen to pay to be a member of my channel. I want to remember to show my own problems and flaws. I want to relate to people in a real way because I'm not just some expert who has all the answers and everything is right and I do everything perfect. That's not how it goes. I like to have a few little reminders here at the end to watch another video. Sometimes I'll mention my investing class that I made in case people want to dive deeper into how you invest. I could say something like, Hey, it's gotten really good reviews, check it out. And then that's the end of the template. And so what you do, regardless of where you are in the world, is you open this up on your phone, you open this up on your computer, and let's say you have that idea in the middle of the night, like, Oh, what if I did a video about fishing off Niagara Falls and how to catch the biggest fish. How can we do that? And you can start to ideate in here. And you can fill in some information here about fishing in Niagara Falls and what's the best lure? And is it illegal or not? You know, do you have to get a permit? And you start to fill out this information, and it doesn't matter if you start on your phone or on your computer or where you're doing it. But you can easily come in here and work on a chunk of that, have your idea and then leave. You can come out of it to the next day or the next week or whatever. Come right back, and you've got it prioritized properly at the top of your list. You know where it is. Maybe by now we're up to 20% because we've actually did a little bit more about our silly fishing on Niagara Falls idea. But this way, it's categorized and prioritize, and it's following the template and the structure that you've chosen of the things that you need in the video, and it stays perfectly organized. And then whenever it comes time to open this thing and actually film the video, you know what things you need to tap into and prioritize. Maybe you don't write out an entire script, but you realize, you know what? I do need to hook here. How do I hook somebody about this idea? What grasps their attention? And you can deliver that to the camera. Okay, then how do I tell them that we are in the right spot, that they've clicked on the video they think they have? Confirm them of that. Then how do I establish my credibility? Then how do I take them on this three at structure? It's just these little reminders to make sure that you're hitting the points that you want to hit. I realize that this template may not be the one you want to use. Maybe you make sewing videos, and so this seems like the complete opposite of the things you want in your template. The important thing is that you just use a template. I think Notion is a great place to host that because you're not having to redo your template every time, whenever I click New and I start a new video idea, it's all baked into it because I built it it by hand, you'd have to have a copy machine or something and make a bunch of copies of it or hand write out whatever the points are that you want to hit. It's much less productive than if you have something like this that's set up that's well thought out based on who you want to be online, what videos you want to make, how you want to come across. Then even if you want to, you can get more detailed and put in things like the writing date that you want to have this thing written by. Maybe I want to have it recorded by Saturday. Maybe I want to have it published by Tuesday and if I want to have a reminder even, then I can remind myself on the day of, Hey, I need to have it published. This can link in with your calendar system, with your phone, with all kinds of alarms and reminders and say, Hey, keep myself on schedule. If you really want a level of outside encouragement and accountability, you can build in more and more of that kind of stuff. Just like with our video files and our audio files and things that we have with our SSDs, I like to keep this organized, too. Let's say we've recorded the video, we've published it, everything is done with it. I make this little button here that says Click to publish. Whenever I click that, then it automatically marks the status as published. And when I go back to this first list in here, it has automatically been removed from this view of my database system. All of these different little categories here are different views within notion. So this one is my highest priority list, but these are things yet to film. Then if I wanted to see all the things I've already published, I can look at Total published. And these are all the things that I've already published, like that one that we just marked right now as published. So it's just a way to keep this idea station clean and separate from the already finished published station. You know, I don't want to get rid of all these ideas because maybe you do a bunch of research for some video, and you're like, Man, that one NiagaFallsFishing video I did back in 2025, I did all this research on types of lures for that kind of water in that kind of season. Do I need to redo all of that now? You just come into your notion, and you can search for whatever that video was. Like my example, video notion. Oh, there it is. Found it. Let's pull it up. Let's go back down here and look at our ideas and the research we did for that kind of fish. Boom, yet one more reason why digital trumps physical things because otherwise, you have a file cabinet full of your legal pads and your ideas and things written down. You know, this is the most powerful, the most repeatable, and the most accessible way for us to organize this kind of information and these ideas. 