MATT CUTTS: Hey everybody.
We have a slightly different webmaster video for you today.
Right as we were in the middle of taping webmaster videos,
we were also keeping an eye on Twitter.
And we got a question from Richard Hornsby.
And Richard asked, someday could you do video
on the process of shooting videos?
As a small and medium business owner,
seems like your workflow would be great model to follow.
I totally agree, and it's wonderful
because all I have to do is talk and Wysz
does all the actual work.
So Wysz, what kind of equipment do you
use whenever we film these videos?
WYSZ: Yeah, sure I can maybe talk about what we have right now.
And it certainly might be interesting to talk
about how it's evolved over time.
But it's been pretty constant in the basics in that we have--
we have a camera on a tripod.
The camera can really be whatever
you're comfortable with within your budget and even
your skill level.
So you probably don't want to get a super advanced camera
if you don't, you know you're not a video professional.
Right?
You're a business owner in some other field,
but you want to do some videos.
And so in a lot of cases, you can do something
with just a standard camcorder.
MATT CUTTS: Yeah, or even a flip or something.
WYSZ: Yeah, a flip camera or even your phone.
A lot of those shoot HD video now.
And then there's a couple of things
that you can do that would bring you just to the point
that you're higher than what the average person would do.
Most people don't think about lighting, right?
They'll walk into a room and just shoot the video as is.
I guess there's like three steps you can do.
One is get a tripod.
So then you get rid of the shaky zoomy stuff.
Set your frame, just don't zoom in or out during the shot.
Just compose it like you're composing a photograph,
and you're already better than most stuff
that you'll see on a videos site like YouTube.
MATT CUTTS: Holding it up, doing this all the way through?
WYSZ: Yeah, exactly.
And then the other thing that you can do is--
or the next thing that you can do-- is the lighting.
Right now we have three lights in here,
but in the early days before we had lights for these,
I would just book a conference room that had a window in it.
Because I knew that it had natural light.
I think we shot the first webmaster videos in this room,
and so we just had the window behind us facing you
for the light.
MATT CUTTS: That worked very well.
WYSZ: Yeah, and it's a very-- that's
where you get the best lighting, is naturally.
Since then, we've brought in just a couple
of smaller lights.
One's just sitting on the table and the other
is sitting on a chair in the conference room.
So nothing fancy.
Just coming from a couple of different angles.
So you have your tripod, and you have your lighting,
and then the final thing that almost no one really
thinks about, is getting good sound.
If you've ever tried to listen to--
maybe you've seen a small business put out a video--
and you can tell that they've taken a lot of time
to put it together, but you're kind of struggling to hear.
That's pretty frustrating as a user.
So if you can-- first of all just
make sure you're in a quiet space-- but if you can,
actually get an external microphone
and hook it up to your camera.
You can get those at Radio Shack or Best Buy,
there's a lot of inexpensive models, search around online.
Then your production value is just so much better.
MATT CUTTS: Yeah, you're automatically
a head and shoulders above everybody else.
WYSZ: Yeah, exactly.
MATT CUTTS: That make sense.
Now how about your workflow?
So you've got a raw video file in some file format.
How do you get it ready for YouTube?
What tools do you use, all that sort of stuff?
WYSZ: I have a Mac at my desk with-- I use Final Cut Pro.
So I think that's $300 now.
And that used to be like $1,000 program or something like that.
So it's actually relatively inexpensive for what you get.
We just import in, up right off the SD card there.
It's an MPEG file, and what I've done
is basically created a template.
And so what's nice about Matt's videos is that it's very--
MATT CUTTS: Very predictable.
WYSZ: --It's very standard format.
It's a question and answer.
Which is good if you want to do videos.
You don't have to think through, OK
what's our script every single time?
And what we want to get across?
So maybe you have a monthly series
that you do as a business owner, where you're
talking about recent work that you've done
or something like that.
So that way you can-- it's easier for you
to set up the framework for what your content is going to be.
MATT CUTTS: That makes a lot of sense.
And then the actual uploading process?
How is that done?
WYSZ: That's just going to YouTube.com
and clicking on the Upload button.
And we try to use a descriptive title, and a good description,
and that's where we'll put in any links
to additional context.
And we also use the tags as well,
and we get them captioned.
So people who can't hear, or want
to read it in a different language,
I can do that as well.
So it's just a few little tricks that you
can do to bump up the production values,
so you're better than the average video.
And you can go crazy with it, but I was mentioning Final Cut,
iMovie is free, and for what we do-- even the types of videos
that you're watching right now-- that can actually
be done in iMovie as well.
MATT CUTTS: That makes sense.
OK It's funny because we have done low-production values
and we've done high-production values.
The very first videos I ever recorded were in my home.
I got some really hot lights and I was sweating-- argh--
and then we've done all the way up to the studio at Google.
But that costs money, and they want to add make-up,
and you've got to get reservations, and all that.
So we're actually kind of back down to the low-fi.
We can knock out a bunch of videos in one day.
All we need is a conference room without a big heavy air
conditioning sound.
That plus a few simple software tools and YouTube, and you're
good to go.
WYSZ: Yeah, yeah.
It's great to keep it lightweight.
We spend more time researching the questions
and focusing on the content now, and not so much
on the tweaking the lights and all that kind of stuff.
MATT CUTTS: Yeah.
You need to decide whether you want
to go for super polished-- in which case
you've got to make sure you got the good audio and all
that stuff-- but even informal can work pretty well.
Because we normally do these webmaster videos in one take.
If there's a horrible, horrible thing
I say wrong then we'll do it in two takes.
For the first time ever I think we
had a three taker earlier today.
And it was-- I made mistakes in the first 10 seconds
each time, like saying somebody's name wrong.
But otherwise, they're pretty easy to just throw up.
Throw up on YouTube, not throw up in general.
Awesome.
OK, Wysz thanks very much for the tips
on how to make good videos.
WYSZ: Thanks.
MATT CUTTS: Cool.