I’ve been delaying on writing this post, not sure why. But anyway, here goes.
Learnings
- Live screen recording with audio
- Getting better at DaVinci Resolve editing
- Handling narration audio track
- Cutting/trimming/speeding up non-essential parts
- Microsoft Designer for creating the title card for the tutorial video
Accomplishments
Created two videos today, one is the morning green tea lofi video, and the other is the "Behind the Scene"/"Making of" video. The second video takes about 30 minutes to record, and 2 hours to edit. Kind of wish I have the DR Studio version where it would cut the video based on the transcriptions without having to do it manually, but gotta work with what I have.
Green tea video
Tutorial video
Making of (Behind the scene) video
This is the first time I’m doing a "Behind the scene" video. Took longer than expected but it was very fun.
Inspirations
There are several inspirations for this video:
- I noticed that when I’m editing the video alone, I sometimes would talk out loud and try to explain what I’m doing to an empty room. Then I thought, hmm, why not just record it and post it.
- I couldn’t sleep last night (because I napped too long during the day) so I was up and thinking of what I want to do today and this was one of the ideas. Sounds like a good idea since it’s better than writing everything down like I have originally planned.
- After making the fireplace video yesterday, I want to try out different effects, and thought that a steaming cup of tea would be nice (and I was drinking tea)!
And with that, I set out to create my first tutorial video.
The video was unscripted, but I have a rough idea of what I wanted to present. I knew the scene I want to create (a cup of green tea) and the song to use (coincidentally found a song named "Green Tea" by the same musician).
Microphone
I started out by testing the microphone on the laptops, they sounded okay, but I wanted something better. I remember that I have a Rode microphone for my cameras with a 3.5mm jack. I was excited to try it out, but then realized that it is not compatible with the Macs since they use the 3 rings input instead. So I settle for the microphone on the monitor, which is pretty decent because it has "Three studio-quality microphones".
Live recording
This is the first time I actually done any kind of recording of myself talking/presenting. Well, I guess that’s not quite true since I have done it many times at work. But outside of work, it is definitely the first time. I actually feel pretty comfortable, I guess all those experience from works paid off!
I used the default recording tool on the Mac (Command + Shift + 5), and use Options to also record the audio.
I won’t go into details of what was going on in the recording, since everything is posted in the BTS video. But to recap, getting the right image was the part that took the most time, surprisingly. I guess my prompt was not too descriptive, and that I have a very specific image in mind that I want to recreate. The animation was fast, easy, and accurate. I was very happy with the generated steam and it took just 2 tries. The output animation reminded me of this tea cup shot that I took in the past:
Finishing the lofi video was quick once I have the animation. I couldn’t get it to transition seamlessly so it has a jump cut every few seconds, but it matches well with the beats in the song, so I left it like that.
Tutorial editing
Now comes the part that’s new to me: editing myself. First thing I notice is that my voice is pretty soft and can be hard to understand at times. I guess I should have re-record some parts to make it clearer. Regardless, I think I did okay for the first try. The editing took about 2 hours, mostly from finding the right segments and speeding up the unnecessary ones. It was pretty cool since this is the first time I edit a narration. I normally only work with background music, and not voices.
Other than that, it’s pretty straightforward.
Title card
When watching other tutorial videos, I remember also seeing some title card with the graphics to grab people’s attention. So I tried to create the same for my video. I started by using Canva, but it seemed a bit complicated for some reasons. Then I remember the Microsoft Designer tool that can do something similar (with the power of AI!). So I gave that a try. It was a pretty good site and easy to use UX. There was some weird bug when exporting, but other than that, it’s a solid tool to generating graphics.
BTS of the BTS
While editing the video, the sun decided to come out and lit up the desk, making the space look nice and warm. Here’s what it looked like (with my own cup of tea on the side):
Follow ups
- Make a Youtube Shorts video of the tutorial
- Improve today’s tea video to have seamless transition
- Create a short tutorial on how to make it
- Have better voice
- Maybe do voice over instead of live audio capture
Thoughts
- It was kinda cool that I was able to make a video on the spot, without any scripts or (heavy) preparations
- It was cool that the idea just came to me and I was able to execute and make it happen on the same day
- A bit sad that the video only has a few views
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