You Ask, I Answer: Morning Video Production Process?

In today's episode, Claire asks, what's your current morning video production process look like? Well, I haven't updated this since about 2018, so uh a lot has changed since then. Uh a lot has stayed the same. Uh some things you're gonna need uh up front. First, you're gonna need to have uh the Camtasia software or the video editor of your choice.

I use Camtasia, uh does an amazing job for being able to record stuff. You will need a text editor of some kind um because you you're gonna be doing a lot of uh editing of text. You're going to need uh some services. So I use uh a service called otter.ai, which is for transcripts and closed captions. I use the Libsyn podcasting platform, uh which is where the audio host is hosted.

I use YouTube and I use uh a couple of utilities. One is called uh FFmpeg, uh which is a free command line utility software for the for Mac, Windows and Linux. Um on the Macintosh uses a piece of software called Homebrew that allows you to install these command line utilities. Uh you're also gonna need well you don't need, but it's some sort of note-taking system that can organize and store notes. And one of the most powerful pieces of software is a uh keyboard macro uh generator.

Uh I use one called Alfred for the Mac. Uh I know there are similar ones like Text Expander for the PC that you can use that do the exact same thing. They uh fundamentally allow you to store uh clips of text. So let's look at the process. We first begin by getting a question together.

So here's yesterday's question. I'll start by writing the title, uh, get the question in place, and then I write out a short answer uh as the starting point. We're gonna need this shortly. The next step is to record the video. So here's yesterday's episode.

In Camtasia, I always render to a local file. Don't use these other options, they just take too long. Uh rendering to a local file is easiest. I use the main concept MP4 in Camtasia because it is the smallest file size while still delivering decent quality. Options-wise, I typically do uh either 24 or 29.

Uh there, good balance of file size, uh smoothing audio encoding. Now to save time, um, I'm not gonna render the video, that would be silly. Um, but that's Camtasian in a nutshell. It you line up your stuff. One important thing about this whole process is that there's a lot of things that you assemble beforehand.

So, for example, I have my title sequence. I built that in Camtasia as well, and rendered it to a single straight video, and that just stays as as a part of the template in the editing software. I have the uh clo I have my uh lower third here, which is the call to action, and I have a closer video as well. Having those templates in place allows me to then take out you know that day's video and move this up here, I'm gonna need this later, um, and be able to stick new video in here and do it very quickly. Right, I don't have to rebuild all these pieces, it really is just like a template.

So, once the video is done, what happens? Well, if we go to my desktop here, uh we see there's yesterday's video, right? Our next step is to turn that video into audio because audio is really important for things like the podcast as well as the transcript. So, using the command line tool, let's go to the desktop here. And FFmpeg is the tool that you use.

Um, there is no interface for it, it is purely a command line tool. So there's the video file. I want it to reduce it to one audio channel, so AC1, so converting it from stereo to mono because it really is just a talking head video, and I want to set the variable quality down to two, which when you listen to it for the spoken word is fine. If this was a musical performance, this would be an appalling thing to do. But it's not.

Depending on how you use services like Libson and stuff, you may be able to upload straight to your FTP server there as opposed to going to the web interface. Either way is fine. Let's go ahead and go to the browser. One of the shortcuts that I use that saves me a tremendous amount of time is the ability to trigger uh multiple changes at once. So let's look at what this looks like.

Go ahead and pull up Alfred here. If I go to my workflows, I have this which will open up all these different web pages plus multiple apps at the same time, so that I can get everything done in one shot. You'll see it'll open up a bunch of tabs. My FTP client opens up at the same time. My uh my screen uh my snag at uh screen capture software opens up each time.

Uh opens up my text editors, so a bunch of things happen all at once. Again, saves time. Remember I said that we need to have the text file handy. So you take that your title, and that it gets swapped in here, and this is this file becomes now the uh YouTube thumbnail. So we're gonna drag that to the desktop, and um also it's gonna become part of the blog post.

So first things first, we want to make sure we upload our MP3 file. So you just drag that in. I did that yesterday. Um typically for every recorded minute of audio, it's gonna take you probably about a minute of processing time. So if your videos are like 20 minutes long, bear in mind it's gonna take about that long for the software to process it.

While that's happening, uh it's a great time to again take go from your text editor where you've you've done all the writing, take your copy, take our answer, paste that there, and we will want to get the header image, drop that in. Again, one of the nice things about Alfred, the ability for it to whoops, um to store multiple clipboards so I can go back in time uh and use my pasted text, insert that into the post. There we go. So there's my header image. Now again, another productivity shortcut.

Those text snippets are gonna come in real handy because I need to have YouTube, the audio, and a place for the transcript. So I have all these things stored as snippets. I hit two keys on the keyboard, it fills in the rest of the blog post. Now, let's go ahead and start uploading to YouTube. Drag in our file here.

Again, same multiple clipboard. Can I move this to the screen? Yeah. So there's my multiple clipboard, right? I can push in my title, push in my text, and now another text snippet.

I have one for YouTube that fills in all the calls to action I want on my YouTube video. We're going to copy that shortcut. Go back here, paste it right in the template, copy. Now that takes care of the embed, it takes care of the um link to the video. With my MP3 file, Libson allows me allows you to just upload audio files.

So I take this MP3 file, copy the name of it, drag it and drop it here again. I did that yesterday, I don't want to duplicate it, so I'm gonna move that out. And then I paste in the name of the file, and now I've got my MP3 audio there. So that takes care of being able to have the linked audio there. Remember that with WordPress, when you link an audio file, an MP3 file, it automatically turns your blog feed into a podcast feed.

