John: Hey, this is John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a bit of a question today about how I do things.
This is a meta question.
If you don’t know, I do a lot of screen casting or at least I have which is creating
online video courses for companies like Pluralsight.
I’ve actually done 55 courses, online developer training courses for Pluralsight.
I did 30 of those courses in 1-year time frame.
It’s actually something like if you were to watch my videos on Pluralsight you could
watch for an entire week straight, like nonstop of watching my videos.
That’s how much I recorded in about 2-years time period.
I’ve done a lot of that plus I’ve done my own courses as well.
This question is related to how am I able to do that, what is my process.
I don’t hold anything back so I’m going to give you what I do and give you the basics
of it.
I thought about doing this as a screen cast itself and showing you the tools and stuff,
but I figured you could probably fill in the gaps and I’ll put some links to some of
the tools.
If you need more info, if this isn’t clear enough maybe I’ll do a follow up video,
but this is meant to be a general overview of this.
I’ll read the email or summarize it here and then we’ll go into the details.
This email says, “Hey John, how are you doing?
I just love to read your blog and listen to your advice.
You’re one of my mentors who spend so much teaching us all what we know.”
Well thank you, I appreciate that.
“I have one request.
I see you do great videos on YouTube and also have so many courses on Pluralsight.
Kindly show us how to record a screen cast so that we can share it on YouTube.
I have absolutely no idea about how to get started, what equipment and workflows to use.
If you can kindly show us how you do your videos it would be fantastic, also some people
advice that we should record and code, be doing the recording and coding the sound separately
and later merge them.
I do not understand how it can be done.
Can you please shed some light on how you can possibly match your screen code with your
voice if they’re done separately?
Thanks in advance.”
Sayid.
Okay, Sayid, again, I’m not going to give the super detailed steps here.
I’m just going to give you more of a general answer but this should get you started.
If you need specifics maybe I’ll do something more in depth.
Really, if we’re going to do specifics I should do a whole course on that because there’s
a lot here.
I’m going to give you the general idea which will hopefully get you started here.
We’ll start of with a few things here.
For the YouTube videos we can talk about that one now.
This one is pretty easy.
I started off just using my webcam.
You can start off using an iPhone camera and that’s all to get started.
I’m a big believer in you go out and run for 6 months and do that before you buy new
running shoes.
You don’t get to have the little fancy gadgets and spend the money and stuff.
You don’t get the reward until you’ve earned the reward.
I started off creating my videos basic.
Then once I had been consistently doing that then I upgraded, I said, “Okay, now I’m
going to go to a DSLR” and I learned just enough just to shoot a little bit of DSLR.
I got this 15 mm lens and I figured out how I could make the background blur and got some
lights and just shot that one scene as you can see in the progression of my videos and
I still did some webcam as well.
As the audience started to grow, right now for the first time actually I’m shooting
a batch of videos and I have paid someone professionally to come in here and shoot the
video for me.
Now, I didn’t start off that way, right?
I kind of earned my way up to it as I started becoming more successful with this and proved
to myself that I was going to be serious about this.
A lot of people will spend thousands of dollars on equipment and all this and what ends up
happening is when they do that not only do they not use it but they increase the chances
that they’re not going to stick with the thing.
Once you have the reward, once you have all the beautiful equipment and stuff, you don’t
feel the need to earn it anymore.
It’s a real important thing to think about in anything that you’re doing, right?
Again, same thing would apply to blogging.
A lot of people spend thousands of dollars on web hosting and web design and all this
stuff and they’re never even going to update their blog, same thing with screen casting
and recording, anything that you’re doing.
Aside from that just so you know what am I doing now, now I’m having someone professionally
do the videos for me.
You can just get started like I said, just with a webcam, just with an iPhone camera
and just record the audio and video at the same time and then just upload it to YouTube.
In fact, a lot of the apps will just let you upload directly to YouTube.
As a matter of fact, on YouTube you can click record and you can record from your webcam
and it just records right there.
That’s a quick way to get started.
Now as far as screen casting that’s a little bit different.
If you’re doing tutorials where you’re recording your screen, here I would recommend
purchasing from the beginning one piece of software which is Camtasia.
Most people—at least on the Windows side use Camtasia to do screen casting.
It’s the best software for doing it.
I actually edited my YouTube video, in fact, I still edit my YouTube videos using Camtasia.
It’s a very simple program that allows you to have audio and video tracks and to do minor
edits and minor effects.
Camtasia really is the best for recording your screen.
That’s what I would say for that.
You can just use your computer mic hooked into Camtasia, it will record the video and
audio at the same time.
In fact, as you see in some of my videos when I use Camtasia I can record my screen, I can
record the audio at the same time and I can have little picture in picture webcam so you
can see my face.
I like to do it that way, but Camtasia will do all that for you and then you can go back
and edit it and then upload that to YouTube if you want.
That’s basically what I use.
On Mac there is Camtasia as well.
There is also ScreenFlow.
I’ll put links to both of these.
That’s probably the more popular one on the Mac side.
I tend to record on the Windows side mostly.
Even when I do on the Mac side I do use Camtasia so I’m using the same software.
Camtasia I think is around 200 bucks.
It’s not super expensive but it is somewhat of an investment, and again, this goes against
what I said about buying equipment but in this case you need something basic to be able
to record your screen, so this is a worthwhile investment if you want to do that.
Now, to address your recording the audio and video separately that can be done.
If you’re doing screen casting you probably don’t want to do that.
You can take a digital recorder and you could mic that up with a microphone and you could
record on a digital recorder and then drop the audio and video into Camtasia and then
edit them.
It’s really easy to—I mean you can figure out how to line that up.
It’s not as hard as what you would think.
One thing that I did in the past kind of a low tech way was to do a clap and then you
could visibly see the clap and you can see the little line on the audio.
I mean there’s a lot of low tech ways to do it and there are higher tech ways to do
it as well which I actually have to start working on myself.
Anyway, it’s not that hard.
It’s definitely something that’s … From being someone who didn’t know anything about
audio and video, I thought the same thing.
How could you even possibly line up audio and video?
What happens when you cut them and edit them?
It turns out for the most part it’s smooth.
If you’re recording your screen by the way, you can edit out audio and not even worry
about the screen.
When the mouse jumps a little bit just because you’ve cut out a second or so no one even
notices, it’s a lot easier than what you would think.
Yeah, that’s it.
It’s really not that difficult.
The key thing I would say though is just get started with something.
Again, I did another video about sucking.
Be willing to suck a few times.
That’s what it’s going to take.
You create a video, you create a tutorial, you put it out there and then you do the next
one and you learn from it and you get better and better at it and then eventually you can
get to the level of quality that you want to be at.
We all have this idea of what we want, but we don’t have the ability to get there yet.
You can’t just aim for your ideal, you have to realize that it’s a progression to get
there.
Hopefully that answer your question.
If you have any more questions about it just let me know and leave some questions in the
comments below if you have any questions regarding my set up.
I’ll probably do something more in depth just talking about not only how I use the
equipment but how I think about the topics, how I create an actual online course to be
able to teach someone something and how you plan those out.
I’ll probably actually do a course on that if there’s enough interest.
Let me know, if there is interest thumbs up the video and leave a comment below and I’ll
up it in my schedule of things to do.
Thanks again for this question and if you have a question email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com
and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel.
Take care.