Top 10 Tips For Creating Pro-Quality Videos
thanks for joining us going to share some of the tips of the trade on how to make pro quality videos. I think all of ussee the need to have a more polished professionallook to our videos. No one does it better than the production teamwe have here at UEN. They're going to share with us their tips andtricks of the trade. Let's turn it over to them. Thanks We're excitedto be here on PDTV today. We're used to beingbehind the camera, but we're excited to sharewith you some of our tips to make your video look alittle bit more professional.
Top 10 Tips For Creating Pro-Quality Videos
Here I have today with me, my team from UEN. I'm dinesh and we have s for our online professional development courses, content for our broadcast station, and whatever else comes our way. You might wonder, "Whyshould I take the time to make my video look a littlebit more professional?" There's a couple of reasons. When you create yourown video content rather than using someone else's, you're able to add a personaltouch and connect with your students andbuild a relationship when they are able tosee and hear from you. The other thing is that it can increase the learning ofyour students when they can focus on the specificlearning outcome that you're focused on. It can make sure thatthey are focusing on what you'retrying to teach them instead of the distractions. Starting out, here's our top 10. All right. Well, thankyou again so much for having us in thisepisode of PDTV. Again, I'm Fernando Lara, and I'm going talk to youabout framing your shot.
One of the most commonthings that we've all witnessed and seenthroughout this time we've been working remotely is bad framing of Zoomrecordings or video calls. We've all seen the shots where the camera's too low and you're pointing at your nose or the cameras too high and you're pointing down your forehead. What we want to do ismake sure that you're center on the screen and your eyesight and your face basically is in the middleand you're looking good. What we're going to talk about first is the rule of thirds. Very quick there, what therule of thirds is basically, if you're looking at a screen, it divides the screening to nine squares as you can see here. There's four differentscreenshots from one of our recent episodesof some good education news, which you can check out onYouTube and on our website, is that all these student body presidentsthat we interview from Southern Utah colleges and universities are center inthe middle of the screen.
We have Penny, that's alittle bit off to the side, but that's great becauseshe has the logo of her school in the back,a cool little sign. Her background is not toocluttered and why not. Everybody else, it'sright in the middle, which is great.That's what we want. We don't want to havetoo much headroom, we don't want to havetoo little headroom. Essentially this is whatwe want to look at. The next thing thatwe're going to talk about is decluttering and spicing up yourspace, just a tiny bit. As you can see, thisis Katie Blunt, this is our host of somegood education news. This is her home setup. She has the table withthe microphone on, she has a little globe up onthe table and then the back has two shelves with booksand some decorations. She also has a little bit of a small plant behindher, which is great. This is what we'retrying to look for here. That your backgroundis not too busy, but also not too dull as well. In our line of work this is what we would callthe production value. This adds to the visualstyle of your presentation, of the video that you're doing. Now, if you have toomuch stuff in your back, you want to make sure that you're removing things that are branded that you don't wantto have on your screen, on your recording, of course. Just be mindful of that.
That's one of the thingsthat you can do to spice up your videos is adda little bit of personality in thebackground of your shot. Okay. Hi, everyone. Nicole here, and I'm going totalk to you about some good lighting techniques. Good lighting can makeor break your video. If you're too dark or in shadow, or you have a brightwhite light behind you, like say a window, no one's going to beable to see you and your camera will havea very hard time focusing and things like that. We want to makeyourself look good. When you're looking for somegood light for your videos, natural lightingis probably one of the easiest and best lightingsources that you can have. If you can, try and face a window and beabout 3-4 feet away, because that will make sure that your light is not too harsh, but not to dim. If natural light is a littlehard for you to come by, try and use someother light sources that are easilyaround your house, like a lamp, a desk lamp, or a ring lightthat you may have. Right here's a quick example of a ring light setup that my husband sograciously post for. This is him in his home office and he's got his cameras setup on the top of his widescreen monitor there with the ringlight just behind it.
