ISO Recording Made Easy: Hardware vs Riverside (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: If you've ever recorded video with multiple cameras and spent hours in the edit just trying to sync everything up and keep the quality consistent, well, I'm about to blow your mind with something that makes all of that much easier. In this video, I'm going to explain what ISO recording is, show you a couple of ways you can do it, including a hardware setup that I've had experience myself using, and then show you an even easier way that requires no hardware setup at all at the end. If you don't know what ISO recording is, know it's not ISO, like the setting that's on your camera that relates to light sensitivity. ISO stands for isolated. ISO recording means every source in your setup, every camera, every microphone input gets recorded as its own separate file instead of one mixed output with everything baked together. You get individual files you can work with independently in post-production and adjust one without touching the others. For anyone recording with more than one source, ISO recording means you can switch between angles in post rather than committing to cuts live. One setup I've actually used to create YouTube videos with a previous channel is the Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini ISO. On this channel, we have three or four Blackmagic cameras all connected to this ATEM Mini ISO system, and during recording, I could switch between camera angles live just like a live production switcher. But while I'm doing all of that live switching, the ATEM is also recording every single camera and audio track as its own isolated file in the background. So when it came time to edit, I already had my rough cut from the live switch, but I also had four clean 4K ISO tracks to go back into if I needed a better angle or a tighter cut or just more flexibility. This massively cut down our editing time on every single YouTube video and increased our quality because we were able to replace those video files with the 4K recorded versions after the edit was done. Now, this was a long, painful, and technical process to set up and get right. The heavy tradeoff with this setup is the need for hardware. Those cameras, the cables, the space, the ATEM, and a pretty beefy computer, all of this adding up to some pretty heavy costs on top of the advanced setup and learning curve. But if you're building out a dedicated studio setup or want a higher-end production workflow, this is genuinely powerful, and it worked out great for that specific situation that we were doing. Now, Riverside does something conceptually very similar, but without any of the hardware or advanced learning curves. And honestly, what happens after recording is where it really pulls ahead. Every time you record in Riverside, every participant's audio and video is captured locally on their own device as a separate high-quality file and track. You're live in the session, you can see and hear everyone in real time, but underneath, Riverside is recording each source independently, just like those ISO tracks on the ATEM system. What ends up in your project is exactly what was captured on each device. But if you've been a longtime user of Riverside, you already know this. But here's where Riverside goes even further than just giving you the separate video and audio tracks to edit. When your recording ends, all of those ISO tracks are automatically loaded into Riverside's built-in editor, already synced and already laid out in a multi-track timeline. There's no importing or file transfers or syncing in post. It's all there ready for you to get working. And from there, you've got AI-powered editing tools to speed up your workflow, custom layouts, filler words, custom designs, and so, so much more. With the ATEM workflow, the ISO recording was just the beginning. You still had to bring everything into your editor, organize it, and do all of that manually, which for a higher production setup, this could make sense. But Riverside handles all of that setup for you, making things a lot easier and a lot more beginner-friendly. ISO recording used to feel like something only big productions worried about. But honestly, once you start editing with separate tracks, it's one of those things you can't go back from. Now, whether you get there with hardware like the ATEM Mini ISO or using Riverside's advanced user-friendly system, the workflow is worth building in my opinion. You'll feel it the first time you open and edit and everything is already where you need it. If you want to try Riverside, there's a link in the description. You can get started for free. And if you're curious about going deeper on any of this, whether that's multi-camera setups, the editing workflow, or getting the most out of the ISO tracks and post, we've got videos on all of that. I'll put the best ones right up here. Hit that like button if you found this useful. Subscribe if you want more of this kind of stuff and drop a comment if you have questions or if there's something you want me to cover next. Thank you so much for watching and we can't wait to see what you create.