Making a Video Course – Behind the Scenes | Hacker News Reader

Making a Video Course – Behind the Scenes

ifdattic.com

35 pointsifdattic8 comments

Constructive feedback for the author:

I would have broken the post into 2 parts or 2 separate posts.

The 1st half of your post is not specific to "video courses" and is generalized thoughts about working towards a goal, motivations, discipline, etc.

The 2nd half of the post that starts with the paragraph "Doing a video in a single swoop isn’t for me & it often ends in a big mess." ... is the material that's specific to how you produce video courses. Version control, Google Drive, organizing audio, etc.

Thanks. Agree that it might have been better as 2 posts, allowing people to choose which parts of it to read. This actually started as simple reflection on pen&paper with a cup of tea, so mostly just kept the same format.

"You could go on forever improving & polishing everything, but in the end you have to remember to just fucking ship it."

Words to live by.

Something I'm still struggling with :/

I'd appreciate any inside information on making professional looking videos on a limited budget.

I am making watch repair videos, but they I want them to be better.

I have been using a iPhone camera with satisfactory results. I mainly, just need a consistent close up view of the movement, while I instruct students on watch repair.

I know watch repair is a niche market. From what I have gathered, only a few guys have made money selling watch repair videos. They don't look like they very successful. They are also old, and outdated. Most are still working on pocket watches.

I know there's a lot of free videos on YouTube, but they are hit, and miss. I'm planning on a course, or a few courses. I paid $100 for videos, a few years ago, but they were dated, and very amateurish.

So--if anyone has done any videos, what was you process? Was it a waste of time? Did you make any money? I'll appreciate any constructive advice.

I recently made a video course "Elixir for Beginners" on Udemy https://www.udemy.com/elixir-for-beginners It was a real learning processes and I can identify with the author of this post... you really get the imposter syndrome.

The process I finally settled on was: 1. read various books, and make notes on the topic for a particular video. 2. break the notes down into bullet points, I used the TaskPaper app, for this and highly recommend it. 3. make an intro slide and do a head shot video talking about the points in this video. I found doing this unscripted gave a more natural feel. 4. then record the content of the lecture, this in my case was a screen video of me writing code. I found that if I was talking at the sametime I made too many mistakes. 5. I then edit this content and remove the typos and errors. 6. record the voice over for the video. - this was quite slow I would use the bullet points to talk about what was happening on the screen. - I found I would record a 5/10 seconds of voice over and then position it within the video so that it would make sense. - there was a lot of editing to get the video and voice to match up nicely.

My course style evolved over a few months but I'm happy with the approach, although some of the earlier videos make me cringe a bit.

As for equipment, I bought a studio kit from amazon on black friday, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Excelvan-Photography-Continuous-Back...

I also bought a logitech C920 usb camera... not that happy with it as using a mac I also needed to change the webcam settings with another app.

Finally I used a Samson CO1U condenser mic, which was excellent: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samson-CO1U-Pro-Microphone-Headphone...

I haven't made much money out of the videos, even though I have around 1680 students. The nature of online courses is that it is very "coupon" based and you need to constantly push and repackage it.

Would I do it again... yep... am building a new course as we speak. Good luck

Thanks for sharing, might come in handy.

Doing it for the money is the losing battle. At least you're self publishing it and have full control over it, and do well with marketing. Otherwise it's better spending that time working on client projects. But personally did it for the experience. It was a really nice challenge and the best way to learn something is by teaching :)

I don't make these sorts of videos for money but I'll say that there are probably better cameras you could consider using. For "fiddly" stuff I use my DSLR with an appropriate lens and set it on a tripod, pointing down at whatever I'm working on and manually focus before recording.

So many times I watch Youtube demos/reviews/tutorials where people have to hold their hand up behind some small object to "trick" their autofocusing phone camera or webcam to focus at the correct distance. Using a better camera (doesn't even need to be a DSLR, just something with a semblance of control over focus and aperture) makes a huge difference in getting good footage, especially when dealing with macro-type photography or videography.

Even if you have a passable point-and-shoot camera with video capability laying around, it would be an improvement over a phone camera. Those are great for general photography and video clips and it's amazing how good they have gotten but they often lack control.

The other main thing is audio. Using a laptop's built-in mic or a phone/camera mic will never sound as good as a decent dedicated mic with the right pickup pattern. Put simply, those built-in mics are meant to pick up everything all around them, including laptop fan noise, HVAC, cars on the street, etc. Sure, you can clean it up somewhat in post-production with noise reduction software but that also takes time and removes some of the vocal range, leading to audio that can sound tinny, warbly, or with noticeable artifacts depending on how much noise you need to remove. Using even an affordable USB mic with a cardioid pickup pattern (picks up sound right around the front of the mic but not behind it or way out away from it) will ensure you pick up your voice and not much ambient noise. All this means less time spent cleaning up audio and better sounding narration.

It may be easiest to shoot the video (remember good lighting), perhaps do rough audio narration for reference and to help with your timing, and then once you've edited all of the video clips together in your editing software, record a voice-over with your good mic. You can re-do as many times as you need and it's easier to do a retake of an audio segment without it being noticeable in the finished project than it is to do the same with video while avoiding jump cuts and overuse of transitions.

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