Behind him you cansee his background is just a nice solid color. One other thing youwant to keep in mind when you're doing yourlight is your light color. You may not noticethis very often, but daylight is more blue and your incandescent lightsthat are in your home tend to be more warmor more orange. If you use a lamp, make sure that you're notmixing your lighting sources. You don't want to besitting by a window with a very orangelamp next to you. If you have harsh light, diffuse it, if you can. If your window has noblinds or anything on it, try hanging some sheer curtains or a sheet over it todiffuse that light.They act like cloudson a very bright day. You'll look a littlebetter and your highlights on your face will not be as blownout or very white. If you can use morethan one light source, but as I mentioned before, make sure theirlight color is very similar or you will have conflicting colorsand that can be a distraction and decreaseyour production value. Make sure that you don't have any harsh shadows on your face. Then here is a quick example of my setup in my home office
, I sit directly infront of a window, but I have blind so I can control how much or how little light I wouldlike to get through. Depending on the time of day, the light can beharsher or less harsh. Thanks Nicole. One of the most important aspects of your video isn't actuallyyour video, it's your audio. We'd like to say quality audio is invisible but essential. It's one of those thingsthat I often hear it said that people will putup with poor video quality, but they will not put upwith a poor audio quality. They'll just move on. Good audio equals good video. Take that into considerationwhen you're producing video that you really payattention to your audio. I say when you startedrecording your video, do a sound check, stop, pause, and listen to what'sgoing on around you. You may think that you're ina very quiet environment, but when you actually pause, you'll hear maybe it's my computer fan on my laptopthat's running right now, or is the dog going to bark?
There are a lots ofsounds around us that we tune out, just naturally. But when you're recordingyour video and your audio, those things are very noticeable to your audienceand are distracting. Do your own little sound check. Make sure that youraudio is balanced, and what we mean by thatis, when you're editing, you can check the levels of your audio with the audio bar. But if you're bringingdifferent sources of maybe music and speaking parts, make sure that thoseare consistent so that your audience or your students aren't turning up the volume, then turning it down and having a really hard time tryingto hear what's going on. That's just a couple of tips to make sure thatyour audio is great. One thing that I didn'tput on the slide that I'll throw out there is, if you're recording some video and you need a place that's not going to have an echo, if it's not hot outside, you can record inside a car, that's a great wayto reduce the echo. Again, if you'rejust recording audio for a podcast orsomething like that, you can even put some voice-over to go over somethingyou are explaining. You can put a blanketover your head and create your own little soundbooth in seconds. But those are some reallycheap but efficient ways to make your audio sound better. Awesome. Thanks.
Now we're going to move on toyour home setup. One of the things that I liketo tell people when we talk about video production is that you can havethe most expensive, the cutting edge equipment but if your content isnot good or great, it's not going to matter. Most everybody nowadaysis going to have a cell phone that's goingto shoot in HD or even 4K. That's going to be your go-to if you don't haveany cameras at all. Now you have to be alittle bit mindful of the memory that youhave in your phone. Another cautionary thing that I would like to tellabout phones is, a lot of them have automaticsettings for your light, so if you're filmingwith the phone, just make sure that you lockthat lighting so it doesn't increase the apertureor decreases or makes it brighter ordarker automatically. Some phones do allow you to do manual settings whenit comes to that. Just be careful with that. Just do some little Google search and you'll be able to find that. Next thing is webcams. Right now we're all filming with our webcam we have andthey're pretty great, even webcams thatare pre-installed within your computers and in your laptop, they'll be great. Just make sure again, going back to theframing of your shot, if your laptop is sittingdown below your chin, you want to make sure youput a couple of books underneath to make itlevel with your eyes.
Next thing, DSLR cameras, as you can see in thatthe little Canon camera that we have in that picture. DSLR cameras withinterchangeable lenses are awesome because a lot of them you can put mics on them, you can put a monitor, you can accessorize it really well and you can havedifferent lenses that allow you to manipulate the lighta little bit more and have a depth of fieldthat looks really good. But again, this isif you have that available or if you havethe funds to purchase one. We're not saying you have to have this to have good content. Another thing thatyou might have around your house is your headphones, you want to have that good audio that Katie was talking about. Any type of microphone is goingto help you achieve them. As you can see, I'mwearing my AirPods here. Usually though I'll justthrow those on without a microphone on for Zoomcalls and they work great. If I'm reportingsomething I'll have a mic which is pluggedin through USB.