11. Posting To Social Media: Back-end Tips: Talk about some tricks to make the posting process easier. Whenever you're going to make a video and put it up online, which most of us are doing on social media platforms nowadays, how do we make that as expedited as possible? Because a lot of people think that video production is just you make a video and you kind of show yourself, and then you put it online, and that's it. What people don't realize is the back end of these social media platforms is actually a lot of work, too. You've got to choose a title and a thumbnail and hash tags and all this other stuff to make it into something that is professionally put together and delivered video to people. So what are a couple of ways that you can expedite that process, make it as fast and seamless as possible? Me. Here's the back end of one of my YouTube videos that I published recently. You can see there's a bunch of things we've got to fill out here. We've got to choose what to put in here, if anything, it can be labor intensive and annoying. One of the things they've done that can make that a little bit easier is sometimes they'll give you the option to duplicate some of the information that you've put in from previous videos, which I think is a very handy thing. But if your platform doesn't allow that or maybe you don't have that option, one way to get around that is to create something that you can copy and paste in here as a standard description starting point for you. Now, if you know YouTube in particular well, you know that you can actually build into the settings of your channel baseline description of every single video you upload, this will be the default that goes I think that's a good tool. There's inherent problems with it. Because what happens over time is things like links change if you want to have any links in your description. Maybe what you want to communicate changes. Maybe you used to put things like your email in the YouTube description and now you don't want to do that anymore. To go in and edit that in terms of the YouTube channel settings, I think is a lot clunkier than just editing a separate document that you have that's handy that you can do anything with that you want, and then just copy and paste whenever you make a new video. For me, I've got this YouTube description template. All it is is a Google Docs file and I put in here the basic format and the placing of where I want everything to be. For me, the first thing that I want at the top of my description is just some text about the video. Let's introduce it in an additional way. If somebody wants to click on the description and read something else, let's tee up what this video is about. Hopefully that helps to hook them and entice them to say, Yeah, this is the video I want to watch. Or at least I can save them some time if they find out this is not the video that I thought it was. Well, I just clarify that and save them a little bit of time. Next, I'll mention a few other things like some links companies that I might want to promote or my own investing class, things like that. Then a little further down maybe I've got general notes about watching YouTube videos, like, Hey, if I'm talking too slow, you can just change the playback speed and make it 1.5%. Sometimes I mentioned that for people. I also will put in a video timeline where I actually have time stamps because I will divide the video up into chapters automatically whenever you're using YouTube and people can click through and find the section of the video that they're looking for. Personally really appreciate that whenever I see, especially a long video. I'm like, Look, dude, I want to watch a third of this video. I don't want to ep forwarding through it and scrubbing back and forth and trying to find the area, just add chapters so that people can find the parts they're looking for. I think people appreciate it. I definitely appreciate it. I think it's worth it. It's up to you to decide, but I think it's worth doing. And that's obviously YouTube specific. It depends on where you're putting the video. I don't know if Facebook does that or TikTok or whatever the social media platforms are in the future that I don't know about yet, that maybe blown up. I just think the point of something like a description is to assist your viewer in enjoying the video as much as possible. If you mention something in the video, it's great to link it. If you can help them navigate through it with something like Chap great. If there's other ways that you want them to be able to contact you or other contexts that you think they need, put that all in. Nothing screams unprofessional like somebody who has nothing in the description or a one liner that says, Let's talk about fishing. It's clearly not well thought out. It's clearly not helping anybody. And so make the description as helpful as possible. Have it in a template like this so you can just copy and paste. I come through here, I highlight the whole thing. I come down, I do a Control C, come over to the video, do a Control V. Boom, done. Super easy. I'll change the first line or two, and I'm in and out in a few seconds. Tool that I think is really worth using is Canva. You can design thumbnails however you want. Maybe you're an artist and you can hand draw something and scan it and you become the thumbnail artist of the stars. However, you can do that is fine. For those of us who are not as graphically inclined and who don't want to pay a bunch of money for something like Photoshop or any of those other really hardcore drawing tools, after effects or whatever, what I find is that Canva is a great mix of powerful enough tools that help you to accomplish the purpose of making a thumbnail, but so easy to use. You can totally do it on your phone. You can obviously do it on your laptop or something else, too. But one of the things I like to do is to iterate within Canva itself. If you've never used Canva before, it's basically like graphic design for dummies. It's a really easy to use graphic design program, and you can immediately pick from their templates. Start with a YouTube thumbnail size because there's lots of different sizes of things. Maybe you're making business cards, that's a different size than YouTube thumbnail. Then you can just search for things that they have already made. You can generate stuff with AI here. If that's your style, you can import a photo. I've got a bunch of different uploads of things that I've either created or photos I've taken, maybe emblems of companies that you want to have in a thumbnail, have all your uploads in there, and then easy paste them together to make a pretty cohesive looking YouTube thumbnail. And then I like to kind of iterate on them. So I might make the first thumbnail here. And then if I want to change something and iterate off of it, then I just do duplicate page. So it's give me a duplicate copy of that thumbnail. Then I can manipulate however I want. Like maybe I want to flip this horizontally. Maybe I want to move that text over there. Maybe I want to put this text over here and I'll make it white. So I've got a totally different thumbnail in 5 seconds. And I love how easy Canva is to manipulate it's also really cool that you can look back to the home screen on Canva and see what all your past designs have been. So you can go, Okay, if I scroll way back down, you know, my thumbnail designs back here were so different than before, which really mine aren't that different. But maybe a year ago or six months ago, I was doing something here that was a little bit confusing. It's a little bit busy. I didn't totally love