Video production notes

20240424 came with a video, in which I read the piece and you get to both watch me and follow along onscreen with the same text I'm reading.

Video recording

Phone video

I used my phone, lol. I AirDrop'd it to my Macbook.

Content video

The onscreen video was done on my Macbook, very simply, using cmd+shift+5 and choosing "Record Selected Portion". I used Chrome's dev tools to display the in-browser content in a scale and ratio appropriate for mobile.

Audio recording

I didn't record audio separately. After getting the phone video file on my laptop, I used Quicktime to export as audio-only, and then I cleaned up the audio with Auphonic.

Here's my Auphonic configuration:

Before/after samples, if you're curious:

11MB

before.m4a

Open

19MB

after.m4a

Open

Video editing

Done with Davinci Resolve. (I pay for it, but you wouldn't need to for this kind of thing.)

I used a timeline resolution of 1080x1350, which is the max for Instagram feed videos. (This was too long for a conventional reel, which is why I didn't use 1080x1920.)

I added three files to the timeline: both videos and the audio file from Auphonic (see above).

I used the waveforms shown on the audio tracks to align all three clips.

The audio tracks for the two videos are both muted.

There's a control curve for the screen recording video, which manages Opacity (found under Video / Composite in the Inspector). This is how the video fades in at the beginning and fades out at the end. I don't have a recording to show you of setting that one up; I really fumbled through it and I'm intimidated by figuring out a clean way to show it, haha. Here's someone else showing you how on YouTube.

The screen recording video is positioned as an overlay using the Transform settings found in the Inspector pane.