I’ve been making YouTube videos where I rant about Linux and security for about a year now. It has taken me time to find my niche, but it worked out to be no-nonsense rants about unintuitive ideas. I’m by no means popular, but I have amassed about 3,000 subscribers which is more than I thought I would.
My workflow for making these videos is quite simple. This is important, because I’m not a professional video maker by any means. This post will not be about the right or best practice ways to do things. This is just the pattern I’ve naturally started operating in.
First, I write an outline for the video. I like to tell myself part of the charm is the mostly unscripted rants I go into, coherent or not. So I stick to a simple outline, usually about 10 bullet points I want to go on about.
For filming the video, I have yet again, a simple solution. I use my iPhone 16 Plus as my camera, mounted on a tripod, and with a Blue Yeti microphone plugged into it. The mic was like $50, but worth every penny. You can have bad video quality, bad editing, etc on YouTube, but bad audio is unforgivable, so don’t cheap out on that part.
I capture the video using live multicam in Final Cut Pro on my iPad Pro M2 11”. Even though I don’t use multiple angles usually, I do like doing it this way to keep the footage synced to my editing device automatically.
Oh, and editing. See my videos are two, maybe three video tracks, and a couple audio tracks. I due process the audio to remove the hum of my central heat and air, but that is about it. But for doing the editing, I’m utilizing Final Cut Pro on my iPad Pro M2 (and sometimes my iPad Mini A17Pro.) This is overkill for what I do – like I said I have maybe three video tracks on any given project. But it allows me to over saturate the picture and reduce the pitch of my voice track to make it seem like I successfully completed puberty 15 years ago.
And so, that is how the sausage is made. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated. And if I could offer one piece of advice to anyone looking to get started on YouTube – keep. It. Simple. Simple shot framing. Simple audio. Simple editing. Don’t try to use chroma keying or special effects on your first videos. They will look awful and turn people away. It is better to have a clean simple video than a poor production quality where you try lots of fancy tricks.
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