Chromakey with Final Cut Pro

I am fortunate to have a nice handy space in my house where I can have a green screen studio set up permanently. I bought a green screen cloth which was large enough for me to be able to cut in size and the other part of it I gave to my son who is a cameraman. The cloth that I have, I stretched over a frame to get any wrinkles and folds out of it and then I bought some LED lights to use for lighting the greenscreen. I find that when I do some recording in front of the green screen it’s very easy to key out the green in Final Cut Pro X. The LED lights that I have not really the best, but they do a good enough job.

 

My studio lighting for the subject which is usually me

I made some lights to fit into some soft boxes and I am very pleased with the way that these work. What I did is to buy a plastic board on which I could mount a number of light fittings. On one of these I added six light fittings so I can have six CFL bulbs and on the other one I added four bulbs. So the soft box that has the six lights in it I use as the key light and the other one I use as the fill light. To do some proper three-point lighting I should also have a light source to direct from behind the subject. I don’t have that at the moment, but it is something that I am considering getting. As it stands at the moment it works fairly well, but the backlight would give me a better separation from the green screen behind.

I fortunately have enough room in the studio to have my subject standing far enough away from the greenscreen. If you get too close, what can happen is that you will get some green spill from the reflected light. I have a marker on the floor that I use to know where I should stand and that also works well in relation to getting the focus set up correctly with my camera.

Getting good sound quality

One of the things that I don’t like about my studio is the fact that there are too many hard surfaces around which can distort the sound and make it a little bit prone to echoes. I have tried a few different microphones to record my audio. I started by using a shure SM58 and used a converter to go from the XLR connector to a 3.5 mm audio into the camera. This worked fairly well, but did give me a certain amount of hiss that I needed to correct for afterwards. Not too much of a problem, although sometimes if you over correct the hiss, it will start to destroy the vocal sound that you are trying to improve.

The next microphone as I tried is a cheap Chinese shotgun microphone which in some ways worked better. Mainly it was better because it left my hands free for other use. The sound was also slightly better and less cleanup was required afterwards. Even with moving the microphone closer to me to get a better signal to noise ratio I was still getting a certain amount of room Echo with the recording. Now I have a different microphone, a lavalier microphone which is working out the best yet.

Amplifying the sound with a Zoom H2 recorder

As with the cheap Chinese shotgun microphone, I route the Giant Squid lavalier microphone through the Zoom H2 recorder. The reason that I do this is so that I get the benefits of the better audio amplifier of the Zoom H2. The audio amplifiers that you find in the DSLR cameras are really not up to the job. If I had the money available then I would consider buying a Juiced Link or a Beachtek which give better amplification and are made for the job of connecting good-quality XLR microphones to a DSLR camera.

Getting an teleprompter

I have already bought some applications to use on my iPad to turn it into a teleprompter, but what I really need is to get a piece of two-way mirror glass. With that glass I would be able to talk directly into the camera using the teleprompter. If I was to put the teleprompter iPad to one side of the camera then it doesn’t look like I am talking directly to my audience. At the moment what I tend to do is to not use any prompters and often I will need to have more than one take so that I get what I want to say correct. The specialist type of glass required can be a little bit hard to find, I haven’t given up hope yet though.

Do you have a green screen studio?

Leave in the comments section below details about how you have set up your own greenscreen studio. It will be interesting to find out how you have yours setup. As you can tell, due to money constraints I have to go the route of the frugal filmmaker and I plan to add bits and pieces to my set up as I go. The best items I have added so far have been the two soft boxes and also the microphone I bought from Giant Squid.

Lately I have been getting very annoyed with YouTube because they are declining a number of my videos for monetisation and it is hard to find out exactly why. I suspect that it is because I’m using software and showing it in the videos and they are unable to distinguish as to the reason why that software is being shown. It does say in their guidelines that if the software is being shown and it is for an educational purpose then it is okay. In the past when receiving these notices from YouTube I have ripped out any music from the videos even though the music being used, was either royalty free or music I created myself using Garageband. To make a tutorial, it is fairly obvious it is going to be necessary to show the actual software. What is extra weird is the fact that there are some videos that I make which are incredibly similar which are accepted by YouTube for monetisation.