But if I didn't haveeither of these things, I have 10 sets of the old iPhone earbudsthat have a mic on them. If you have those, you can definitely use those, they hang by yourneck and they're aligned with your vocal cords. That's going to be definitelybetter than anything. But again, if you don'thave any of those, Katie's advice, it was great, go to your car if it's not hot, put a blanket over yourselfto record the audio, find a quiet room, quiet space. But that's pretty much what we recommendon your home setup. Again, your content is what matters and equipmentis secondary. Some screen recording toolsbecause we all know that like right now weare recording with our webcams and ourbuilt-in cameras. We mostly record onMacs here at UEN. So we're very familiarwith QuickTime.
It's a great recordingsoftware that just comes pre-built with your Maccomputers or your laptops. You can set a recordingarea if that helps you, or you can record your wholescreen, it doesn't matter. It's great recording, you can do maximum or high-res recording. PC recordings, I'mnot as familiar with, but many of the webcamsthat you can order today, they come with theirown software to record, and so you would just need to google that andsee how to set up. Some other PC recordingsoftware I'm aware of is Loom and Screencast-o-Matic. If you're looking topurchase some software, Camtasia is a really greatscreen recording software that many co-workersthat use PCs use at UEN. Another component of goodvideo is having good graphics. This would be the extra visualsthat you add while you're talking to help your audience understand whatyou're talking about. When you're able to see andhear it at the same time, that equals better understandingfor your students. A couple of tools,ideas to create some graphics for yourvideo would be Canva. This is a tool thatI know a lot of teachers are loving already, but this is a tool that you could use to create somegraphics for your video. There's a lot ofgreat templates that look really well done. The other thing is, Iknow you've created a lot of Google slides, maybe some NewPodsor your PowerPoints, you could export thoseas a PNG or JPEG.
As you're editing your video, you could bring those in as the graphics foryour presentation. That's exactly what wedid for this, easy-peasy. Next step is Adobe Spark. Because you have access to Adobe through thestatewide license, this is a tool thatyou can easily create informational pages or graphics, again, a lot ofpre-made templates that make thissuper easy to make. It look like you hada graphic designer working on your video. If you're really looking to take your video up a notch and makeit look even more amazing, you can check out thesemotion graphic templates. There are some freeones available from Motion Array andalso from Pixabay, so those will really enhance the productionvalue of your content. Now onto editing. I think for me the first time I ever started working onvideo production the editing was the most dauntingand intimidating thing. But let me tell youthe more you practice, the better is going to get,the easier is going to get. I know it can be intimidating, but you can do it. I've divided this sectioninto three parts. Let's talk about thebeginner section first.
All of these editingsoftwares here are going to be most of the ones that youhave heard before. The most popular oneprobably is iMovie. That has becomes averb in and of itself. That you will find for freeon your Mac if you have one. Pretty user-friendly,it's drag and drop. A lot of these even the professional ones likeFinal Cut and Premiere Pro, they're going tobe drag and drop. The way I see itas like a puzzle. You're building a puzzlewith your editing. iMovie is great for abeginner with that. Adobe Premiere Rush, this one is great if you're editing on your mobilephones; on your smartphones. It's an awesome tool, and again it's free through the state licensing.You can try it out. I believe it workson most smartphones, you can drag and drop clips from yourlibrary on your phone.
