You Ask, I Answer: Morning Video Production Process?

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You Ask, I Answer: Morning Video Production Process?

Clare asks, “What’s your current morning video production process look like?”

I haven’t updated this since 2018 so it’s time for a refresh. Step behind the scenes to see how the magic happens.

Tools used:
Otter.ai – https://www.trustinsights.ai/otter
Camtasia 2020 – https://www.trustinsights.ai/camtasia
– Libsyn
– BBEdit / Atom Text Editor
– FFMPEG / optionally YouTube-DL
– Optionally OBS
SnagIt 2020 – https://www.trustinsights.ai/snagit
– Alfred App
– Homebrew for Mac
– Evernote / Joplin

FTC Disclosure: Linked items are affiliate links.

You Ask, I Answer: Morning Video Production Process?

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Listen to the audio here:

Download the MP3 audio here.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.

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 a lot has changed since then a lot of stayed the same.

Some things you’re going to need upfront first, you’re going to need to have the Camtasia software or the video editor of your choice I use Camtasia does an amazing job for being able to record stuff.

You will need a text editor of some kind, because you doing a lot of editing of text, you’re going to need some services.

So I use a service called otter.ai, which is for transcripts and closed captions.

I use the Libsyn podcasting platform, which is where the audio host is hosted.

I use YouTube and I use a couple utilities one is called FFmpeg.

Which is a free command line utility software for the for Mac, Windows and Linux.

And on the Macintosh uses a piece of software called homebrew that allows you to install these command line utilities.

You’re also going to need layout need, but some sort of note taking system that can organize and store notes.

And one of the most powerful pieces of software is a keyboard macro generator, I use one called Alfred for the Mac.

I know there are similar ones like text expander, for the PC that you can use that do the exact same thing.

They fundamentally allow you to store clips of text.

So let’s look at the process.

We first begin by getting a questions get this here’s yesterday’s question.

I’ll start by writing the title, get the question in place and then I read out a short answer as the starting point.

We’re going to 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.

Rendering to a local file is easiest.

I use them main concept mp4 in Camtasia, because it is built smallest file size while still delivering decent quality options wise I typically do either 24 or 29.

They’re good balanced file size, smoothing audio encoding.

Now to save time, I’m not going to rent a video, that would be silly.

But that’s Camtasia in a nutshell, if 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 my 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 going to mute this later.

And be able to stick new video in here and do it very quickly.

I don’t have to rebuild all these pieces really is just just like a template.

So once the video is done, what happens? Well, if we go to my desktop here, 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.

There is no interface for it is purely a command line tool.

So there’s the video file, I want it to reduce it to one audio channel.

So AC one so converting from stereo to mono, like I said, really is just a talking head video.

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 it’s it’s just a spoken word and it’s intended for use in like the car and stuff.

I don’t know To convert that to an mp3 What did I do wrong there? Oh, I forgot the I forgot the I command.

There we go.

And you’ll see that’ll take that yesterday’s video about a nine minute video or so it’s going to take go through, it’s going to convert it into an mp3 file and I’ve got my mp3 file.

Depending on how you use services like Libsyn 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 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 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.

So what this looks like is pretty straightforward.

You’ll see, it’ll open up a bunch of tabs, my FTP client opens up at the same time, my, my screen, so I snag a screen capture software opens up each time, open 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 YouTube thumbnail so I’m going to drag that to the desktop.

And also is going to 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.

Typically, for every recorded minute of audio, it’s gonna take you probably about a minute of processing time.

So if your video is like 20 minutes long, bear in mind, it’s gonna take about that long for the software to process it.

While that’s happening, it’s a great time to, again, take 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 oops, to store multiple clipboards so I can go back in time and use my pasted text, insert that into the post.

There we go.

So That’s my header image.

Now again, another productivity shortcut.

Those text snippets are going to 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 it takes care of the embed It takes care of the link to the video with my mp3 file Libsyn allows me allows you to just upload audio files.

So I will take this mp3 file, copy the name of it and 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 and 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 marketing and research.

I think were the topics yesterday so The next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to go to our file here, I’m going to do two exports.

In otter one, we’re going to export the raw text itself.

I want this as a monologue and an auto, we’re going to take that 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 it reads a little easier on a cup.

Cut that out of here, the text editor, go back to our blog post.

There’s our machine generated text transcript now a nice big fat blog post.

Second thing we’re going to do is export the SRT file.

This is the closed captions file.

Very, very important file.

In YouTube, go to YouTube here.

Yep, I don’t process a duplicate of one already done.

Let’s go ahead and close this and do a Just open up yesterday’s.

So I’ve got my anywhere.

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 saved myself time is I have YouTube keyword lists that I put together over this over the years.

So it’s not something that’s immediate for all these different topics.

So being able to go in and to 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 our SRT files, right 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 English by YouTube, YouTube will give precedence and preference to the SRT files that you upload versus the ones that 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 seeing anything that has any kind of jargon or specialized words, it is not great.

You’ve seen some pretty hilarious translation fails on YouTube.

When you use a service like otter, 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 final keyword text inside the video itself.

Google will analyze the video and and identify 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 to has, in this case, our next step is to upload to LinkedIn.

I have my personal profile, I have the company profile, and I have the podcast profile.

I’m going to load the video.

I’m 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 going to use my closed caption file there.

If you have a thumbnail that you want to use, like we do, you can go ahead and use that looks nice.

And then you fire up our old clipboard, remember, our friendly clipboard, oops, that’s the transcript.

I don’t want that.

And then again, more shortcuts have the ability to fire off these shortcuts.

You may have to trim down some of your text in order to fit your shortcuts in.

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 different shortcuts.

So if you have, like I have one for Trust Insights, that spits out our stuff there and 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 tech snippet, the summary and the second half of 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 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 your video preview, which in this case is not working cuz we abandon it.

We got our podcast review.

We’ve got our calls to action, we got our machine generated transcript.

At this point, you hit go right, you hit Publish.

I’m not going to do that again, because this is literally a duplicate of yesterday’s post.

We’ll actually delete that And once you’ve got your post then so question of just taking it and loading into a system like Agorapulse to fire up Agorapulse hit our Publish button.

And you start choosing your networks and obviously all the stuff that you want to, 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 get in the habit of it and you get good at it, and you have all the necessary little bits to make it work.

It’s very efficient and it allows you to create a lot of content very, very quickly.

So if you do a, like, you know, live streams, it actually is even easier depending on your live streaming software.

So I use a piece of software called OBS open broadcast studio, open broadcast studio, one of the really nice things that it has built into it, bring it up on screen here Whoa, that one too is you has the ability to when you’re doing your outputs to record a video right you so you can take your videos and record them locally on your machine and you can choose the format like mp4 is probably the best format to save as.

And what happens when you do that then of course, you get 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 you know trying to rip files off of YouTube to save a file locally.

If your streaming software does not allow you to do that.

There is a tool called YouTube DL.

Let’s bring that up here.

And YouTube dl is a command line program it a lot again, like FFmpeg that allows you to take a page and rip the video from it as long as it’s public.

So if you have been streaming on Facebook, you would use YouTube dl and, and whatever the Facebook URL is 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, see how the different pieces interact with each other It does.

We will take your time to get up to speed but once you’re at speed, it’s it’s very clean.

You can also obviously outsource any part of if you have an agency or assistant or something Feel free to show them this video and they can follow it As many of these steps as mixed as it makes sense for their own workflow, just remember to be consistent about it.

Right.

Once you 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 on the newsletter, I’ll talk to you soon.

Take care.

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