Rejected Video

 

Accepted Video

 

Both videos showing the same software. WTF?

Part of the problem is automation

It seems that the first pass at whether to accept or reject for monetisation is automated, as in not done by humans. I don’t know about the second stage, which is the point where an email is sent to the YouTube user, but I suspect that is also automated. Going by my experience so far, I can be fairly sure that if a video doesn’t get past the first stage, then it will not be accepted at all. It seems to be normal that the videos that are declined stay in limbo for a long time, months on end, before getting finally irrevocably marked with a big fat X.

Explanations are ignored by YouTube

When I have been given the opportunity to give them information as to why the video should be accepted, which is after the first email, I have tried a number of tactics. I have cut and copied information from their own guidelines and added a few lines of explanation, to say that these videos are tutorials. I have added information regarding all of the images and music that have been used in the videos. Sadly, nothing has worked so far. What would be really nice, would be if it was possible to actually talk to somebody at YouTube directly and to get the word from the horses mouth. Unfortunately, there are only generic email addresses to use for contact, if you are lucky enough to find them. No chance whatsoever, in getting a phone number.

What can be done about this problem?

Due to the size of YouTube and the social side of using YouTube, it is the place to be for having a video following. There are people that are making money as YouTubers and I really want to make a business of creating videos for YouTube. With what I have done so far I know that it is possible to earn some money from being a video guy on YouTube. So far I have been doing it as a maker of tutorials,showing off software in a how to format. Is this going to have to do change? Do I need to start making a different type of videos? Can I finally convince YouTube that they should follow their own guidelines when accepting or declining videos and continue the work I’ve been doing so far.

One possible solution to the problem is to put my videos behind a pay wall where I am not reliant upon advertising from AdSense. The problem with that, is the difficulties of getting people to those videos. I am toying with the idea of creating my tutorials on another network where people have to pay to access those videos. What I could do is to take the videos from YouTube and put them on this other site, maybe leaving one or two behind. Those that are left behind will be left there for the purpose of attracting new customers to my courses on this other site. What I also could do is to chop up the videos on YouTube so that only the first minute of tutorial is available. At the end of those videos will be a message to go to the new home for the tutorials.

Make a different type of video

I would rather continue doing what I’m good at, which is the making of tutorials, but I might have to look at doing something different. The big question with this of course is – What! I think maybe that I’m a little bit too old to try to enter the realm of college humour or impromptu dancing in the street. I don’t have a small baby that I could video doing something silly and funny. I’m not particularly keen on the idea of creating the “You’ve Been Framed” getting a kick in the balls type of videos. It has all been done before and is really not my cup of tea.

Some people are having a certain amount of success making videos which do reviews of hardware products. I don’t have access to these products to be able to do reviews, either getting test units or the ability to buy stuff to talk about.

It would be a shame to just quit!

The amount of money that I bring in from making the YouTube videos at present had started to grow during 2012. January 2013 has so far been a bit of a disaster with an approximately 50% drop from the previous month. The same number of views of the videos on my YouTube channel, but half the money. Maybe there are other things going on with Google and YouTube that should have me thinking about moving my stuff elsewhere anyway. It is starting to look as though a good way forward would be to start using that other tutorials site. I could create a course on there and just see how it works out, in terms of creating some income, while at the same time persevering with YouTube. It really would be a shame to give up on the progress that I have made building of the number of subscribers on YouTube by giving up on that video network altogether.

We all want to get more viewers for our videos and one of the ways that you can do something to help your videos be found within YouTube, is to add a caption track. You will have already chosen a good title and added a good description to help the search engines find your videos. Now you can supercharge the search engine optimisation of your YouTube videos by adding more text that a search engine will just love with a captions track.

