Speaker 1: Time here for more in systems, and this is a little bit different of a tutorial. I want to talk about my solo creator workflow because yes, the 1700 plus videos on this channel all but one was produced and edited by me. I put it all together. I take and do the editing from camera A here to camera B, which will be talking about how all that works. And I want to cover this because I think the more I share this information, it gets it out there to help other people who want to create tutorials and content. Now this is a very collaborative space in my opinion, YouTube creators and creators in general, and the workflows you have to develop, it can be the challenge. Maybe you have a really good tutorial. You'd like to get some information out there, but you're like, how do I get all this going? Now this is not some definitive in-depth guide, but it's just an overview of how I create things and the tools and parts I use, which are in more detail linked down below if you're just looking for a hardware list, but I want to talk about this process and the ways I've simplified it. Now by doing this, I know many of you will have comments of how to make it better, and I'm actually looking forward to those comments. I love when there's other workflow ideas to kind of help me out and get me further along because this used to be pulling cards and media out of camera and I was able to ramp up my process and speed it up by, well, the process I'm worked it down to right here in March of 2023. So the first thing I want to talk about is that, yes, I do use a teleprompter, but mostly just for, as I would describe it, keeping me on topic with some bullet points and sometimes model or part numbers that are very specific that I don't want to be wrong or have to deal with being wrong when I go to edit. So this is a Sony a6600 camera with a Sigma 30 millimeter F1.4 lens, which means this is not a poster after effect that's good separation you get in the fact that it has eye focus. It's one of the reasons I like the Sony camera and I use it as my main camera. Sometimes I move around or scoot around and I don't want to lose focus. So it is in auto focus mode, which is not something people recommend for studio. They're like, Oh, just sit still and get in a focus plane. But I like simple and this is simple. Next is the audio. This is all facilitated just off camera here by my Sennheiser MK 600 goes into an Audient ID4. And then over here, the other camera that we'll talk about this whole process in a second is a Canon C100 Mark II. It was originally my studio camera, but I decided to go with the Sony for my main camera. So studio cameras more like a webcam, but it has a Sigma 18-35 art lens on it also gives nice separation. That's one of the first things here is having cameras that you can fine tune a bit. So I'm not shooting in a way that I have to color grade later. This is not color graded. This goes from the camera into OBS and over to the DaVinci Resolve that's open behind me. I don't want to spend any time color grading. I don't think my tutorials would improve if I was color graded. I want good color, good light out of the camera and not having to mess with any of that. That's something where people have offered to help me with the color grading. And I'm like, I just don't see the big value in it. Leave a comment down below if you think I look better color graded or my tutorials would improve because ultimately my goal is to get those out. Next let's talk about the actual process of ingesting this media using OBS and the switching I'm doing with Stream Deck. This is how we create the stream and this is the part that's really important to this workflow. So let's switch over to the other cameras. This is one of my favorite tools, diagrams.net, I've used it in lots of my demos. And how do we get to YouTube? Well, we have camera one, camera two, as I mentioned. And camera one, camera two, one goes actually to an Elgato, the other ones goes to AverMedia capture cards. Those are linked down below. I just use the Elgato icon three times for those that are wondering. The second monitor, this is an important part, that big widescreen, that one that's kind of behind me over here, that is my main computer running Linux that I do my work from. Then I have a second monitor that you don't really see because it's a little bit off screen. Now recording and capturing OBS on a widescreen would be tricky to present on YouTube. Not everybody has a widescreen to match it. You want something that is more of a standard format. So this is just a normal monitor here. There's an HDMI splitter. So it's just like any second monitor has an HDMI feed to it. But then it's got a splitter that goes over to this other capture card. So we have the camera one, camera two, and then this all put in there. Now what I'm able to do is move myself around. Let me use that. I use a tool called Barrier that allows me to have this Linux machine acting as a server to talk to this Windows computer, to be able to grab control with my mouse and move myself around kind of as needed. The goal of all of this and the way this works, the studio computer is running OBS. It's got a big TV behind me so I can see what's going on easily on it. And OBS produces a single composited, if you will, from all of these input sources stream. So I'm not trying to sync up different cameras. I'm not trying to sync the audio. I didn't add the audio source here. I probably could have, but it was that Sennheiser mic is always one audio source. So no matter which one of these you switch between, I just ignore the audio on all of those. That goes just over to a TrueNAS. So in real time, the studio computer is going to a TrueNAS. Then that goes back over to my computer for editing. And in case you're wondering why I use an HDMI splitter versus looping