[MUSIC, Title: "Lights, Camera, Action—Oops!"] [David] Teaching online, you're likely going to use a lot of video. You might pre-record videos, or you might teach live via camera. Either way, it can be tempting to just hide your own camera feed and stick to slides and visuals. And it's fine to do that sometimes, but it's important to remember your video is about more than just presenting your content. Video is also your chance to foster connections with your students. Now remember, these students don't get to be in the same room with you, so video is where they truly get a sense of who you are. Now, with that in mind, we should chat a bit about producing good video. But as we do, I want you to keep two things in mind. First, the reason why we emphasize these practices is not because there's some requirement that you'd be really good at creating video to teach online. These practices instead focus on using video to build connections. We're not talking about super advanced techniques. You don't need to be the next Hitchcock, or Spielberg, or film something as sophisticated as whatever YouTuber is popular nowadays. Instead, these are just simple things you can do to make your videos feel more personal. And second, if at any point you feel overwhelmed, don't fret. These practices are about making your videos better, but any video is better than no video at all. Our hope is to give you a lot of simple tips that can make a big difference. But at first, they may not feel simple, especially if you're new to teaching video in the first place. If you're overwhelmed, just ignore us for a while and go film your videos however you're comfortable. Then, later, once you've gotten some practice, come back and see these tips again. By then, you'll probably find that some of them are easier to put into practice than you may have thought. [MUSIC, Interlude: "Cameras - Small Differences Can Have a Big Impact"] [David] Let's start this by talking about your equipment for a bit. The equipment that you choose is probably the place where the smallest decisions can have the biggest impact. But at the same time, there are thousands of options out there for cameras and microphones and more, and it's extremely easy to get overwhelmed. And you might be wondering, "Can't I just use my laptop microphone and camera?" And the answer is "Of course you can!" You can use whatever you want. But we want to make sure you know what you're getting and what else is out there. So right now, I'm filming with my preferred setup. It's a Logitech Brio 4K camera and a Yeti Blue microphone. And I'd say this equipment is pretty top of the line for desktop filming. It's not the camera you'd use to film a movie, but it's a pretty sophisticated setup. Now before I got this camera, I used an older, cheaper Logitech camera. This one. Now, the picture quality isn't bad, but it's certainly not as good as my new camera. The viewing angle is too narrow though. I have to keep my hands all the way up here for you to see them. If I'm motioning down here, you can't see what I'm pointing at. And I find that there's more of a challenge with the light balance on this webcam, because it doesn't have its own light sensor. Let's freeze my 720p feed for a second and do a side by side comparison with my 1080p feed. Notice how I'm a little bit more crisp here. I also have another 1080p camera. This one... Now, this one certainly shows more. You can see my hands better, but it has kind of this weird, curvy, fisheye effect to it. And I always find that the color balance on this camera is a little off. I'll look red and flushed on this camera when I look normal on other cameras. Now, lately I've also been experimenting with something called a Center Cam. Which looks like this. Now the interesting thing about Center Cam is, it actually comes down on a stick from the top of your monitor to sit right in the middle of your screen. That can make it easier to look at the camera while also looking at your script, or looking at your students. But because it has to be that small, it lacks some of the sophisticated lighting features of some of the fancier cameras. And it can be a bit hard to get the focus just right, because it's a manual focus, not automatic. Now, you might just be accustomed to using your laptop camera, and I've got one of those too. Now, depending on your laptop, it might be a really nice camera. The challenge with laptop cameras is usually more about camera positioning, which we'll talk more about in another video. But right now I've got my laptop on top of a pile of books, so that I'm looking even with the camera. But that makes the keyboard kind of hard to use and the angle is still pretty narrow, so I have to have my hands up here for you to see them. Now, you probably have a lot of other options at your disposal as well. And in fact, right now, you're probably holding in your pocket the most advanced camera you might ever touch: your