 Hello everyone and welcome to our spring 2019 workshop and webinar series. Today we are focusing on recording videos in Southwestern College's green room. And we have green room guru, Andre Ortiz with us today, to walk us through the room, show us how it works, and show you how you can start using it right away to make videos for your courses. Before we go into the recording room, I wanted to share with you a video that Andre has made that will be really helpful for you as you're thinking about the kinds of videos you might want to make. And so right now I am on the DE at SWC website, and I am under the Making Videos page on the Resources tab. And so there's some information here about how to use Camtasia and the videos that you record in the room, maybe something that you want to edit in Camtasia. And then here is some information about how to sign up, and Andre will go over that with us today. And then here is his video that I wanted to share with you. So this is an introduction to the recording room, but it also is using the recording room footage to make the video. So let's take a look at this before we take a look at the room. And as the audio starts, let me know in the chat if it needs to be turned up. I didn't see you there. Hologram, on. I'd like to introduce a new service offered through professional development and training services. Follow me. This new service will be available to administrators, faculty, and classified professionals. Well, it may not look like much right now, but this is a new green room at Southwestern College. What is a green room, you ask? Well, it is a room that has been set aside to do various types of recordings. And while right now it looks like nothing is there, with a little thought in district funds, we can start adding some essentials like carefully placed acoustic foam panels, a 4K camera with a 24-piece setting to give you that Hollywood look. Along with the camera, we have a road video mic and a lavalier mood for close audio recording. A blue Yeti microphone for voiceover narrations, such as this one. A green screen to add a little movie magic to your videos. Baby, what would you like to be for Halloween? Indirector Transformers. Or place you in a distant time with majestic creatures. So what do you think of Jurassic World so far, Leah? I like the bracket sources and I saw the T-Rex and the Raptors. Hey, wait a minute. Where's your brother? I don't know. You will also be able to pick between IBM and Apple computers to edit yourself in this version of space? Unless I told you what never told you what happened to your father. He told us enough. He told us that you fired him. No. I am your father. Hey guys! Or if you prefer, this one. Second starter the right and straight on till morning. Along with this available service, we will offer training and demos on how to set up for your recording needs. You know on campus, I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you what videos to make. I came here to show you what your videos can be. I'm going to hang up this phone and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without whiteboards, without markers or transparencies. A world where videos are possible. Where we go from there. Is a choice I leave to you. But first, I need some coffee. Thank you for watching and we'll see you at your movies. I've watched that video probably 15 times and it is equally funny every single time. So I think we need to give Andrei a little round of applause here, even though you're muted. You outdid yourself. Yay, that was great. Absolutely awesome. Great job. So funny. Loved it. And Andrei, how much time did it take you? How much time did it take you to make that video? Well, all in all, they were done in several takes because first of all, I had to coordinate with my kids because with their busy schedules as Hollywood stars now, they're consumed all day. But along with them and figuring out which days, of course, after school, they could come in and do very quick clips. It didn't take a long time. What took the longest was probably planning the scenes and bringing the props and all that kind of stuff, getting them dressed too. So it wasn't that long. All in all, it was probably a couple of hours. Green screen, we should probably be back up a little bit and explain that for people who haven't used it before. So the recording room has a green screen built in and a lot of people choose to use it for that. But as Andrei explained, there are some other options. So basically what a green screen does, you record in front of this green colored background, and then you use Camtasia to pull the green color out and replace that background with whatever you want. It could be your course. It could be a PowerPoint presentation. It could be an image of a forest. It could be video footage underwater, anything that's an image or a video you can put behind you. So those scenes that Andrei with his movie star kids recorded were all using green screen. So it's set up to get the lighting just right for you to easily make those videos and then edit them in Camtasia, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But you also can just do basic recording because it does have really good sound and lighting already set up for you. And that's kind of the hassle factor with making videos sometimes is getting the lighting right and getting the audio set up right. And so this is designed to take those hassles out of it, even if you choose not to do the green screen. And I have to draw everyone's attention to the comment in the chat from Emily that she'll never see Andrei the same way again. So that's a good thing, right? But think about the impact a creative video can have on students. It really does change how they see you. Suddenly they see you with somebody who's not just the teacher, but who's a person who's got these interesting ideas and has a whole other life outside of being the teacher. And so that really humanizes you and lets them see you as approachable. And not that we are as creative as Andrei or could could have so many pop culture movie references in one film, but