How to add a caption track to a YouTube video

It is quite possible to add a caption track actually on the YouTube site, You don’t necessarily need closed captioning software. On the YouTube site it works fairly well and can be done reasonably quickly. There is a machine created closed captions track that will have been created automatically, but it will be complete nonsense and gobbledygook. If you are lucky there will be one or two sentences that it will have done the speech to text conversion that make any sense. Most times though you will need to rewrite the sentences completely. Or dictate them in using DragonDictate , which is my preferred way of creating YouTube closed captions.

Using the application ScreenFlow 4 to write your YouTube closed captions track

There is a new feature in ScreenFlow, in the latest version which has just been released, for creating a closed caption track. What it does is to split up the timeline into small sections and into each of the sections you put your caption text. You can type directly into a text entry box, you can paste the text in there or you can do as I do and that is to dictate. I like to use DragonDictate on my computer as much as possible, so that I can lean back in my chair, put my feet up and talk to the computer. So far it hasn’t started to talk back to me, well that is not quite true, if you count the text to speech that is available on Mac OS X.

 

 

Youtube closed captioning with ScreenFlow 4

In the video I show you how you can extend the length of a section, so that it fits with the actual audio is on the video. It is a simple action of holding down the command key and using the up arrow to make it longer and the down arrow to make it shorter. So far, with the videos that I have created closed caption tracks for, it has worked fairly well and has been very easy to use. I have found that it is slightly more comfortable and therefore faster using ScreenFlow to do this job, than it is to do the same job on the YouTube website.

Adding caption tracks to your YouTube videos with closed caption software videomagical.com/2012/11/adding… via @wizardgold

— David Allen (@Mac20Q) November 4, 2012

Get more video views on YouTube by using closed captioning software

So there you go you have some tips now on how to add a closed-captioned YouTube track. The text that you have created is another way for Google and YouTube to find your videos and pass them onto new viewers that are searching on the search engines. You can easily use specialised closed captioning software that made specially to do that job. On the other hand if you have ScreenFlow which is a very good Mac video screen capture application , you can use version 4 to make your YouTube closed captions. Then if you don’t want to spend any money, it is perfectly viable to create a caption track on the YouTube website.

Is it worth adding closed captions on YouTube?

Now that I have over 230 videos on YouTube, it would be rather tedious to go back and add captions to all of those. Even if I used the best close to captioning software available. What I may do with the videos that I have uploaded already, is to look at the ones that are most popular and at a caption tracks to those. At the moment, the YouTube videos I have that are most popular are the ones about how to add movies to iTunes and the videos showing how to add review questions to iBooks author . If you’re wondering if it is worth the effort in adding YouTube closed captions, then I would say yes, especially if you can use closed caption software and DragonDictate.

Just the other day, I downloaded the latest update to Final Cut Pro X and straight away I noticed that there were some sizeable changes. The first change that I noticed was that the import dialogs have completely changed. They look completely different and have gone all dark and moody. This change fits in better with the overall look and feel of the application. The new import dialog does look and work a whole lot better. The way that it works now, I think it is easier to find the files that you are looking for. At least, I got to the files that I wanted very quickly indeed.

Where did the Share menu go to?

When it came time to share out the video that I had just edited, I had to do a little bit of cursing while searching for the Share menu. In the previous version of Final Cut Pro X there was a Share menu towards the right of all of the menus. It was an easy place to find and go to for exporting out finished video. For some strange reason Apple have moved this menu to within the File menu. It does take a couple more clicks to get to share out your video, although in another way they have made it a little bit easier. There were a number of defaults already available within the new Share menu. Such as sharing out to YouTube and to Apple devices and at the bottom of the list of about six choices, you could add another destination.

