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I’ve long thought about creating some video content but forever put it off – like many people I dislike seeing and hearing myself on video (as I quipped half in jest, half in horror, on Twitter “I have a face made for radio and a voice for silent movies”). I finally convinced myself to just get on with it and so my first effort is presented below along with some lessons learned.
Hopefully video n+1 will be an improvement on video n in this series – if I can do that I’ll be happy!
The Process and Lessons Learned
This was very much a voyage of discovery – I’ve never attempted recording myself code before and I’ve never edited video before.
To capture the screen and initial audio I used the free OBS Studio which after a little bit of fiddling to persuade it to capture at 4K and user error resulting in the loss of 20 minutes of video worked really well. It was unobtrusive and did what it says on the tin.
I use a good quality 4K display with my desktop machine and so on my first experiment the text was far too smaller, I used the scaling feature in Windows 10 to bump things up to 200% and that seemed about right (but you tell me!).
I sketched out a rough application to build but left things fairly loose as I hoped the video would feel natural and I know from presentations (which I don’t mind at all – in contrast to seeing and hearing myself!) that if I plan too much I get a bit robotic. I also figured I’d be likely to make some mistakes and with a bit of luck they’d be mistakes that would be informative to others.
This mostly worked but I could have done with a little more practice up front as I took myself down a stupid route at one point as my brain struggled with coding and narrating simulatanously! Fortunately I was able to fix this later while editing but I made things harder for myself than it needed to be and there’s a slight alteration in audo tone as I cut the new voice work in.
Having captured the video I transferred it to my MacBook to process in Final Cut Pro X and at this point realised I’d captured the video in flv – a format Final Cut doesn’t import. This necessitated downloading Handbrake to convert the video into something Final Cut could import. Not a big deal but I could have saved myself some time – even a pretty fast Mac takes a while to re-encode 55 minutes of 4K video!
I’d never used Final Cut before but it turned out to be fairly easy to use and I was able to cut out my slurps of coffee and the time wasting uninformative mistake I made. I did have to recut some audio as I realised I’d mangled some names – this was fairly simple but the audio doesn’t sound exactly the same as it did when recorded earlier despite using the same microphone in the same room. Again not the end of the world (I’m not challenging for an Oscar here).
Slightly more irritating – I have a mechanical cherry switch keyboard which I find super pleasant to type on, but carries the downside of making quite a clatter which is really rather loud in the video. Hmmm. I do have an Apple bluetooth keyboard next to me, I may try connecting that to the PC for the next installment but it might impede my typing too much.
Overall that was a less fraught experience than I’d imagined – I did slowly get used to hearing myself while editing the video, though listening to it fresh again a day later some of that discomfort has returned! I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time.
Would love to hear any feedback over on Twitter.
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