even just one of those. Imagine just a little piece where you're in costume, your students would never forget that. And so that's the kinds of things that the green room can let you do. So Andrei's video has a whole bunch packed into one just to show you lots of options, but even just one of those can really have a lasting impact on students. So what we're going to do is take a look at that room now. So the way that you saw it in the video was in the beginning and then the different pieces that he added in. But it is in use now, and in fact, is somebody in there right now, Andrei, doing recording? Can you hear him? So the point is... Alright, I'm knocking. Okay, I feel like we're giving a sweepstakes award away or something. Do you mind if I do a quick demo of the room? Yeah, sure. We have a webinar that we are showing and we wanted to catch someone in action. So there you see Luke. Say hi, Luke. Hi, Luke. You are on Zoom, by the way. So here's the room. Very quickly, we've got... And the cool thing about this room is that Luke can edit all of this out from his actual final product. It's beautiful. Yes, yes. So as you can see, he has his MacBook Pro or MacBook Air Ice, I mean, on a cart where he can read his script from. We've got the camera that you can see there. There's that green screen behind him and there's him. The camera with the microphone, he's using the boom mic, which is this thing right here. And as you can see, the room is set up with acoustic foam all throughout. That basically minimizes any sort of equity bounce back. You've got your Mac and your PC, which is missing a monitor right now because we had to borrow it, but the tower is still there. We're planning on getting a bigger monitor. And then, of course, right behind Luke is that fancy green screen. And as you can see, it wraps around two walls, which is pretty cool. I mean, it'd be cooler if we could actually move around the two walls, unfortunately, because of tight spaces we can't. But if you needed something bigger, something wider, maybe a full body shot, the screen itself could be taken out of this room and maybe put out here in the reception area or the lobby for you to do a full body shot. We also have, I don't know if you saw behind there, there's a mic for narration. So if you don't want to do a full on video of yourself and you just want to narrate something like a presentation on PowerPoint or a website, you have a fancy studio quality microphone that you could use. Did I leave anything? Can I just add that when you record, when you actually edit the thing later, you can leave a space on the side for yourself and you can throw it kind of like the Daily Show or something. You can throw up little pictures and images and even arguments that you're talking about so that it can be more dynamic than just talking over PowerPoint. Right. Luke, you do that in Camtasia, right? That's correct. Yes. Yeah. As you can see, we have Luke sitting pretty close to the corner. The reason for that is he leaves all of his right side, right? Right side. All of his right side open for him to go ahead and put any visuals besides the background. Anything that he may have behind him, he also has space on the right side to drop pictures or whatever content you may want to use in your videos. So one more time, running around the room. Well, I can't run because it's kind of small. Hey, Andre, can you show how he has his computer connected into the camera? Just kind of show that hookup. Oh, yes. So do you see that little card reader right there, the little square box that says IO Gear? It's probably hard to read because it's the other way around. So the camera has a memory card that you take out from the camera. You plug it into, again, if you have your laptop, your MacBook, plug it into your MacBook. If you have a flash drive, you can use either the PC or the Mac and transfer your files into your portable storage. Like I said, if you want to drop it on Google Drive and then download it at home, that's also doable. It's pretty easy. It's not hard to do it all once you get one, once you figure it out. All right, thank you, Luke. Sure thing. All right, we'll let him get back to his recordings. Promise I won't knock again. No worries. Thanks. That was great. I knew he'd be a good sport. So we had one question come in, Andre. Well, you guys were showing around the green room. The question was, let me scroll back up. When you are recording outside of the green room, like you did for your video, what is the minimum resolution you recommend? And do you have any other tips for recording outside of the room? It really depends on what your output really is. I think what Luke has been using so far is the lowest version of high definition, which is a 720p and YouTube plays really well with that. Actually, Camtasia plays really well with that too. And that gives you, even though, again, it's the lowest resolution and high definition, it still gives you nice, crisp video. When you bring that into Camtasia, it basically leaves it the same. And then in Camtasia, you have the option, of course, of downgrading if you wanted to. Upgrading won't really make any difference because you can't upscale something that is already low. If you have something that is, again, even though it's the lowest high definition and you downscale it, that works. It just makes the quality a little bit less sharp, but it still makes it readable, intelligible, et cetera, et cetera. If it comes in, a little choppy might be text. So start with the highest you have, and then you can always downgrade it in Camtasia if you need to. Right. The camera has 4K definition, which is what you hear about nowadays in TVs, which is double the high definition. You don't really want to shoot at 4K because it's not a movie. 