Speaker 1: Hey what's up everybody, my name is Jeff and I make programming tutorials over at Fireship.io. And something people often ask me is how do I make my videos. So today I'll show you everything I've learned over the last few years about building high quality programming content for YouTube. I started my channel in 2017 without any video production skills and it's grown to over 400,000 subscribers and a full time income. Over the next few minutes you'll learn about the tools I use, my workflow, and just generally how I approach content creation. The best time to start a YouTube channel was 15 years ago. The second best time is right now. Video content ages quickly, and that means there's almost endless possibilities for creators to build a business on this platform, but if you're sitting there with zero subscribers it might seem like an impossible goal. How do you start with absolutely no social following and build a big YouTube channel? It's actually really simple, just focus on creating high quality content consistently and try to make each new video better than the last. What happens is you start building this positive feedback loop and it grows bigger and bigger over time. Don't use other creators as inspiration, but really try to embrace your own unique voice and style. When you find that voice, things become easy. You don't need to be anything special, I'm just an introverted nobody. What you do need to have is passion for what you do, and on a deeper level than just money or internet fame. If you don't have that passion right now, you'll never stick it out and you'll never be happy doing it. But if you do have that passion, then you'll first need some hardware. You don't need anything expensive or fancy, it's 99% skill and hard work and maybe 1% the equipment you own. My actual hardware has barely changed from the day I started. You're looking at my actual setup here. All you need is a microphone, a computer, and some software. You don't need to invest thousands of dollars into building your own studio, just keep it simple. When it comes to hardware, what is important is having a decent microphone, and that's because low quality audio is the quickest way to drop a viewer on YouTube. If you have bad audio on a programming tutorial, your video is going to be unwatchable, even if the visuals are awesome. All you really need is a decent USB condenser mic which you can get for under $100. The only other hardware you need is a computer. I prefer Windows, however Macs are a good choice as well. It'll help to have some decent specs on your machine, because much of the software we use for video editing is resource intensive. You'll want at least 16 gigs of RAM, the best CPU you can afford, and an Nvidia graphics card is useful as well. It can take a really long time to render out video files in HD or 4K, and a more powerful computer will just help you get things done faster. It's also worth noting that I don't show my face in my videos, so if you do want to show your face, you'll have to talk to a face YouTuber to figure out how that works. You probably need a webcam and a green screen and that kind of stuff. Now let's switch gears by talking about the software I use, which is far more important. The single most important tool I use is Adobe Premiere. I have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud which is $52 a month, and it's well worth the expense if you produce a lot of videos. I'll show you my workflow in Premiere in just a minute, but essentially it's just a tool that gives you a timeline where you can combine multiple audio and video clips together into a single package. Now many of my videos contain shorter, more advanced animations, and for that I use a tool called Adobe After Effects. It has more advanced animation tools, and it's good for short clips that you can then render out and bring into Adobe Premiere to combine into your final video. Now when it comes to static graphics and other images that you might see in my videos, I tend to use Figma most often. Figma is free for individuals, and you can access all of your assets on the web as well. Depending on the type of graphics you produce, Figma might be a little too limited for you, but if you have Adobe Creative Cloud, you also have access to Photoshop and Illustrator, which are also good options for static graphics. All this software takes time to learn, but luckily there are a lot of pre-built templates out there for you to make professional videos with minimal effort. The primary hub that I use to access graphics and pre-built templates is VideoHive. It contains a ton of After Effects and Premiere templates that you can use to quickly add titles, transitions, and logo intros and all kinds of stuff to your videos. For example, you can find a fancy logo intro, swap out your logo, and now you have a professional logo sting for $20 and maybe an hour of work. Aside from templates, you'll also likely want stock photography and other graphic assets to use in your videos. There are plenty of places where you can buy stock photography, but the place I look first is either Unsplash or Pexels. These sites have a huge collection of free images, and they're entirely free. Another element that I use in many of my videos are animated GIFs, and I source those from Giphy. All GIFs can be freely used in your videos though, so make sure to respect the copyright of the artist that created it. And lastly, I use a lot of icons and emojis in my videos, and I primarily get those graphics from FlatIcon.com. I pay $10 a month for this service, however they do have a free tier as well. Okay, so now that you know the tools I use and where I get things, I want