it, but it's kind of fine. And this one was decent. And you can kind of have an easy record of things, not only what you did, but then also if you come back and you're like, I really like that thumbnail. Just click right back into it and take off and start designing again from before. I don't know if there's any easier way to get professional looking graphics, A for free or B on multiple different devices. They do have a Canva P version, which technically I do pay for it because you get all of the tools and all of the different things that you can manipulate with. I don't think for the average person, that's super necessary, but I just think Canva is the fastest, easiest way to make thumbnails, to iterate thumbnails, to learn from what you've done in the past, to duplicate stuff. It's just super, super smooth. Be a thumbnail is such an important part of a deliverable for a video. Then also nowadays, YouTube will give you the option to Beta tests multiple different thumbnails at once. So it's wise to do multiple like three or six or nine different thumbnails, because you can upload three at a time, and it tests them for you to see what gives viewers the most satisfaction. What keeps them watching the longest. And really what that's judging is, did you promise something on the thumbnail that everybody then believes and wants to watch throughout the video? And so it ranks them for you and picks the best one for you. And then you can do another test after that, if you want, and keep iterating these thumbnails until you get one that's really, really effective. So it's really amazing they've built that in now. Different platforms will have different things. Maybe you have a thumbnail, maybe even don't. But if you can iterate on things like that and learn from that, then informs your thumbnail making the future, really, really good idea. 12. One Mistake That Will Make You Fail: Caution going forward whenever you're making videos, though, is it's very easy to get distracted in this process. For us to become effective at this, we've had to do a lot of research. We've had to learn a lot. We've watched videos like this. We've invested a lot of time and money to get as far as we've gotten. And at a certain point, that has to change. It's sort of like when you're dating, when you're in a relationship, the person who's dating has a very different kind of outlook and posture than somebody who's married. When you're married, you stop dating other people. You should continue dating your spouse. But I think mindset that you have of having your head on the swivel, maybe you're aware of single people around and whatever, all that stops because now you're in this mode of focusing on one person. Similarly, it's really easy to keep looking for tools and software and lenses and what's a better battery, is this a better memory card? And do I need to get more ego men in the background because people are going to maybe I need a bigger monitor because then I'll edit faster, and that will help me, we just get lost in the sauce. Get gear acquisition syndrome. We get gadget acquisition syndrome. We get software acquisition syndrome. And we had to go from nothing to something to get started. But I think pretty quickly, we need to be content to shut that off and realize that we are the weak link probably in our video production system. It's not so much about having the perfect camera and battery and memory card and lighting and everything else. We're really the ones that need to do the work on ourselves to make videos more effectively. And what does that look making more videos. That's why I wanted to make this series for you was to say, how do we actually output more videos? Because that's the best way we learn. We learn by repetition. Like me right now, I'm trying to get back into shape. I've got a road marathon I signed up for that's six weeks away. And what's the best way for me to get ready for a marathon? It's not learning about running and buying better shoes and researching aerodynamic hats? You know, it's going outside and running. It's keeping my body healthy, stretching, losing a couple pounds here and there, and just spending time on my feet. And that's what we need to do when it comes to making videos is spend time making the videos. Get a video done, actually put it out into the world, if that's your goal, finish something, and then start a new one and keep doing advice I heard online that's pretty common, but I think is very powerful is to make 100 videos. Don't come up for air until you've knocked out 100. Be for those of us that want to make video production a living, we have to have a certain level of acuity and expertise that only really comes from actually making the videos. You can't keep doing research all day. We can't keep shopping for the next best thing all day. I know I've exposed you to some of that today to show you the gear that I have and the software that I use and things like that because I don't want to hold anything back. I want to give you the most impactful things that I've done as far as things you can easily accomplish today. And that is stuff that I've shown you today. But things that take longer time than that is getting down to the hard work of it. So I challenge you today to sit down and make a video. Edit it, make it as good as you can, in a reasonable amount of time. Doesn't have to be perfect because they almost will never be perfect. And then hit Export and share it with at least somebody. Doesn't have to necessarily be the whole world to put it on social media, but share it with somebody and have that accomplishment of You know what? I made a video. I've made hundreds of videos by now, and in a fun little kind of tactile way, I still keep track of the videos that I've made and the number of videos that I've made, because for me, yes, I want to get a lot of views. Yes, I want to have an impact on the world. And yes, I want to get better at this craft. I want to be a better presenter and communicator and leader, but none of that happens if I'm not videos. The videos actually being out there in the world are my key performance indicator, my KPI. So this is the ultimate thing that I need to track most of all. Am I making the videos, or I making excuses? Am I shopping around? Am I wasting time? Or are we doing the key thing? If you see this and you do go ahead and make the video, then send it to me. Email it to me, post to my social media, whatever, say, Hey, I took the class. Here's the video that I made, and I will check it out because I'm proud of you that you've actually done the thing. Thank you for being here, and I'll see you soon. Bye.