it through, like in and out of a capture card, what you'll run into is I did. You have to have the studio computer on for the second monitor to work. So if you want to use your other monitor when the studio computer is off, which it's only on when I'm recording, then you probably want to use an HDMI splitter to solve that problem. Then once it comes over here to my computer, the pauses I do, I pause there purposely to show you, like, I'm going to go and trim those out. If there's a delay from when I switched, or sometimes I switch to a camera, I compose my thoughts a moment, stare at the ceiling, you know, whatever I have to do to get to the next line, it's okay to have pauses. With the pausing, you just kind of go and trim those out. Sometimes you'll put a graphic over the top of it. That's a pro tip for when you have too many pauses, or when you're doing a very technical tutorial and you're reading from a very detailed script because you're typing out commands, and occasionally you'll do a typo and you'll just backspace that out. You just take yourself off the desktop so no one notices any of the pauses that you have done or any of the typos. You just go back through and edit it. Now the editing process, let me show you what that looks like. This is a timeline for DaVinci Resolve, and this is pretty much me just trimming out, like here I trimmed out a couple pauses I had at the 152 mark, but I also put over the top like how much something costs. I think I pulled from a website. I do drop in a little bit of extra b-roll sometimes. I'll pull up a website, just make it full screen, hit record. That's all I'm doing. It's really, really simple. Like with these cameras, I actually had recorded a scene for updating one of the Synology cameras. I recorded their website, which you can see is up here. So I just drag it over there, and those are perfect opportunities if you need to shorten your video a little bit or you pause or you had to really think or you misspoke on something. I'm just trimming those out. So this is all one timeline, even though I'm switching between these different modes, whether I'm screen capturing from camera two with a screen capture or just a screen capture or going back over to camera one. It's always just one timeline edit. This saves you a ton of editing time because you're just pulling in the extra things and maybe just refer to things and copy those websites over. Now, the next part of this process I had mentioned, and we'll do this right here, is that we have Canva on the list here. So as we pull all this in, we're going to go over to Canva. And if you haven't used Canva, it's just great. It makes it so easy to make these thumbnails and things like that. Matter of fact, let's go and show you like if I delete myself here and I want to add another version of myself there. I just I have a green screen. I just snap a bunch of photos of selfies and I will just click background remover. And all right, cool. Now I've got that version of me in there. This is how I do thumbnails. And if you're wondering, how do you find these templates for all these thumbnails? They have a ton of them on here you can just choose from. So here's some of the ones I've made in the past, but you can choose from a lot of templates. I can't recommend Canva enough for being easy to use, drag and drop, and you don't have to be a skilled designer to grab a template. And yes, I have gone for more putting my face in there because I know that A-B testing works. I don't really like that it works. It almost bothers me that when I've done some of the A-B testing, I use a tool called TubeBuddy to try two different thumbnails, one with me making a stupid face and one with not. Every time people click the one with the stupid face. Hence, I've decided I have to put stupid faces or I won't get the views. I'm sorry. I don't want that to be true. I keep running those A-B tests, but they are true. Back to the creative process though. TubeBuddy is probably the last thing I mentioned that I use here. It just helps with doing things like making sure you have all the titles and tags correct and putting those in. Those are some details for uploading to YouTube. But this process does allow me to get things done quickly, get the edits done quickly, publish all the videos that I have on my channel very quickly. And that's what I wanted to share. It may help some other people who want to get into this market of creating content. It may help you get through that barrier of what are all the technical challenges of creating content, because I think there's a lot of people out there that would probably be really good at it. And I don't want the, how do I get this set up? Or how do I build the studio? Or do you have to have a whole team of editors? And I don't. I'm doing all the editing myself. Now, because I do it myself, I think constantly about how to make it more efficient. And I'd love to hear from you if there's some thoughts on how to make this better. By the way, the capture cards are all HDMI. Someone always usually suggests like going really high end. If you think that'd make my tutorials better, leave me a comment as to how. Because a few people said, time you should go with like this, this and this, or, you know, Linus is using one of these really high end. This is that cameras. And I'm like, I don't know that I would look better. I mean, those red dragons are cool from a technology standpoint, but nonetheless, I don't get too off topic here. Love hearing from you. Leave your thoughts and comments down below on ways to make this more efficient. Or if you're interested in getting into this, I like talking to people that are also in the creative spaces. And if you want a more in-depth discussion with me or reach out and connect, my forums are a great place to do that. All right. Thanks.