Rob's Video Recording Tips
/I’ve recorded over 50 videos for the new book. So now I think I’m qualified to be able to give advice on how to make videos.
Use a proper tool. I’m using Camtasia, which is wonderful. I’ve built a template and now I just have to make a new file from it, add the video bit in the middle and then hit publish.
Build a workflow. For me the workflow starts with the name of the video in the book. I copy this into the filename for the video in Camtasia, which then uses that as the name of the video I publish onto YouTube. Then, when the video has published I copy the link back into the document and then use Edge to make a QR code (you can make a QR code for a url by right-clicking the site and then selecting the option from the menu that appears). I copy the QR code into the document and then save the image in the chapter file. Then I move on to the next one.
Keep going if it all goes wrong. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I’ve done fifty videos this way and I’m not going to change. I used to spend ages trying to make my videos perfect. If I made a mistake I’d go back and re-record that bit. If a demo failed I’d re-record that too. But then I decided that “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. My videos don’t need to be perfect. My lectures certainly never were, and there was no way of rewinding those and going again. And besides, the bits that went wrong were always the bits that the students found the most interesting. So now I do every video in exactly one take. If it goes wrong I fix it and then carry on. I do make good use of the ability to pause recordings though. If something fails I’ll pause, fix it, and then resume and explain what happened.
Don’t use your development machine for the videos. I’ve been caught out in the past when my sample code fails to work on the user’s machine. This is usually because there is something on my machine that I’ve forgotten, perhaps a device driver or a setting, which makes it work on my machine. Now I use the cheapest, lowest specification machine I can to record the videos. I install everything from scratch on a brand-new installation of Windows and go from there. I’ve lost count of the number of things that I’ve discovered testing the exercises this way. I’ve used a virtual pc on my machine in the past, but I really like the idea of having real hardware. I’m presently using a super cheap laptop for all the videos.
Remember to be yourself. You and your viewer are going to be together for a long while (especially if you decide to make over 50 videos). You need to be able to relax while recording until you reach the point where you can properly be yourself.