720p, which is the next step up from 720, is probably also just as good. Again, it's not crucial for the videos that you might be making unless you're super concerned about quality and sharpness and detail. That's pretty much it. But 720p, which, again, it's the lowest on this camera, it's pretty good. And when you were recording the outside scenes, you were using a digital camera or digital camcorder, not a webcam on a surface, for example. Correct. Although the cameras on your phones are probably just as good because you can't set the recording dimensions on phones. These phones can record at 4K also. But where you would suffer would be at the audio because if you have a phone that's like 50 feet away from you, you're going to get pixelated video, but you're also going to get the distance issue unless you have a nice microphone hooked up to the phone. And actually, something that I have been using, and it's been great, is a lavalier mic that you plug into a phone. It takes up hardly any room at all. You can just keep it in your bag with you. And when you're ready to record video outside with a camera, you just plug it in and then you're ready to go. Unless you don't have a plug-in for a headset in your phone. But assuming that you do, you can just plug it in, put the lavalier mic on your shirt, and then the recording is picking up the audio from that much closer microphone instead of your camera. And there also are wireless versions. If that works better with your phone, they're a little bit more expensive and they're a little bit bigger. But there's actually a wireless lavalier mic in the green room. And so that's an option too. The wired ones are around $10, which is kind of hard to beat. When you have some video footage and you're ready to build on it and turn it into a video, here are the tools that you can use. The first one, Camtasia, is the editing software that we have been discussing for making videos like the one you saw. And so Camtasia and Snagit are part of a free site license for Southwestern College employees. So this is for all employees at the college. And you can have it installed on a campus computer through IT, or if you want to install it on your own computer or computers at home, then you're going to go through a form in the training services area of SharePoint. It will ask you to log in and then you will find some instructions, you'll put in your information, and then you'll get a license code that you can use. There will be one for Camtasia and there will be one for Snagit. And Snagit, by the way, is a screen. Let me back up a little. Well, Camtasia is mostly for video editing. Snagit is primarily for image editing. So it's a screen grab rather than a video. But it does do basic videos. And so I've actually used it for doing videos where I'm giving students feedback and I want to move in between a webcam video and sharing my screen. So both of those come free as part of the site license. You're welcome to download both. So once you have Camtasia installed on your device, you would bring in that recording that you did in the green room or that you did outside of the green room, which gets to the second thing that Dave was talking about, which is our multimedia checkout. So if you're interested in doing some recording outside and you're wondering what kind of hardware you might be able to use without having to go out and buy it, the multimedia services area, and again this will ask you to log in as well. We'll take you to a Service Now page where you can check out equipment. And so you'll see there are lots of things on here. There is a camcorder. And I'll put your attention to a couple of other things that are in here as well. These were actually funded through Program Review. So if you have some additional pieces you need to record but maybe you don't need the green room for it, you just want to add to that green room footage. There are headsets, which are USB headsets for recording audio. If you plan to record video and you don't want your headset to be on, you can check out a microphone and these are desktop microphones that are USB plug-ins. So basically you just sit in on your desktop and it's outside of your webcam recording area and it'll have much better quality than your onboard computer microphone. And we also have webcams for checkout. There are lots of computers on this campus that do not have built-in webcams and or microphones, and so you can check out a webcam as well. And so I can't speak to the checkout range for the camera, for the camcorder, but for the webcam, the microphone and the headset, those can be checked out and used over a period of several days or even several weeks, whatever you need. So these are all checked out through the multimedia equipment and then you pick it up on the first floor of the library, which is not the main floor, but the floor underneath it. Andre, are there some other notes or recommendations you wanted to give everybody about the room? Scripts are very useful because they will reduce the amount of time taken in recording your videos. So it doesn't have to be a full-fledged script. It could just be bullet points. It could be flashcards. The only thing with flashcards or with something taped to the side of the camera or anything to cameras that you move your focus from the camera to whatever it is you're looking at, especially if you're looking down. What I did want to let you all know is that we are investing in a mechanism that will provide a teleprompter on the camera, which is, you could use any mobile device, a tablet, a phone. And basically what it is, it's a reflective lens that the camera doesn't see it, but whatever you put underneath it will reflect on the lens, which lets you see it so you can get it directly off of the camera while looking at the camera. I second the importance of a script. Even if it's just roughed out notes, it really helps you stay focused and putting it right behind the camera or right next to the camera is key. So a teleprompter would really help with that because then it doesn't look like you are reading. And one other little note kind of tying into what Andre and Luke were talking about. When you're recording, it's okay to have some places where you mess up. You don't have to stop the recording and start over. You just keep going. And then in Camtasia, it's very easy to just cut out the areas that you don't want to use. So what we usually do is we just get it