The Lavelier Microphone for On Location Interviews

Hello again, it's jane gardner of Step in front of the camera tips and tricks and before we talk about all the, physics or how to optimize your sound. Let's go over, the lavelier, microphone and why you want to use maybe use that in your business.

So we looked at the blue yeti, which  sits on a platform and you can also get audio technica overhead boom and get it close to your mouth, which reminds me I should get a bit closer. So now let's talk about the lavelier so let's get, get yourself a picture of a lavelier and let's have a look at that.

So ignoring the quality, I guess, of this lavelier we'll just assume that you're going to get a good lavelier mike and let's talk about lavelier clip on microphones and why you want to use one to clip on your microphone. Well, obviously it's first of all, it's, it's very portable.

You can put it in your bag and carry around anywhere where you want to go. And it's very flexible so it helps you to free up your hands because you just clip it onto your lapel blouse and then just put the transmitter which connects up to your recording device in your pocket. So it's perfect for doing things like that for podcasts.

You may not need to show your face. So there's an advantage of using clip on your lavelier mic. It's not obvious. , but it depends on the quality of the lavelair microphone. So let's have a look at some of the pluses and minuses. So, the lavalier microphone doesn't record the full range of frequencies of your voice.

So you lose a little bit out of the bass frequencies or the lower frequencies and that's consistent across all the different types of lavelier microphones, whether they're inexpensive or expensive. So one that would be a good lavelier there is a r0dor lavelier mike and it's gotta uses a standard audio input jack.

So you could fit it into your smartphone, the input jack, if they still have it on your smartphone or most audio input jacks on any computer. Or you could try setting it up with your ipad etcetera. And it's, it's some of them are specifically designed for mobile phones and tablets and things like your macbook air or macbook pro.

Of course you have to have an audio jack. So it's the same jack that used to record and also to plug in your headphones. So you may find that the other types are not meant for low-powered devices like smartphones or tablets. So if you try it and there's no sound, you plug it in, it's probably not gonna work at all.

So you'll have to get a different one. So you have to decide how you want to use it. So you could use, you could basically have the same components for all lavelier microphones, you have a clip and this is for you to clip onto your clothes, you have the audio input jack and you have the microphone and some lavelier microphones don't come with a little sponges, which is actually a pop filter that you put over it and it's what a pop filter does. That removes the most explosive sounds when you pronounce the word peace.

Alright, so if you're not pronounced p, you may hear okay api because I'm not using a pop filter, but if, if you're whenever you, so you could always remove the pop filter if you don't like it, but it's great for removing the popping p's. So basically, if you have a limited budget and you're wondering what microphone to go for the rodr smart lavelier mike, is best option.

Obviously if you have a microphone like this, it's very portable and so you could probably use use it when you're driving in your car as you probably know the built in microphone for your smartphone can be very sensitive and pick up a lot of the noise on sounds of the road of your car and so sometimes it's very brittle or weird.

So, but if you were to get a lava lier microphone, it basically wants to capture your voice above everything else. So it captures other sounds as well. But because of the proximity of your mouth or your throat, to the microphone, your vocals will be the loudest of all. And then of course, that's what you want now in a studio sets in a studio setting, it's still useful.

You can move around obviously if you're one of these people who likes to stand while you're doing recordings or presentations where you like to wave around with your hands and move about, I would certainly recommend it for people who are doing demonstrations, exercises and that kind of thing, because it's not gonna, it's probably going to carry most of the of your voice, but it's not gonna do as much of the surround sounds that is around you because it's focused on your voice.

So you don't have to worry too much if you're looking at it. Having it in your studio about things like echo and noises outside of the lavalier, as you can imagine, the lavelier mike is the one that most reporters used and they're using them outside even as well as of course in the studio.

So it's worth getting, I think to me, if the time comes when we're back to interviewing people and sitting across from each other and interviewing people, you can clip a microphone on the other person and then there's a transmitter and you have a microphone and it's a little more natural than having to move one of these microphones in your hand. So it's worth investing in if you think you'll be doing that kind of a lot of stuff outside, and I get a bit more a better sound than you would if you used your smartphone.

And I guess I should have put up a picture of a smartphone, but I haven't really considered that as a possibility, especially when it comes to developing a tv show or and such like that. The most important thing for your show is to have good quality sound. So we'll be talking further on that next time and after that we'll do some physics and how to get the volume right on your microphone.