I have Compressor installed and although I don’t actually use the application directly, I do use the compressor settings indirectly when sharing out of Final Cut Pro X. It was very easy for me to choose the appropriate setting to export out ready for sending to YouTube at 720p. The first time that I used this new Share menu, I thought that it had not worked. In the previous version of Final Cut Pro X there is a separate sharing application that pops up that with an indicator bar to show how the operation of transcoding of video is going. Luckily I checked in the Background Tasks window and I was able to see that the operation was in fact in progress. So the sharing has now gone in-house within Final Cut Pro 10.

Looking for other changes

I think I can be fairly sure that there will be other changes within this latest version of Final Cut Pro X. I may have to read some of the details regarding the latest update in order to be able to find them. When I do find more of them, then I will make more videos to explain how to use them.

I bought the Avid iOS video editing application for the iPad from the iTunes Store because I had heard that it was a very capable iPad video editor. Then later, I found when I was opening it, that the company had been taken over by Corel and the Avid iPad video editor was going to be replaced by Pinnacle Studio. I was however, pleased to see that Pinnacle Studio was going to be made available for free for a period of time. This would allow users of Avid for iPad, that had bought and paid for the application to get Pinnacle Studio at no cost. A stroke of good fortune and good luck for everybody else interested in video editing on the iPad, that were also able to get a free Pinnacle download. That period of time where you could download Pinnacle free has ended now. It is still a very good alternative to using iMovie on the iPad and great value if you still buy it.

Pinnacle video editing software for iPad

I have made a few video tutorials showing how to use Pinnacle Studio for editing video on the iPad. The first one is an overview showing how easy it is to use. The rest of the videos that can be found at the Wizardgold YouTube channel go into more detail of how to use the Pinnacle Studio video editing tools. In the Pinnacle video editing software you can drag video clips to the timeline with ease. You can drag a whole clip onto the timeline or you can pre-trim before you do the drag and drop. After you have set the in points and out points to more or less where you want them, you can then use gestures to get more precision.

Avid Pinnacle Studio Video Editing App

Once you have the video clips in the timeline you can still do some splitting and trimming of clips. There is the razor blade tool which you can use to split one or all of the tracks. For example, you might have more than one audio track and the software allows you to choose which track you want to cut, or if you want to cut all of them.

There is also a precision trimming tool that you can news for video clips on the timeline. By using gestures you can increase the length of a video clip or decrease the length of the clip, by either one frame or 10 frames. If you need to keep the video length constant, then it is also possible to do a rolling edit. With a rolling edit, frames that you take off the end of one video clip will be added to the video clip next to it.

Montage clips and Titles

There are things called Montage which is like something you would get from Motion 5. These have drop zones that you can drop video and still images into. These are video clips and photos inside of other video animations. There are also titling sequences that you can use where the text is animated. Not a problem if you want to make a composite bit of video with text or even video on top of other video. Very easy to make a picture in picture section of video.

Pinnacle video editing tutorial

Although the application Pinnacle Studio is fairly intuitive and easy to use, there are one or two things that you will benefit from watching the screencast tutorials that I have made. It is also well worth looking at the help documentation that is included with the application. You really do need to have some information about whether you should be swiping left or swiping right and whether it should be with one finger or with two fingers, in order to get the best experience from editing video with Pinnacle Studio. Overall I highly recommend this video edition app for video editing on the iPad. Who would have thought that you could do this sort of work on the iPad.

Screencasting with ScreenFlow 3

Many of the videos I make for the Wizardgold YouTube channel our screencasts, showing how to use Mac applications for the readers and listeners of Mac20Q and now also for VideoMagical. Mac20Q did start off as a website with a podcast emphasis, hence listeners. If you are going to show your followers or fans screencasts showing how to do things with the Mac, then you’re going to need screen recording software. On the way to using ScreenFlow for Mac, I did try to other screencasting applications. While these others were competent, I found that the capabilities and usability of ScreenFlow meant no going back after trying it. There are some people that will look at ScreenFlow vs Camtasia, a ScreenFlow alternative, and wonder which is the best of the two, but for me ScreenFlow always wins hands down. Screencast for Mac with Screenflow.