all set up. We press record and we go and we might do several pieces at a time. And then later on, you can just separate them and use them however you want to. So there isn't a lot of stopping, deleting, rewinding. In the recording room, you can just record everything. And then in Camtasia, you can play around with it. And Andre, is there room, if their two hours are up in the recording room, is there room in the area in the lobby out there for them to sit down and kind of look at the footage, see if they have what they need before they leave? So we have two PCs and two Macs right as you come in into the reception area where you can go ahead and verify the footage, make sure that you covered everything before you leave. If not, you can always come back into the room if it's not being used and rerecord. So this is the page that we were on where we were just watching this video. Right next to it is a form. And you'll find this on the training services page of the Southwestern College website as well. So this is in the professional development area. If you pull down that menu, you can see training services. And down at the bottom, you'll see the same things here. So we have it in both places. And so this is where you can book your session. And if you click on this, you can select your day, you can select your time. Andre asked you to reserve about 48 hours in advance. He's got a good reminder here to bring all of your props. If you want to be Darth Vader, you're going to need to bring your Darth Vader costume. Andre does not keep that in a costume area. So you can book it here. And then as we just heard, you can become a regular if you'd like to. And you can book it for, is it a two hour session, Andre? We normally let you book it for a period of two hours. We have three periods of two hours throughout the day. We allow an hour in between those two hour booking periods just to reset the room or if anyone decides to take it up a little longer. In this case, Luke decided to do so. He's one of our frequent patrons that likes to use the screen room. I've heard from him that the feedback that he's gotten from his students is spectacular. They actually look forward to the videos and they can't wait for the next one. So that's a good sign, I think. So if I click on a date, as I just did, you can see those are the three times that you can choose from. And Andre, do you want to talk a little bit about the walkthrough training to familiarize people with how to use the room? There is a two hour training called record and edit videos for office slash instructional use. I'm still planning out the calendar for this spring semester. So we'll have a couple throughout this semester, next semester, basically year round. And it shows you not just what's available in the room. It also talks about lighting and if you're planning on using maybe not necessarily a camera, but your phone. We go and cover that too. We walk into that green room and then I show you what difference a microphone makes as far as recording goes, like the onboard microphones on cameras while they may be good and they may offer the 5.1 surround sound, which is what you would expect from like a Hollywood movie sometimes picks up more than what you wanted to. And that actually interferes with your recording. That's why we offer the boom mic, which is that microphone on top of the clip on that goes on a piece of clothing. And actually the that's matrix scene that I did, I actually have the clip on. Of course, it was underneath my clothes so that you couldn't see it. But as you saw, it picks up audio really well, even though it's covered by one layer of clothing in this case. So we cover everything from like recording, if you're going to be using the green screen, if you're just going to be using a backdrop. I don't know if you can see, but behind me over here, there's this black thing that you could also use as a backdrop. That's actually, it's a base or a tripod for reflectors. So that actually has five coverings. You have two or three reflective coverings and then you have a white and a black. So if you don't want to do green screen, but you just want to have a solid background behind you, we could set that up in the room. So so that you have it as a background. If you're thinking, well, this sounds great, but I've never done this before and I have no idea how it's going to go. I want to share with you something to think about. And that is Camtasia training to kind of go along with the green room training. And so Camtasia is a really full featured editing suite. You can start simple. So there are a lot of tools in there that you may never need to use. But when you're ready, there are lots of tools that you can use to kind of, you know, kick it up a notch like green screen. There are also ways that you can add things to the screen like Luke was talking about where you could add in a box with some key points to it. There are ways that you can adjust the audio or even re-record a piece of audio if you need to. So it's a really flexible tool, but sometimes it's hard to know where those where those options are. So if you're interested in Camtasia training, I'm going to screen share one more time here. And if we go back over to the DESWC website and look at the training calendars, I wanted to let you know that every pre-semester how-to academy, and so that's the Academy of Technology Training related to DE that's offered the week of opening day every semester. Within that training academy, there's always going to be a making videos with Camtasia workshop. And this is a full day workshop that Andre and I host and you have a laptop with Camtasia on it. We take you into the green room so you can try it out and do a recording. And then we bring you back in the training room so you can edit it with some guidance in Camtasia. So we go through lots of different aspects of how to use Camtasia. And by the time that you're done, you'll have a video that you have recorded in the green room as well as with webcam and a screencast. And you'll have edited a little bit so that you know enough to continue doing that on