to talk about how I approach content creation for programmers. My strategy has always been to distill content down to the most efficient possible form. The majority of programming tutorials out there are very long, anywhere from 20 minutes to 5 hours. Content like that is generally great for beginners, but as an experienced developer I have a very hard time sitting through content that long. In most of my videos, I make the assumption that the audience is made up primarily of intermediate level developers. By making that assumption, I can omit the very basic stuff and get right into the intermediate to advanced level stuff that the audience will find interesting. The bottom line there is know your audience and craft your content around what you think the audience wants. As your channel grows, you'll learn that you can't please all the people all the time. You want to suck me. You suck. Really try to learn from the negative criticisms that you get from people on YouTube. Most critics are people that actually like you and want to watch your channel grow. And some people out there will just be mean for the sake of being mean. But you should never let that go to your heart, because a person who spends their limited time here as an internet troll is someone you should feel sorry for more than anything. Now let's get down to brass tacks and look at my actual workflow for producing a video. Now because I produce code tutorials, the first thing I do is write some code. I'm not going to get into the details of that, but let's just assume that I have a full working project here that I want to teach the audience about. I just wrote this code so I know exactly how it works, and the next thing I do is open up Adobe Premiere to a template that I have that has some of my reusable assets in it. Now a lot of people think that I write a script for every video because they sound scripted, but that's actually not the case. What I actually do is focus on the voiceover first, and I do that right here in Premiere by clicking the record icon in the timeline. I record the audio in a bunch of small chunks, almost sentence by sentence. When I have the phrase I want to use, I use the razor tool to cut that piece of audio and then put it together with the rest of the dialogue. I often record the entire dialogue before I add any visual assets to the video. As you can see here in the recording for this very video, that's exactly what I'm doing. After I record all of the audio clips, I nest them together and then go into Essential Sound and set them as the dialogue. In this panel, I automatch the loudness, which will give it a consistent broadcast volume. And I also like to add a de-esser and possibly a vocal enhancer to make the sound of the voice a little more rich. Now that that's done, we need to fill up our video with some visuals. I'd recommend spending the most time making the visuals at the beginning of the video really good. The first 60 seconds is your best opportunity to set the tone for the video and really inspire the viewer to see it through until the end. The video's watch time, or viewer retention, is really important for getting that video promoted through YouTube's algorithm. Try to keep long pauses to a minimum and give your viewer a consistent feed of useful information. When I present a graphic on the screen, it typically only stays there for 1 to 5 seconds. At this point, the graphics can really emphasize what you've already said in the dialogue. After the initial intro, we need to show the actual code that we're working on. Many tutorials will show the programmer writing out the code line by line in real time. This is very slow and also very error prone. It is more realistic that way, but that's not really what we're going for here. Here's how I do it. When I have a code snippet that I'm talking about, I first delete it in reverse order. After that, I start my screen recorder, and then I hit Ctrl Z, or undo, to record each snippet being inserted into the document one by one. I can then take that screen recording and just lay it right on top of my audio track. Now it is difficult to get the timing perfectly right here, so one useful technique is to add a frame hold to your actual video, which is kind of like taking a screenshot so you can hold that position while you're talking about it. And if it's not 100% clear what line of code you're talking about, I'd recommend throwing in an emoji or some other graphic that explains what that line of code is doing with text. That way if the user pauses the video, they can look at that line of code and really understand what it's all about. Now once you have all the pieces put together, ideally take a long break or sleep on it and come back to the video with a fresh set of eyes tomorrow. Then watch it critically as if you were the end viewer. Do anything you can to polish or improve the quality of the video before rendering it to upload to YouTube. Once you're happy with the quality, your next important consideration is the title and the thumbnail. A catchy title and thumbnail will improve the click-through rate and get your video seen by more people on YouTube. That's a whole nother topic that I might break down in a future video. If you want to see it, let me know in the comments. I'm going to go ahead and wrap things up there. I hope this video gave you some insight into how I produce my own videos, but keep in mind that there's no one right way to do things and you will definitely find your own path when you start putting in the work. Make sure to subscribe to my personal channel here on YouTube for more videos like this in the future. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.