They even have some stockmusic that you can use. Then the last one as a beginner, I would recommend Adobe Spark. Now this one is mostlyfor the desktop. This will work. I don't think there's a video editing Adobe Sparkapp on mobile phones, but you can use this through their websiteand it's great. It acts a little bit like aPowerPoint generator almost, but you can definitely add videos that you've filmed with your phone or other cameras. Now the next one isintermediate and professional. These are the ones that we use. Our team uses Adobe Premier Pro, and these are going tobe the heavy hitters. This is going to be what weuse for our documentaries, for our SG&A and for eventhe edit in this PDTV. If you want to get into this professional level editing software, you definitely can. There's a ton of tutorials out there that are free on YouTube that take you fromthe very beginning, opening the program until exporting your very first videos. Again, this is for more advanced skill set,so take that as you will. Then the next option is thefree/open source software. This is for all the people that are thinking,"Well, I have a PC." I've been talking about Macs and all the stuff thatyou can do with them,
but PC is a littlebit different because they don't have theirown editing software like iMovie for Macs. For PCs, for Windows machinesyou have to work around it and look at a bunch ofdifferent open/source programs. With this presentation,I've actually linked an article that has 24 of the free programs that you can use for PC and also Mac, but a lot of these are for PC. These are going to beopen/source, free to use. Some are paid tiers. If you have a PC, you don't have access to a Mac, I would definitely look at this list and pick fromthe top ones because there's a lot programs that you can use to edityour videos on your PC. Fernando covered theend of the project, but you want to start witha really good plan in mind. Before you start filming, have yourself agood solid outline. You want to know whatyour idea is and how you want to get that ideaacross to your audience. A good way to keepyour ideas on track or how you want tovisualize your idea, you can storyboardor do a script.
When I say storyboard, most of you I'm sureare thinking about the professional storyborders at Disney, or Pixar, or things like that. You do not need to have that artistic skill todo your own storyboard. As you can see inthis example here, it is just a fewsquares of some stick figures and they have a little description underneathabout what the shot is. If that helps you, great. Draw some little sketchesout and just go from there, and then plan your shot by shot. If you're not this visualor you don't feel like your video really needs thisin-depth storyboarding, go ahead and just writeyourself a script or even a few bullet notes for your video that you canpull up on the side. You can be like,"Okay, look over, now I'm on to this nextpoint or this next point." Try not to haveyourselves too scripted, because if you're tooscripted in your video you'll seem wooden or just too stiff.
You want to keep your videopersonal and authentic. The next part is music. Music can be a little bit complicated at timesbecause of copyright. We definitely want tomake sure that we're following copyrightlaws and not using music that it's owned by someone else and we don't havepermission to use it. But at the same time, music can help your videosget to the next level. Now, for educators out there, there are some resourcesthat are free for you to use to get acopyright free music. The first one that you canlook at is Soundzabound. With this one, you have to login through your my.uen login, but after that you'll be able to browse our catalog and all their libraries and pick and choose from which which song you want. Then you can usethat in your edit, and it's going to get a million views and it'sgoing to be awesome. Then the next thing isFree Music Archive. Now this one is, I think a little bit more for independent producersand film-makers, but you can definitelylook into this library.
I might have a littlebit more different vibe and style of music thatyou can choose from. This website willhave Creative Commons or attribution that youhave to put on your videos, so just be mindful of that. If you find us on theUEN, you really look at the fine print of whatthe copyright is on that. Then SoundBible, I was doing a little bitresearch and I found this one that also has a lot of Creative Commons license music, but also publicdomain sound effects. Music will definitelyimpact your content, and don't be afraidto experiment. Our final tip is justbecause you can, it doesn't mean you should. When you're looking atall that fun music, and graphics, andfonts, and colors, be intentional about your use of those and not just becausethey're cute or at bounces, or at dances, or you thoughtit was funny at the time. Think about what youwant students to understand fromyour video and use those as tactics to help get that message acrossrather than distract from it. Definitely think aboutwhen I add this Bitmoji, or when I add this font, or this really crazy color, is that going to help my students understandthis content? I know that I often will see fun.
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but that's actuallyreally tricky to read; yellow text on awhite background. Think about is the fun aspect of this that I'm trying toengage my students with, is that actually may be hindering their learning becauseof that design choice? That leads into this diverselearner or an accessibility. Think about the universal design, what is actually going to help my students understand this? If I were colorblind, would that colored choice help? If I were deaf, how would I access that content? Think about yourclosed captioning. There's all sorts of free tools that canalso help with that. Take everything that we'vesaid and make it intentional, make it good and thoughtful. You'll end up with a great video that your students arelearning from you, and that's the best outcomethat you could ask for. Thanks for spending a fewminutes of your time to learn about how to make your blog a little bit better. . Thanks for joining us foranother
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