The best part is not the screen recording

Even though Telestream ScreenFlow is essentially a screen recording application, the fact that you can take what you have recorded and also edit it, takes it from a good application into a great application. In fact, not only can you edit your videos within ScreenFlow and achieve great quality while doing so, you can also upload from within ScreenFlow to YouTube. This makes ScreenFlow a one-stop shop for screencasting for the Mac. In fact is it the best screencasting software.

Using ScreenFlow – The basics

ScreenFlow will capture the whole of the screen and you can even choose screens if you have more than one. At the same time it will record audio from either the internal microphones or better still the external microphone you have connected. You always get better sound quality recording from external microphones. On top of that, ScreenFlow will record the video from your iSight camera. Once you have all of this footage recorded from your computer, you can arrange it within the editing window. You can have a number of tracks or layers of video and audio which makes it very easy to do picture in picture, for example.

Making the transition with video clips

You can make easy transitions from one video clip to another by dragging the end of one clip of the top of the one next to it. Once you have done that you are presented with a settings icon, so that you can choose from a number of transitions available. For a more professional job, it is better to stick with the cross dissolve or a fade to black or white, but you can also do fancy things like making the picture rotate or slide across, among other things.

With a screencast you are bound who want to bring attention to areas of the screen. You may want to show off what to click on within an application menu. You may just want to zoom in, in order to give your viewers a closer look at something. You can easily zoom a track in or out using two fingers on the Magic Trackpad, or you can set it more specifically using a slider, or with numbers, or a percentage. In earlier versions of ScreenFlow I used that facility to create my own transitions or animations between clips, now and then.

Using callouts in ScreenFlow

Instead of using the zoom feature to do a pan and zoom for a Ken Burns effect, you can use callouts to highlight your video. When using the callouts, you can set a zoom for the area where the mouse is. You can also choose to blur either inside or outside the callout. If you’re blurring within the callout, it is probably because you are intending to hide a certain part of the screen. Instead of choosing to highlight and zoom where the mouse is, you can set it to put the emphasis on the foremost window. Then there is one more option for the callouts which is the freehand callout. The freehand callout can be a section drawn totally free hand with a round spot, or it can be a rectangle area.

Good enough to be called a pro application

Despite having used the application for a number of years, last week I managed to find a function I hadn’t used before. ScreenFlow will get the Mac OS X speech facility to talk for you, which works surprisingly well. You may have to re-spell one or two of the words so that they get sound right phonetically. Quite a handy capability, especially so if you have a speech impediment.

One of the tools that are used more frequently would be the marking of in points and out points in the timeline, so that I can do a rolling edit. This allows me to chop out a section of the recording, all of the tracks, and for the empty space to be closed up. Why this is so useful, is because it means that you can keep all of the sound and video tracks synchronised to the right of your edit.

Fast and efficient screencasting with ScreenFlow

Even though the application records the whole of screen, which can be quite a large area if you’re using the 27 inch iMac, once you have finished recording you hardly have to wait before you can start editing. ScreenFlow is quick. One of the other applications I tried for screencasting was much slower to have the video ready for me. When you start editing your video you can crop the area that you want to work with. Generally I will set the video area at 1280 x 720 and size things to fit. Sometimes I will leave it at the full size of screen, it depends upon what I have been recording, and then when I export out, I let it export out at 50% size.

Going all the way with your screen cast

I have tried exporting directly into YouTube from ScreenFlow, it works perfectly, but there are one or two things I prefer to finish off in Final Cut Pro X. I could easily have an intro and an outro ready-made, to drop into the media area of ScreenFlow. You can then take these and put them into the timeline to do your final edit. I use Final Cut Pro because I like the individual adjustments I can do with the titling and with the lower thirds. I can well imagine that there are one or two users that will use ScreenFlow to create their complete non screencast movie rather than using iMovie.