So it sounds good. I'm not sure how this is sounding. I still just for you to know, I've realized that the computer sound, it should be muffled in my studio. After all, it's been I've been picking it up, I think it's the fans getting older and so it's changed the sound, and so I'm going to have to get myself a quilt to put over it while I'm recording to try and cut down the sound of the fan. So, my apologies if you can hear a hum in the background.

I what I do is I try and take it out in the recording, but of course that's that's extra work. Right? So you want to try and get good quality sound while you're recording so that you don't have to try and we'll be giving you some tips on that. And how do you use gain to get a good quality volume to your sound?

And hopefully I have one today. I haven't checked it. So I was playing around with it a couple of days ago to see if I could get a good sound. So yeah I might have to do some editing in the recording to up the sound a bit because I'm a pretty quiet person. So that's it for today and tomorrow.

We'll be talking about something else. I'm not sure what. Bye.

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My Favourite Microphone

Welcome, welcome welcome. It's jane gardner again and it's step in front of the camera again, tips and tricks. So today we're gonna talk about the Blue Yeti microphone. I'm going to be using pictures because I don't want to move my microphone, but I use the blue yeti.

It is a stereo condenser microphone and so it is great,  it has a usb cable on it. So it also, so you can put it into the computer, so make sure you have a usb connection available. So let's have a look at the front of it. I took a picture and let's have a look where are we here? Oh, there we are.

So on the front, the front of the BlueYeti, you have your volume for your micro mike, sorry for your speaker. So your headphones so you can connect your you're obviously your headphones into your microphone and always listen to what you're saying in terms of what it's producing for you.

You can also do the recording out through it to listen through the headphones and of course the button, the mute button flashes when you're muting and it's a steady red glow when you're recording and it's on. So that's always good to check because I've many times had it off when I should have it on.

But basically, the blue yeti has been really good for me. I haven't really had to do any volume changes in terms of my once I do a recording, but let's look at the back of the blue yeti. So we've got a nice label here and we're going to talk in depth I guess a little about what everything is now gain is basically what you need controls the amount of audio that you want to capture or the level audio that you want to capture on your blue yeti.

And then the pattern button has the pattern of how the microphone takes up sound. So we'll go over gain and the pattern. So you really have to do some recordings and test your you're a microphone when you get it to see what you like the best in terms of gain. If it's always in the same position in the studio and it's real close to your voice.

Then you can probably put it low but until you try and test it, you won't really be able to tell what settings you want for that but for the pattern that is pretty obvious. So let's go over the patterns. So we have the stereo mode and so it's multipurpose it's good for lots of different types of recordings.

If you're not sure what mode you need to record in, then you can just put it on stereo mode and try it out and put a real on the recording and see if you like it or not. The next setting is omni-directional. So it's a complete circle symbol on the microphone. And the blue yeti will actually capture audio from a 360° angle all around the microphone.

So it's useful. And let's say you want to record a conference and you can have various people speaking around the table. And you can actually capture this, there's voice because this actually tries to catch the sound of their voice from whenever they're sitting or whatever sounds there are in the space and you can hear most of what people are saying, even if they're sitting around a table. So it's good for conferences or when you want to record in any direction.

Now in a studio setting, I don't think it will work for you because you don't want to catch the sounds of the computer as much either or any, clocks or whatever else in the room. So it's best to not use omni directional if you're trying to do a screen casting or recording of a video.

So the third one is cardio mode and it gives the best quality of audio, it's meant for podcasting or for recording voiceovers and it will only be recording the audio from right in front of the microphone right above where obviously the mute button is. So if you switch it to cardio mode and you speak right in front of the microphone, you do well.

But if you speak and from behind the microphone, it's very weak. So you want to be able to be up nice and close at a standard distance away from your microphone. And if you're doing screen casts, I would recommend using the cardio mode because it gives the richest quality of audio. But of course, you can't really tell until you set up your studio and do a little quick recording and see if you like the sound.

So the next and last option is bi-directional. So it's similar to cardio to stereo, but it strictly captures audio only from the front and the back. And this is useful if say for example, you're doing an interview and the other person is sitting in behind in front of you so that the back of the microphone as well as the front of the microphone is capturing the voices.

And so you can place the blue yeti right in the middle and I will capture both your audio and the person that you are interviewing. If there are people on the left and right, technically speaking, it won't be capturing that audio but you could always see if it does or not. But it's going to be pretty noisy if you're trying to capture all for directions.

