Since my first video in April, my process and systems for making Youtube have changed a lot. They were in flux for the first 7 months of the channel’s existence, but they have stabilized.
As the first post unrelated to a channel video, I wanted to take the time to break down the various tools that I use to go from idea to published Youtube video. Some of you may be interested in educating on Youtube, but maybe don’t know what kinds of things you should be doing to start it. This is my current list, and I know that it will probably change in the future, but I thought it would be helpful to document them for others.
Let’s get started.
Filming Equipment
iPhone 14 Pro Max
I don’t do it a lot, but sometimes I put my face on my Youtube videos. When I do, I use my iPhone. From my perspective, the type of phone itself does not matter all that much. It’s merely a way for me to record myself.
Of course, I’d like to get a dedicated camera in the future, but I would have a hard time telling you why that might have advantages over a phone camera. It would be more so because I like purchasing tech, rather than any need for the channel.
DJI Mic
What mattered more to me was my mic. I knew that getting good sound was very important for keeping people on my videos. I technically use two mics — the DJI Mic (shown in the picture) and the Rode VideoMicro — but I use the DJI mic 99% of the time.
I’ll be the first to say that you don’t need this bougie of a mic. I splurged on this purchase because it had two features that were just really convenient for me:
It was wireless and has impressive range, opening possibilities for future videos
You can directly connect it to your computer to get your voice overs.
For my videos, which are mostly faceless, all I need to do to record voice over is take the DJI Mic and walk to my car to talk for about half an hour. I don’t have access to a quiet room, so my car is the next best thing. There were a few videos where I recorded in my small ass closet, but this sucked so it didn’t last long.
Software
Obsidian
Obsidian is a free note-taking app. It has some paid features, and one that I take advantage of is for syncing across all my devices. All of the files are in Markdown format, and the app allows you to create your own linkages between documents. It is less fancy than something like Notion, but that simplicity was something I craved in an app like this.
I use Obsidian as a “second brain” in my more general life, and I have extended it to contain all of the scripts and planning that I do for my videos. The main idea here is that Obsidian is a place to hold all of this information, but any other note-taking app could take its place. It’s only because Obsidian pervades my entire life that I use it.
My writing process currently goes as follows:
Commit to a video idea because it’s too easy to juggle ideas and not get any progress on any of them
Write an outline of how I want the video to go. I consider outline writing to be the equivalent of writing the actual script itself, not “lesser”. It’s akin to pseudocode for the actual script, and makes it MUCH faster to write it because I have the backbone already.
Write the script according to this outline.
Read it in voiceover / on-camera
In the past, I have had to go through this process so fast that I don’t typically have time to edit/revise it. As a result, mistakes often crop up while I’m editing or they might regrettably make it into the uploaded video.
In future videos, I hope to incorporate a better check for this, but I am currently trying to find a new upload schedule that works better with my research. I’ve found that it’s easier to just focus on one optimization to your systems at a time and internalize it rather than juggle many simultaneously.
Figma
Figma is an application for design. It is free for individuals and there are some paid tiers that I’m not quite familiar with.
I design all of my thumbnails in Figma, and I also create other visuals that I need for a video. Keeping all the images together in one place helps with consistency, something I have struggled with in the past.
I am by no means a great designer, but I’ve learned enough of the tool to leverage it in all my videos. I am scared of running into copyright issues with images and gifs, so I do my best to make the design myself when the need arises.
Midjourney
Some designs are too complicated for me. This doesn’t come up a lot, but for this, I also use Midjourney. I am definitely not using it to its full potential, I mostly use it to construct simple logos and icons in cases where I am too lazy or unskilled to do it myself. The hammer logo used in the thumbnail for this post was made in Midjourney.
Final Cut Pro X
Editing is by far the most time-consuming task of the video making process. I use Final Cut Pro X to edit video. In high school, I learned about editing and my class used an older version of the software. I know there’s other software out there, but this one just had the least overhead for me to learn.
My workflow is almost entirely in the Apple/Mac space, but that’s mostly because that’s what I’ve been using. I don’t think there’s any superiority between using Mac or Windows when it comes to creating an education channel.
Adobe’s Enhance Speech Tool
I will be upfront and say I have very little knowledge on how to make audio files sound good. I had a mic that let me record better audio than my phone mic, but I was never really satisfied with how it sounded.
Instead of learning how to do that, I turned to Adobe’s Enhance Speech tool, which is also used to improve podcast audio. The tool uses artificial intelligence to make your audio sound better. From what I can hear, this involves removing background noise, removing weird noises my mouth makes, and helping the sound to be around the same level across the entire clip.
This tool is free to use with constraints. At the time of writing, free users can only upload one audio file at a time, with a maximum of duration per file and a limit on the total duration of audio clips analyzed. The free option served me very well for a long time, and it was so integral that I decided to use the paid version just for some extra conveniences (higher file limits, modulation of how much the audio is altered).
R & Python
I do code demonstrations for my statistics videos. I feel like the code component really drives home the more theoretical aspects and gives someone something to work with themselves. Since I use R in my daily life as a PhD student, I also use it in my videos. In the spirit of open-source, I also make my code available on Github for people who want to play with the code.
I also use Python for my videos, but mostly to create mathematical animations through the manim library. If you haven’t heard of it before, manim is how 3Brown1Blue makes those beautiful animations, so I use it to make janky, simple animations. This also implicitly requires me to know LaTeX, which I only have a working knowledge of.
Conclusion
There are other, smaller parts to my process, but the things I’ve listed here get me 99.9% of the way done with my video projects. I hope this has been somewhat helpful!
I haven’t decided on a system for writing posts to the newsletter, so these types of non-video posts will be sproadic. If there’s content you’d like to see or know about, please let me know! The point of the newsletter is to add a small bit of additional value on top of the videos