Getting the audio right in ScreenFlow

There were a few extra audio tools added in version 3 of ScreenFlow – screencast software. When you adjust the volume of the audio you get a visual representation of the size of the waveform. There are also some basic audio editing tools. You can easily chop up your audio track, which is especially good if you want to take out one or two words you no longer need. By pressing Command T when you have a track or multiple tracks selected, ScreenFlow will split the track or tracks. You can then grab an edge at the start or end of a video or audio clip, usually to shorten it.

The verdict on ScreenFlow

In my opinion there is no better Mac application for screencasting. You can if you wish record your screen using built-in Mac OSX tools for free. The recordings you get that way, you can also work with in iMovie, a version of which you will have on your Mac anyway. Although there is free screencasting software, the ease of use and the quality that you get with ScreenFlow for Mac, makes it well worth getting. I particularly like the video actions, which are used to set a start point and endpoint for a zoom in or zoom out of the video. I find that works much better in ScreenFlow than in Final Cut Pro X. ScreenFlow the screencasting application for the Mac gets the Mac20Q seal of approval. The only thing that I would complain about, is that there are icons at the start of tracks in the timeline which are too big and get in the way. Other than that, ScreenFlow for Mac is the bees knees. Time to download ScreenFlow and get your screencast online. It will not take you long to learn how to screencast.

Getting started making a video for YouTube

If you haven’t made a video before and you’re just getting started with video making you might wonder what it is that you need to do to make a YouTube video. Fortunately if you want to make videos for YouTube, these days quite often you will have the tools that you need at hand. With your Mac you can start by recording yourself using the iSight camera and editing the movie using iMovie. I would recommend that you get an external microphone, even if it is only a cheap microphone for your YouTube make a video session. The internal microphone will still work, but it will sound as though you are far away and a little tinny. Do remember when you are making a YouTube video that having good sound is very important.

Making videos for YouTube with your camera phone

The trend with phones is to have smart phones that are also cameras and quite often these cameras will also do video. It is quite easy for you to make a YouTube video using this mobile technology. Of course my favourite phone is the iPhone and the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S do have a good video camera included. There is absolutely no reason why you could not make a video for YouTube with your Android phone or your other smart phone.

Blair Witch Project Type Vomit Inducing Camerawork

With the wide-angle lens that you have on phone cameras, it is easy for you to record yourself and make a video blog which is known as a vlogging. Sometimes when you make videos for YouTube in this fashion and you’re moving around then you might get too much video camera movement and end up with something that looks like it is from the ‘Blair Witch Project’. You might get away with that when you’re making a video for YouTube, if the video is short. You would certainly need to make sure that your YouTube video is interesting so that your viewers will continue watching through this vomit inducing type of camera work. As you can tell, I’m not too fond of the shaky cam style of video photography. If you have a tripod, and you should have one, then why not use it?

You can make a YouTube video today

The first thing to do when you’re making a YouTube video is to have some ideas of what you want to present in your video. What is the story you want to tell? It might be a good idea not to be too serious, as it seems that the best performing viral videos on YouTube tend to be the silliest. It used to be that the most popular videos were the ones where the guy got kicked in the balls and now it is likely to be a parent filming a baby doing something funny but cute. What it really comes down to with making a video that is successful and engages the audience is a subject matter that will twist of the emotions in some way or other. If you can make somebody truly laugh or cry, feel happy or feel sad with a story then you might have a viral video on your hands.

Making youtube videos is fun, so lets get to it and see what we can come up with. Youtube to video is when you want to have a hard copy of a video you like off  YouTube. It can be a little difficult to download youtube videos sometimes, but it can be done. You can get into Motion 5 and making video effects. Will you be making a video for YouTube? Check out a YouTube tutorial.