So it's probably best not to do that. So there's four patterns to the blue yeti and basically it's kind of difficult to show you the difference because it all depends on your own studio environment. But I'd recommend either trying the stereo or the cardio pattern. And of course, you're going to have to check your gain and see which you like the most.

I've been trying it quite a bit and I haven't really found the one that I really like yet and when I do I market on the microphone so I can always get back to that setting. So there you go. Maybe we should actually talk a little bit more about all those types of things like gain and just so they understand it a little bit more, so do better because at some point we're going to have to talk about editing your sound and making the best it can be in terms of your videos.

So yeah, it might be good to talk about game next time or if we need to talk about gain. It depends, it depends on using audacity whether or not you need to understand gain and certainly the volume of what you're speaking, you always have to you know, stop your recording and then go listen to it and see if the the volume of the voice is loud enough.

Ah, this one may not be because I've been trying to gain but anyway, that's for next time.

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Microphones for your Studio

hello? Hello. Hello. It's me again today on step in front of the camera. I'm using my ultimate tv channel system presentation system to talk to you today because I like it and it's a nice blue but let's get on with it. Okay, so I hope that you can hear me. I think this is pretty good sound  I am going to be talking about sound today because sound is the most important thing for any presentation you do on any video you do and anything you do if they can hear you, they're not gonna listen to you.

So we're gonna have a look today at some of the options you can do and all obviously give you my opinion and so let's get started. Um so first off I think a lot of people think that you can use your webcam sound and you've been on broadcast where people are talking into their computer, looking into their webcam and they think this sound is sufficient.

Well, let me tell you a story. I did a presentation on tv show format for entertainment and I thought it would be entertaining to do a little bit of Shakespeare that was my first tv show and what I didn't know and now I've got it stuck on my computer is that the presentation software that I used had changed my microphone and it went and used my webcam.

So let's go and have a little listen to what was going to be the volume of the sound in this presentation experience. Yes. Well as you can see this is silly what has happened was it was picking up, I mean it's a good webcam but it picked up the sound and the sound was like half the volume as it should be.

So this is what I would have to have done and I don't recommend it every time that I used it I would have to use either Audacity, the free software that changes the volume and the sound of your sound. And you know it's great software, we'll talk about it another time because when we're editing but you don't want to when you you don't want to have to edit so you don't have to want to have to use Camtasia or audacity to improve your sound, you want your sound to be the best it is when you do your video.

So that's my opinion. Anyway and so let's have a look at some of the microphones that you can use because we don't want to do the webcam. Sorry let's just turn that webcam sound off, you know how to do it. We want a microphone and basically there are some great microphones that are really reasonably priced if you're doing presentations where you're sitting.

Well I'll give you three choices and then if you want to be a person who's standing and doing activities and doing some teaching and then I'll show you the other one that you could use but I think that one that we'll talk about that one later. But anyway, so so my secret weapon as we all know if we're smart is my blue Yeti and we'll talk about the blue yeti later as to tips on how to make the sound great.

Sorry, I'm probably ruining the sound right now.  So the Blue Yeti is just so reasonable and such good quality pride, such good quality. It's got its professional sound and all you have to do is plug it into your computer. And you know, I love it.

The other choice you can do of course is the blue Snowball, which is also quite reasonably priced and it's a USB mic and you can use it for the pc and Mac, just like the blue yeti and I'm sure it's just as good. But I'll tell you one thing that I like about my blue yeti, which doesn't show on this blue yeti.

Oh yeah it does. It has, it has a stand because I'll tell you my other choice which is professional quality and actually quite reasonably priced is the audio technica, which does not have a stand. And I had Audio Technica to begin with and it was a great sound. But I kept dropping it onto the floor from the stand.

And so now I have an old audio technica with a very loose little wire in the bottom of it. And so once the sound starts crackling and it's caused by the microphone, it's time to get a new microphone. So yeah, what I love about the Blue Yeti is it's got a nice solid  stand that you can use now. Of course.

I also liked the Audio Technica because I had an overhead  stand that I could put it in and move it around until I got the best sound. Um whereas I'm fairly limited  with my blue yeti as to where I can place it, but it picks up sound so well and we'll talk about that another time.  You know, I really don't have any problem with it. Okay, so for those of you who want to move around, of course there's the lavelier mike.  you put just like professional reporter, you put them on your lapel of your jacket and you of course um can use them quite well and they have good quality sound.