smartphone camera. Don't sleep on the idea of using your smartphone camera to film videos. It's actually a great camera, and selfie videos like this can feel very personal. Now, if you're going to do this a lot, I do recommend getting a tripod, because it's very difficult to hold your camera steady while filming a video. The bigger issue with your smartphone camera is that you're not likely to use it along with slides or visuals or whatever else you're showing. And the audio quality can be a little bit spottier. We'll talk more about what these smartphone microphones sound like in a few minutes. [MUSIC, Interlude: "Microphones and Your Recording Environment"] [David] Your audio quality is way more important than your video quality for creating engaging videos. As long as students can see enough of the detail to understand the content, then whatever video you can muster is probably going to be fine. But if the audio quality is lacking, listening can become an absolute chore, and that's going to wear down students far more. So for this video, I've been recording with my Yeti Blue microphone. It's a big, clunky thing, but it sounds great, and it has a ton of settings to tweak, if you're into that sort of thing. But one thing it suffers from is a little bit of echo. If you're in an echoey room, your audio can sound a bit hollow. If that's the case, you might want to try a lapel microphone. A lapel microphone can be a great option. Because it sits so close to your mouth, it captures the sound more directly and tends to cancel out some of the echo. This one I've got here is just a $20 USB lapel microphone from Amazon, so it doesn't need to be anything fancy. Honestly, even though I use my fancy Yeti microphone most of the time, for most of you, a USB lapel microphone, is going to be your best bet. It's way cheaper, way more portable, and it's way less sensitive to room noise. Your webcam also comes with its own microphone. I find webcam microphones are extremely hit or miss, though. This one you're listening to now is the microphone of my Brio camera, which is above average for webcam microphones, but not quite as good as the lapel or my standalone mic. And this is the microphone on my other webcam, you can tell there's a pretty big quality difference. Can you imagine listening to an entire course on this microphone? I can't. If you're filming with your smartphone, you'll probably use its microphone, which is what you're hearing now. Through the magic of editing, we've merged the audio from my phone with the video from my webcam. But don't worry, you'd never do that in practice. This is just to show you the audio difference. Your smartphone microphone might be perfectly fine, but it tends to make audio a little bit tinny and high, rather than full and robust. So, if you're filming on a smartphone, you might also consider using a Bluetooth headset for the audio. Again, the quality is going to differ a lot from headset to headset and you're probably going to find it's still a bit high and whiny, but if you're filming on the go, you might find it keeps your audio volume far more consistent. If you're filming on a laptop, you'll be tempted to use your laptop's built-in microphone, which is what you're hearing from me now. Again, this is my laptop microphone with my regular webcam. Depending on your specific computer, that might be totally fine. But generally, laptop microphones are not great options for a couple of reasons. One is that, like smartphone microphones, laptop microphones are shrunk down for portability, which inhibits the quality of the sound they capture. But what's even more problematic, is that laptops can be noisy and you can't separate the microphone from the physical laptop. Often that means you're going to have a fuzzy buzzing sound in the background throughout your entire video, which can be a real pain for students to listen to. So, if you're filming on a laptop especially, I'd recommend going with a cheap lapel microphone instead. This really just scratches the surface of selecting your camera and your microphone. There are so many more things we could talk about, like other headset microphones, or fancy DSLR cameras. But I'm worried we may have already overwhelmed you. Our goal here, is just to give you some basic ideas to get started, as well as to show you what a difference small upgrades can make. If you're overwhelmed, though, just keep in mind the law of diminishing returns. Just switching from your built-in laptop or webcam microphone to a lapel microphone is probably going to make more of a difference to your final video quality than just about everything else you can do put together. But unfortunately, there's more to it than just having the right equipment. You also need to know how to use it. And that's what we'll talk about in the next video. [Barb] I'm Barb Oakley. [David] I'm David Joyner. [Terry] I'm Terry Sejnowski. [All] Learn it, link it, let's do it!