There's very little additional work you need to do in order for it to work. Next, we'll go through and obviously set our categories. This one was from yesterday, so this was analytics and uh marketing and research. I think were the topics yesterday. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to go to our file here.

We're gonna do two exports in Otter. One, we're gonna export the raw text itself. I want this as a monologue. And in Otter, we're gonna take that and bring into a text editor. Now, I have a shortcut again, no surprise here, that allows me to take that big text and basically it just adds two line breaks after every period so that uh it reads a little easier.

I'm gonna cut cut that out of here, out of the text editor, go back to our blog post. There's our machine-generated text uh transcript now. Nice big fat blog post. Second thing we're gonna do, I'm gonna export the SRT file. This is the closed captions file.

Very, very important file. In YouTube, go to YouTube here. Yep, I know process is a duplicate of one already done. Uh let's go ahead and close this and do a just open up yesterday's. So I've got my thing there.

Remember that thumbnail I made in for the blog post header? Because of its format, it just goes right here in the YouTube thumbnail. So now I've got the consistent thumbnail, reuse the same piece of code. After this, one of the things that I've done that saved myself time is I have YouTube keyword lists that I put together over this is over the years, so it's not something that's immediate for all these different topics. So being able to go in and just select and copy and paste them right into YouTube saves time.

I can tag it and have it be mostly correct. After that, we upload your R SRT files. So our subtitles, we load those subtitles up. In this case, I've already done it, but it's just connected to the SRT file, and this allows you to have uh English by YouTube. YouTube will give precedence and preference to the SRT files that you uh upload versus the ones it automatically does.

If you don't upload a closed caption, it will try to do a transcript of it. This is okay if you're not ever saying anything that has any kind of jargon or specialized words. It is not great. Um you've seen some pre-hilarious translation fails on YouTube. When you use a service like Otter, uh, you have the ability to define your own dictionary of words that you use a lot that are more jargony that will get it correct inside YouTube.

Again, super important that you do that because a part of the reason for doing this is so that you have findable keyword text inside the video itself. Google will analyze the video uh and and identify um those words and phrases and use it to help match your video in the recommendation engine. So you want that customized transcript as as best as possible. Okay, so let's assume that the YouTube video is has finished loading, which it has in this case. Our next step uh is to upload to LinkedIn.

Now I have my personal profile, I have the company profile, and I have uh the podcast profile. I'm gonna load the video. We're gonna select our video here, edit. Generally speaking, if a service like LinkedIn gives you the option to do things like load closed captions, you want to do that, right? So I'm gonna use my closed caption file there.

Um if you have a thumbnail that you want to use, uh like we do, you can go ahead and use that. Looks nice. And then we fire up our old clipboard, remember? Our friendly clipboard. Oops, that's the transcript.

I don't want that. Uh there you go. And then again, more shortcuts. Have the ability to fire off uh these shortcuts. You may have to trim down some of your text in order to fit your shortcuts in.

Uh, but then you repeat that, and again, one of the nice things that you can do is you can have many, many, many of these uh different shortcuts. So if you have like I have one for trust insights that spits out our stuff there, one for marketing over coffee. Each time I go through LinkedIn on these different profiles, I upload the video, the first half of the post is the text snippet, the summary, and then the second half are the different calls to action, so that it's contextually appropriate for the page that I'm on. So once that's done, then we can see it just go through and validate the blog post. You've hit publish on YouTube at this point.

So you've got your post, you've got uh your video preview, which in this case is not working because we abandoned it. We've got our podcast preview, we've got our calls to action, we've got our machine generated transcript. At this point, you hit go, right? You hit publish. I'm not gonna do that again because this is literally a duplicate of yesterday's post.

So we're gonna actually delete that. And once you've got your post, then it's a question of just taking it and loading it into a system like Agora Pulse. So you'll fire up Agora Pulse. And you start choosing your networks and obviously all the stuff that you wanna to share. From beginning to end, this process, if you've got if you've done the groundwork to establish the templates, the keyword lists, the graphic look, all these different things.

The process takes 35 to 45 minutes a day is what it takes to run this whole thing from beginning to end. But if you d get in the habit of it and you get good at it, um and you have all the the necessary little bits to make it work, it's very efficient and it allows you to create a lot of content uh very very quickly. So if you do a um like you know live streams, it it actually is even easier depending on your live streaming software. So I use uh a piece of software called uh OBS, so open broadcast studio. Open broadcast studio, one of the really nice things that it has built into it, I'll bring it up on screen here.

Whoa, that one too. Um is it has the ability to when you're doing your outputs to record your video, right? You so you can take your videos um and record them locally on your uh machine, and you can choose the format like MP4 is probably the best format to save as. Um and what happens when you do that, then of course, you get the the video from your stream right on your desktop, and that's what you pop right into Camtasia. Saves you a tremendous amount of time.

No monkeying around with um uh you know, trying to rip files off of YouTube to save the file locally. If your streaming software does not allow you to do that, um there is a tool called YouTube DL. Uh let's bring that up here. And YouTube DL is a command line program. It allow again like FFmpeg that allows you to take a page uh and rip the video from it uh as long as it's public.

So if you have if you've been streaming on Facebook, you would use YouTube DL and you know whatever the the Facebook URL is uh to download that video and into a local format and then you pop that into Camtasia. So that's the process from beginning to end. Go back, rewatch it, um, see how the different in pieces interact with each other. It does it will take you time to get up to speed, but once you're at speed, it's it it's very clean. Um you can also obviously outsource any part of it if you have an agency or an assistant or something, feel free to show them this video, and uh they can follow as many of these steps as makes as it makes sense for their own workflow.

Just remember to be consistent about it, right? Once you've got a process in place, it's easy to follow the recipe. It's like like baking. If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.