I don't know about this one because it's so cheaply priced, but this one would be for interviews as well, it even has the wind muff if there's wind to stop the wind affecting the sound. I bought a set myself but with the pandemic, I realized that, of course, I won't be interviewing anybody, so I haven't really used it and I get it out of the kit, but it's not really much point because you want to have something that a studio that's all set up, you know, it's all set up, it's ready to go.

All you have to do is turn on your lights, you know, make sure your microphones on, which I haven't done sometimes. And who knows? Maybe this one I don't have the microphone on. But and also, you know, check that it's the micro proper microphone and just get recording.

So, you know, this is the important thing is sound and we're gonna be talking about the microphone in more detail next time.

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How to Improve the Sound Quality in your Studio

Welcome. Welcome.

It's jane again, doing another show.

And this time we're going to be talking about the audio acoustics in your room. I know I kind of skipped over this and went onto microphones, but we're going to say, we're going to talk about padding and acoustic panels.

So we're also going to have another episode where we talk about Audacity, the free software you can use to record your voice and but you can also use Audacity  to basically um make a recording of you speaking and then that listening to the recording and seeing what kind of sounds you sound you hear other than your voice that you don't want to hear. Because audacity has a few things in there where it can cancel out those sounds and take them out.

But we're going to talk today about how to try and take some of those problems in your sound out before you actually record. So today, um you've either realized that you have an echo or maybe your audio is perfect. You don't have to do any of this. So even better. But if not, um and you have something noisy that, you know, you can't get rid of, for example, your computer, but you could put it into an acoustical box, like a box, um with acoustical panels on it, so it absorbs sound and it doesn't come out or something like that.

But you can probably find something fairly reasonable to do this, but you cannot easily edit bad audio noise in post-production. I mean, you can but you know why why why try and get it, you know, make it better the first time. So we're gonna talk about um a couple of things um you may have already heard about if you do any podcasting, um audio foam panels, and the other one is called a bass trap, which probably we've you've not heard of and I'll show you a picture of because it's mostly used in musical music studios and I'm going to sneeze.

So excuse me while I sneeze. So what are base panels? Bass traps and phone panels? Well, essentially to do one thing, which is to absorb echo and clean up your reverb in your recording studio. But although they may look the same, they're actually a bit different and they serve different purposes.

So the smaller the room is, the more padding you will need in order to absorb sound because of the echo when you speak your voice and your audio just bounces all over the walls and comes back to you if it's too small. So we've probably going to have to put up some acoustical panel to reduce the echo for example.

So bass traps are used to filter out or remove the low frequencies or the bass frequencies. Now it really depends on what you're building your home studio for. Um if you're going to record music for example, um traps, it will help you because they will help you to control the bass frequencies when recording.

Um but also there are bass frequencies in your voice. But generally speaking for bass traps, you would find a lot in recording studios, music recording studios, if you're doing podcasts or videos like this, then you may not need based traps, but you definitely need foam panels. So phone panels are for mid to high frequencies and bass traps and foam panels can work together or you can use just either one, but mostly it's used together and if you don't need it all well even better, but if you're not in a recording studio or using musical instruments, you can skip the bass traps and you can just focus on getting phone panels.

So we're gonna show you some of what they look like, just so when you're looking in the catalog, you can figure that out. So we're looking at um having a little bit of a cold, but we're looking at the acoustics for your studio. And for example, these are foam panels that you can get there are triangular in in cross section and so they absorb sounds from their phone. And um here's a picture of a bass trap over on the left in the corner of the room and those are foam panels adhering to the wall.

So bass traps, they're basically it is in the corners of the room, is where your rules meet each other, and there triangular. And so of course they absorb more sound because they're thicker in the middle. And these angles are the ones that reflect the most amount of audio.

And it's responsible for serious audio problems sometimes in the corner of the room. So it's always good to put some acoustic panels there. And those are the base, it's triangular. Ones are the base type, which you probably don't need.

So if you were to get the bass drops, they'll fit in nicely here and then 90° angle on the wall, triangular. But you don't really need bass traps if you think your audio is pretty good when you do your test and you're not recording music. So in this section, you can position um your acoustical panel, phone panel in the corner to absorb any sound that might be echoing off in the corner because the it's not as critical for podcasting and doing videos.

