The main channel was the “Recorded Live” series, which was basically livecoding with me thinking out loud. That didn’t require any real prep, as I had enough experience with a previous livecoding show that it came out pretty well. The main thing I did was edit out pauses and gaps while I was thinking so that it flowed nicely. I would also announce a pause when I needed to go research something (which was fairly common) and edit a “fade to black” into the video.

The “Lessons Learned” channel was more elaborate. The video at objectplayground.com [1] is my most popular example. For those, I would make slides and animations in Keynote, then record while playing the slides. I had an outline, but not a script, as I felt that made the narration less stilted. Sometimes that resulted in minor mistakes going into the video. For more serious ones, I would record a new line and edit it into the video.

In all cases, I would edit out pauses, and if I misspoke or stumbled over my words, I’d just repeat myself and edit out the mistake. I got pretty good at editing—because there was no video of my face, I could make cuts that were basically invisible. My livecoding videos each had hundreds of cuts, typically just half a second or so. It would take a 20 minute recording down to a 15 minute final video. It took about 4 minutes of editing per minute of final video.

[1] The video on objectplayground.com isn’t showing up on my phone for some reason. You can find it here instead:

http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/comments/lessons_learne...