your own. So that's offered at the beginning of each semester in that pre-semester week. And then also during the semester Andre has a couple of shorter Camtasia trainings that you could take one after the other as a refresher or if you weren't able to make the how-to academy. Do you want to talk about those for a minute Andre? Yeah, so we do Camtasia training as well. It's two sessions of two hours or part one, part two. Part one basically goes over the interface, some of the features. We talk about how to lay the tracks because it is important to know how the tracks work. So we cover all of that. Part two we actually do some of the more fancier stuff like the green screen. The more fancy effects. If you look at the first clip of the video where we introduced the room where it says, oh, carefully placed acoustic foams. I blocked out everything and put attention to just the little quadrants of film that I was showing. So we go over the fancier detailed effects that you can do in Camtasia in part two. Most of the time they're offered on the same day one right after the other. Maybe there's an hour break in between. But because we offer them more than once in a semester, if you can't take both at the same day, maybe you can take one day and the second part the other day, that's fine. So if we go back out to the DESWC website. So we were under resources, we were on the making videos page, which went over the site license and the recording room. And it actually has some more information here as well about how to caption, how to embed. But there is a page that I put together here specifically about making videos with Camtasia. It's actually the resource site we use for our full day training. And so on this site you will find, and you can access this even if you haven't gone to the training, you'll find some sample videos that we use during the training. So we walk through how we did this, what different tools we're using Camtasia to do different effects. And so you're welcome to watch these videos just to get some ideas. They were all made with Camtasia. And then at the bottom there's a downloadable script. There are some resource sites for where you can find free Creative Commons licensed images to put behind you when you're green screening, also videos. And at the very bottom are the slides, the workshop slides that we use for that full day training. So these Google slides are embedded on the page and you're welcome to go through and kind of get a sense of what we do. And a few slides in, you'll find some annotated examples within Camtasia. So you can see, you know, what you would do, what the recommendations are for all sorts of things, for resolutions, for audio, for webcam settings, for audio settings. So we walk through how to do green screening in here as well. And these are shots from Camtasia. So that's an option. And then the other one is there's a link at the very bottom to the Camtasia tutorials put out by that company, TechSmith. These are really good. And they're of course done by the people who make Camtasia. So they're crystal clear, very current, and there are lots of them. So this is their Start Here series. You can dig deeper in these series as well. So this is actually how I learned to use Camtasia. I was entirely self-taught and it was all through these Camtasia tutorials. So again, just to backtrack to where we started, this was all on the DESWC website. And it's under resources. Okay. So we have just a couple of minutes left and it looks like we have some questions that have been coming up in the chat. I can take this one. How do videos get posted to 3C media? The answer is you. So we have two captioning options at Southwestern College. One of them is the system-wide solution 3C media, which is what the 3C stands for, the CCCs. And you can make an account there for free and you can upload your video and you can click a button to have it captioned. And it will be captioned for you and then you can grab the embed code there and embed it into your Canvas course. So that's one option. The second option is to do the captioning through our college, which is funded by the same grant and actually uses the same captioning company. But you get a little something extra if you go through our college and that is the smart player, which looks like this. The same resources tab. There's a page that goes through how to embed a smart player. I'll show you what it looks like because it's included in here. This is what it looks like. So as you will see that the smart player has the interactive transcript. So it has a transcript. It has a search feature. So there are more things that you can do with it beyond just the captioning. So this is only available if you caption through our captioning service. If you go through CC media, you will just get the captions put onto the video, kind of like the central image that you see here. Both are free to you as a faculty member. And by the way, captioning is walked through on that first making videos page that we were looking at. So there's a section here on how to caption. There's a link to both 3C media and Southwestern College's captioning service. There's also another really cool feature that some of our video loving instructors have set up. And that is you can link your YouTube account to our captioning service so that when you request captioning through our campus, you get that smart player back, but you also get the caption file pushed directly into your YouTube video. So that gives you several options and a lot of flexibility. And if you're interested in that, there's a service now forum that you fill out. And that will go to me or to someone in the online learning center. And we will take about five minutes with you to link those two accounts together. All right. Well, we are just about out of time. Andre, thank you so much for that tour. I think everybody's really excited to use the green room. And we just can't thank you enough for making this happen for our college. And we're hoping to make it better. I mean, little by little, I mean, we have other ideas and plans. So baby steps, baby steps.