Perhaps your first question is, “What is B-Roll”? Great question. After reading the next paragraph, feel free to throw around the term at your next cocktail party. No need to cite me. The easy definition is that it’s any video, animation, or dynamic graphic that doesn’t count as A-Roll. Yes, I love these kinds of…
Read MoreHave you (like me) been spending too much time memorizing a script so in the final video you look as natural as possible? Maybe it’s because the ideas behind each video keep becoming more and more complicated, but I’m sure my scripts are longer than they used to be. And for me, there’s a point…
Read MoreRather than the type of advice in my series on how to create a tutorial video, today let’s talk about the specifics on how to create a “porthole video”, which is an inset video overlay used during a screencast that doesn’t have the standard square shape (if it were square, we wouldn’t need any special…
Read MoreI’m not one to follow a lot of the latest YouTube trends. Maybe it’s an age thing, though it could also just be a stubborn streak. But after you make enough videos, you start to recognize a good thing when you see it. And one thing that struck me recently were a number of great…
Read MoreOkay, this is Part 12, so we’re all experts now. Still, there are a number of things you can do to up your game. Today let’s talk about one of them: planning your video with an organizational tool called storyboarding. Briefly, a storyboard is a visual tool, a series of drawn frames with written dialog…
Read MoreSo you read the advice I wrote in parts 1-9, you think to yourself “Oh why not, I’ll try to make a video”, and you then plan everything out: where to film, what to say, how to dress, the equipment you need, etc. You’ll pick or reserve a room somewhere in your office building (we’re…
Read MoreSince one apparently just can’t have enough parts of a multi-part blog post, why not one more? Let’s depart slightly from the usual themes, because I want to talk about something that’s applicable to videos that are slightly more marketing oriented than your typical tutorial videos. Of course you could always make full-blown marketing videos…
Read MoreWelcome back to our ongoing series of how to improve the video tutorials you make, especially when you’re on a tight budget, and by that I mean both money and time. Today let’s look at conducting a live, one-on-one in-person interview. Note that online interviews and documentary-style off-screen interviews are their own full, separate topics)….
Read MoreSo your video shooting and editing skills are at a high level now, and you’re comfortable and even confident appearing in your videos. You’ve acquired a good quality microphone, greatly improving the resulting audio. But down deep you know there are still some things about the sound you could improve. I’ve already written a bit…
Read MoreYou might remember from the last post in my series on creating video tutorials that we talked about improving the quality of picture-in-picture video tutorials. I broke it down into two parts, the background and the presenter, with this summary for the latter: What’s realistically the most natural way you can present yourself in the…
Read MoreIn my previous blog post we looked at how to use a green screen to add an extra touch to the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, particularly focusing on the ambient space for filming, the lighting (both the screen itself and the subject), and the necessary audio and video equipment. The goal of using…
Read MoreIn my last blog post we looked at practical suggestions for improving the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, focusing on tips for audio recording, video recording and editing, writing the script, and uploading them. Now suppose you want to take the next step that will (hopefully!) add some impact to your tutorials: putting yourself…
Read MoreIn my previous post I described the kind of tasks, resources and software that we had to master in order to create YouTube IT tutorial videos like the 20 Alyvix videos we made in 2020. As we looked back to compare the first few videos we made with the last few, it was easy to…
Read MoreIn a recent blog post I described our new Alyvix YouTube channel that contains the 20 Alyvix tutorial videos we’ve created this year. Each video is a self-contained tutorial that showcases one aspect of how Alyvix can be used for visual monitoring, both practical application examples and for learning basic concepts and operations. Since one…
Read MoreThis year we introduced an Alyvix YouTube channel to complement the written Alyvix user guide. It now contains a number of videos that explain how to monitor specific tasks as well as explaining background knowledge about the building blocks you can use to create your own Alyvix test cases. At the end of this year…
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