It's basically you can curve it and attach it and it'll act in a same way, very cost efficient way to do it. Um so the next one you want of course to cover is your hard surfaces, for example, the door in your studio. So you can also put um phone panels around the door handle, cut it. That's what's nice about foam.

And because hard surfaces also tend to reflect audio, make audio bounce. And that creates an echo. So you can basically this is uh what acoustical panel looks like. It's a triangular in nature. You can get it of course on amazon. And so you can use it um you've got to use more than one, of course, but you don't know how many until you actually try it out.

So you might want to just start with a few. Um and then try and see what it does to absorb your sound and then if it's working, that's great. If it doesn't work well, you just don't use it. Um, so most importantly, it comes in two different colors.

So you can have some fun and arrange your foam panels anyway, you want and it makes your studio look cool. So the recommended coverage area is 48 square feet for your studio. And this is just a rule of thumb, it really depends how big your studio is, but you should have about 48 square feet of it on one wall.

And then, so you can always get packages of 12 square feet four packages of that, for example. Or you could get 12 square feet, which is 12 panels and then times 12. Now that being said, you don't have to go and get 48 square feet of adult ones because as I mentioned before, having too much of this panel actually can affect your audience in ways that you don't really want it to. So you can do more harm and good.

So start with your 12 square feet and you can scale up by adding another 24 or another 12, two different areas in your home studio or office studio until you get the right balance and removed all the acoustical problems like echo and buzz from your studio. So obviously if you have a perfect um studio and there's no problems with sound after you do a test.

And I would definitely use audacity because it has a um, it has a noise um leveling I think, and it also has a noise removal. And so when you take out the, your actual voice, you can, you can see the little um noise being made of ambient noise before we actually speak and what, and we'll talk about that later.

Um because it's, it's really good to record it and then listen to it um very quietly in your headphones to see if you're happy with the sound of your voice. And also, of course, you're happy that there isn't too much buzz or noise and you don't have to clean it up.

Well, if you want to clean it up then it would be worth getting some foam panels for your home studio to set up and I might order some soon just to try it out. Maybe we'll see. But the difference is if I put some foam panel panel up, if I remove any of the noise, although my basically I found that the microphone having a good microphone, like the blue yeti or the audio technica is great for um, sound that you really don't need to worry too much about not sending natural.

Um so that's, that's it for today. I'm gonna make a note to um do one on audacity, how to install it maybe, and then show you the possibilities of using audacity for your home studio as well. As of course, later on you will use other software, like video editor, but this is a good start.

Um so we've gone through most of the sound um possibilities for your studio and now I think we've done a couple of microphone types and I think we should probably get onto lighting. That's pretty important. And so my lighting right now is pretty cool, uh pretty white. And so I have to adjust that make my face warmer.

But that will be for next time I'll show you that you have a lot of control inside your web cam that you buy as to changing the colors of your video. Thank you for listening. This is jane gardner.

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Plan your Studio Space now!

On today's tip. We're gonna talk about planning your studio space.

Before you even start to consider recording, you need to find a place in your apartment or your house that is, you can dedicate to your studio space. So you could use a home office or a bedroom space where you can leave your equipment all set up and connected.So it's quick to do a video. And when you feel like an impulse to do a video, all you have to do is go and set it up and press live.

So let's have a look at what you have to consider for when you have a studio space. So we're going to talk about the size of the room. Bigger rooms are better because there is fewer problems with audio and light. Small rooms can have sound bounce back and forth from walls. Same with light, it can bounce and it's uneven in one area versus the next and it can change quickly. Also you may not find the perfect spot where light and sound are even in a smaller room, whereas a large room that you have more choice as to where to put your space more likely for sound to echo.

It will happen in a small room. We'll talk about how you can fix that later when we talk about sound, but when planning your space, these are some of the things you have to consider. In small rooms, it can be harder to control the light, especially if there are windows. Lights above lighting the room maybe too close to the recording area so they could cause uneven lighting on their face and change very quickly during the day.

In bigger rooms, the light can be more even in the room there isn't an echo or sound bouncing. If the ceiling is high enough, there isn't any sound bouncing off there either. The windows are far enough away, that natural light doesn't stream in at different times of the day, affecting your light exposure windows.

Now some people say place yourself in front of the window and you'll have natural light for your recordings. But the brightness and color of sunlight changes through the day changes with the weather and of course there's nighttime. So if you just use sunlight to record in for your recordings, then it limits the time that you can record if you only record when light is in the right place.

