 In this video, I want to spend some time talking about the video production process and what we've learned over the years about how videos are best produced. Now, these days very often people are used to making videos very quickly for their family purposes and it's so easy to simply take out a phone and make a video. But I think people many often forget there's sort of a hockey stick need in terms of the growth of skill and ability needed to make a video. So to make videos of a family for a toddler or edit together a little bit of a holiday retrospective, that is well within the reach of pretty much anybody these days. But if you want to record a lecture, record with a green screen, or even edit a multi-camera video, that's actually beyond the skills of most people. And it's not that anybody could not learn it, but it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of time to do it, and also there's a lot of information and knowledge and skills that people have to develop if they want to do it well. So I think that's important to remember as we think about creating videos and think about where on here are our skills and where our willingness to create these videos. And luckily some of the tools that we have actually take some of these more difficult things and put them down here where it's much more within reach of most people to create videos. Now we talked about production quality in the previous video, but let me just again summarize what is part of that production quality. Well, we need to have good lighting, and often people use props, we need to think about camera angles, so often higher production will change the camera angles, often different shots, we have background music, animations, and simply just a general look of what we're producing is important. So we need to think about which of these things are important to us and adjust our production needs and our planning to all of that. And traditionally the higher the production quality, the more of a team you need to do it, and if you ever watch credits at the end of a film, you know that the teams are getting bigger and bigger. Whereas on the other side of the production is self-production. But these days with many of the tools that we have, we don't necessarily have to sacrifice too much of the production quality for the high quality in term, even if we're producing our videos ourselves. So some of the traditional production, and often people still give that advice that these are things that are necessary, but with the new tools I think we don't need them, is the traditional production often requires, goes in sort of three steps and very broadly summarize. So first you start with a script, and that has to be quite detailed. You have an outline, then you write the text, and then you do many, many rewrites to get it quite right. And it can take a long time to create a good script. Then once you have a script, you create a storyboard. And that's your plan of how each shot in the video will look. You plan out the individual shots. You worry about continuity, how things change from shot to shot, how many angles you need. And then you'll do the production at the end. And of course that itself is a massive process. You need to create a graphics, you'll get your props. You need to shoot the video, and then you need to edit it. And all of those things take a lot of effort. And there are specialists in many areas of the video production process. But with something like RapidMOOC, which is what I'm using right now to record this video, the production can be a lot simpler than that. And one person can record a video that is good enough for the purposes of instructional videos. So what I'm doing right now, I'm standing in front of a green screen and between the green screen and the RapidMOOC unit. And whatever is green behind me is replaced by a presentation, which is a simple PowerPoint. And the way I prepare this is I start with an outline. I outline what I want to say. I created a PowerPoint based on that outline. Now I could have created a script, but I didn't do that. I'm just speaking, following my outline. And then I'm recording. So in three steps, I can have a video very easily done. I can, at the end, edit the video, but I cannot, because RapidMOOC allows me not to do that. I actually don't do that. I simply finish talking, push, pause, and that's my video done. Now there are many alternative tools for video production of different style. And the easiest one of them is a PowerPoint. You may not realize that, but in a slide show, you can simply record a slide show and add a video of yourself or not. And then you go to export, and then choose the quality of your video and simply export a video. And you have a video that you can upload on YouTube. So it's a very easy way of recording a video simply with a PowerPoint. Of course, it's going to be looking very different from this, but it's pretty much anything that you can put in a PowerPoint you can make into a video. But there are many, many tools out there. One that teachers often like, or it's quite well known in the world of education, which is a way of creating sort of an animated presentations, videos, and it's an entirely web-based service. It's been around for many years, but it has many alternatives. There's GoAnimate, there's Movely, Animaker, Luminify, all these other tools, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. So if you were interested in creating more infographic style videos, you can certainly look at some of those tools. If you wanted to make screencasts, there are tools like Camtasia, which is quite expensive and complicated, but there's a cheap or free version called Screencast Stomatic online one, there's Filmora, and these are just the ones that I've used. There are many, many out there, including actually PowerPoint has its own built-in screen recording feature as well. And if you wanted to make videos where people animate descriptions, animate sort of writing as part of the video, you can use video scribe, doodling, explain videos. So there are, again, and these are just a three of several tools out there that you can choose from, and many of these, some of them are download, some of them work directly in your browser. Now, no matter which tools you use to create your videos, what should be your priorities? And actually from the research and also from just experience, it turns out that the biggest amount of time should be spent on good sound. So sound is actually, it turns out more important than the video quality than all the other production elements, such as lighting, such as having props and multiple camera angles and so on. So focus on getting good sound, and the other things really don't seem to matter so much when it comes to production. So that's all for this video. In the next video, we're going to have a look at creating an outline and then how to make a PowerPoint from an outline, and then finally how to record it with RapidMoc.