So it's best not not depend on sunlight to light your face or do your recordings on video. So remove it from the opportunity by blocking out the sunlight with a curtain or by moving to an area of space where the windows don't affect the lighting and use reliable daylight. Studio lights with consistent light and you can record at any time of the day or night.

The space needed to do face recordings is as much as the size of a desk with lights on either side and a screen at the back as the background can create quite a small space to do your recordings within a large room. So sound, however, no matter how big the space you're in, you will need to test how your recording sounds when you set up your studio.

And of course on the the only way that you can test what if you have any problems with your sound is to actually set up your studio recording space. So there are some things you can do beforehand or during the time you're planning your studio space. And so we'll talk about those next time but we're going to discuss next time how to cut out the distracting sounds.

But for now, go look for a space in your house or apartment that has consistent lighting. You can control you can even use a smaller space if you do some of the options that we talk about next time in reducing the echo and bounce of sound. So see you next time.

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Ambient Light in your Studio

Welcome welcome.

This is jane gardner and welcome to the Step in Front of the Camera series.

Today, we're going to be talking about ambient light. So what is ambient light? Well, it's basically all the light that fills your room when you don't have any lights on.

Now, I do have lights on because you wouldn't be able to see me at all, but I just want to show you.  I don't know if I'll show you the difference. Well, I guess I will, I guess I could, I don't like to have close-ups where I moved close to the camera.

But anyway,  you may not notice the difference between ambient light and the light that's directly from your lamps and lights, but you can actually see quite a bit of ambient light. And so, you know, it's always present in your room now right now, it's sunny down here in the basement with the windows.

It's just coming in and the cats are enjoying it. And that's why I've got some light on one side of my face and shadows on the other. Well, once the clouds cover over the sun, I'm sure I won't have any light on either side of my face. So even if you switch off all the lights,  my cameras is, webcam is so good that there's ambient light in this room, otherwise I wouldn't be able to get out of it in the dark.

But the chances are, you can find a way how to figure out what is ambient light that's coming into the room and of course probably block it because as I mentioned before your ambient light, it could vary during the day. And it it it would change. And so the sunlight for sure will change obviously between one and reflect off different sources in your room.

So, I have some white umbrellas for my lights and that's reflecting some of the light. So it could also be from the external light source. Now, I have some fluorescent lights here in the room and you could get also street light coming in, certainly in the evening, that contributes to your ambient light.

So you have to understand how much ambient is coming into the room that might affect the quality of your video by turning off all your lights and then record a video. And of course, it will be a fairly dark video. Try to notice where the highlights and shadows are in your face or in the room and they still get an idea of the direction of light to the amount of actual ambient light in your room.

And when you figure that out, you can start to eliminate the unnecessary light. And I'd recommend that you want to get your lighting right first, understand all the sources of light in your room and change the distance that your lights  are going to be using away from. You're just to see the difference in how the distance of the light from you changes.  So, you've got to figure out what the overall lighting is in your videos. So, as you can see here, I have none of my studio lights on.

I do have fluorescence on and also there's sunlight coming in from one side of the room. So I have some ambient light. Also when I turn off the fluorescent, I'm not going to do that. So you can see that it's the recording area for my videos here. My studio, it's pretty good without lights and sometimes when I'm just talking to people on soon, I don't turn on my lights and I'm in shadows and it sort of gives you a more natural look sometimes depending on what the light is.

But of course, if I want to record a good video, I need to have studio lights on. So what we're gonna do is I'm probably going to change the scene, so you don't see me lurching. So basically what you can do to test this is to turn off all your lights and then use a screencast video, ScreenFlow camtasia or something and just record a video and see what it's like when you have the webcam on and understand where light is coming from.

And then once you know that there is some maybe ambient light you don't want, you can close off that area with a screen or curtain obviously and if you want to create videos consistently, you really have to do that.  You can just put up something to block the ambient light that's coming in because you want to be able to have the same type of lighting in the same field for all of the videos in your chorus and then of course will probably take more than two weeks to complete.

You want to have consistency. So when you understand where ambient light is coming from, you can control it better and you can even make an attempt to block the light out so that the light is no longer it's minimized. But personally what I would recommend is to turn off all your  ambient light or I'll show you how it is when I just turned on my studio lights and you will see that I have a consistent light and I don't really have to go and close my window.

So let's see if I have a screen that is, let's see, I think that one's black. No, we don't want that one, that one's boring. How about we go to my website there, step in front of the camera and while you look at that, I'll just turn the lights on.

Oops, so these are my radio lights. I'm with the grand screen and a kit and not that expensive really, when you consider how long I've had them and let's have a look and see what the lighting is like. Now, oops, wrong screen, there we go.

So here we are, we're back again and the lighting is a bit more consistent and when it's consistent it's much easier for the video to be a consistent quality and obviously to have good detail, I have a few shadows and I could turn on another light, but I don't have the plugged in right now because I'm not doing any kind of recording at the moment other than talking to you. But you can see that it's a bit more consistent light.

It'll make for a better quality video and it will, if you decide you want to make it, you know, enlarge the video, it won't be pixelated or grainy because you've got a fairly good quality lighting. So have a look at the ambient lighting that's in your area, that you want to have your studio space, and we'll talk to you again.

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Ambient Light in your Studio Read More »

What has Jane been doing?

A brilliant time with Jeff Herring working out from an article about the three piillars of producing into a show into a digital empire of courses and content which gave me great ideas of mini courses to create.
On a personal note, I kept on on camera even through I had to turn off Xsplit due to bugs and using my webcam in front of green curtain. One of the few times, you will see me without my Xsplit software. I will share the video when it is ready.

What has Jane been doing? Read More »

Video Trends Survey

Video Is Preferable for Watching Instructional Content

Video watched more than text read!

Video Trends Survey

In a survey of Techsmith users, there was an overwhelming preference to watch videos of instructional training than to read text or listen to audio.

As we have watched so much television in our life, our brains get used to consuming content from videos.  Youtube is the best-known and used search engine for instructional how-to videos. Want to know how to unplug a toilet then do a search on Youtube.

Want to succeed on Youtube? Then according to the Techsmith survey you should have clear titles, good description and compelling thumbnails with lots of the words that people search for in the content.

What length should you make your videos? According to respondents in the survey, videos should be between 5 - 19 minutes long.  Your video should instruct only for as long as needed. People are willing to consume a longer video only if the content is compelling and worthy of their time.

So what are your plans for video in 2023? Are you warming up your screencast software to create instructional videos? Are you getting your webcam into position to create on-camera videos for your fans?

For more on setting up a studio you can get the free book "7 Steps to producing your own show" at https://stepinfrontofthecamera.com/7

Video Is Preferable for Watching Instructional Content Read More »

7 Tips on making a Show Interview easy and valuable for you and your Guest

Tips on Doing a Show Live
You are in the Studio
You are live and on camera.
You have a Guest.
Now what!
Tips to make your Show Interview easy to do and you and your Guest Shine!
1. Design a questionnaire that asks for vital information and also the main topic and 3 potential subtopics for the interview.
2. On the questionnaire, I like to ask for what they want to give as a gift (whether an e-book, checklist or free consultation) to the audience.
3. Use Notepad or other text software open with short bio on Desktop and read looking into the camera
4. Or you can use free teleprompter with bio in it on Desktop to introduce your Guest while looking into camera
5. Or you can use Teleprompter app on smartphone with bio in it to read while scrolling
6. Lead the Guest through the topics and subtopics he/she wanted to talk about from their answers on the Google Form.
7. Prepare a slide with the Guest's gift beforehand and load up to present during interview so Guest can talk about the giveaway.
These are some of the strategies I use on an interview to make it easy to do on camera for me and my Guest. You can check out some of my interviews of purpose-driven entrepreneurs at Finding Your Purpose TV at https://findingyourpurposetv.com/spotlight
If you are interested in having an interview about your purpose-driven entrepreneur you can apply here- a link for Finding Your Purpose TV ... https://forms.gle/wAfpM4UWXwo4yxCK6

7 Tips on making a Show Interview easy and valuable for you and your Guest Read More »

STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD

Are you feeling like your social media marketing posts are invisible?

Crickets, crickets, crickets.

So, yes, you have to stand out from the crowd. You have to be visible.

You have to be authentic.

You have to be consistent in being out there sharing your message and your mission.

What's the easiest way to stand out?

If you have seen my posts before, you know the answer.  You have to be on camera.

I've developed the 7 Steps to produce your own show e-book free for you to show you what type of equipment, software and checklists you need to make an easy show that can be a consistent, authentic way for you to be visible. Check it out at http://jgtips.com/1show

 

STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD Read More »