Today’s GSDdaily will be about how to make a video course, including all the tools and tech to create a video that you can sell online. Now, I have a collection of shit sitting in front of me, so we’re going to go through all of that.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of Done For You. Basically, we help people create and sell stuff online. At the end of the day, that’s what we do. And that is usually through clarifying sales messages on building automated sales funnels and then also, analyzing tech and creating courses and all that other stuff.
This is a digital product creation week or Create a week if you will when we teach how to make a video course. Monday we talked about creating eBooks. Yesterday was Tuesday. It’s all these days have just kind of like compressed it together. It’s been kind of crazy, but so Tuesday, yesterday we talked about creating video courses and I ended up going along and we didn’t get to the point, the part where we talked about tools and technology, the things that you use to create the digital courses to create the material.
At the end of the day, when you’re trying to learn how to make a video course, literally all you need is a computer. I mean, you can use a laptop, doesn’t matter what you have, as long as you can get your stuff into the computer, you can get your knowledge, your audio, your video, and then you have a way to capture it and record it and encode it and put it into a membership site. We’re going to be talking about membership sites later on the week.
Tools Needed To Make Videos
So first, in getting into how to make a video course, I want to talk about physical stuff, and then we’re going to talk about software and all the software to use.
1. Mic
Let’s start with mics. I got this little boom mic, which I like quite a bit. So this thing plugs into an iPhone. And little windscreen and it ends up becoming a microphone. It’s a directional mic that you can end up putting on the front end of something like this. This is a nice little portable unit.
Basically, you put the mic on, and then you’re able to attach your phone to it here, and then you’re able to steady your camera as you’re walking around with both hands as opposed to … I don’t even know where my phone is, as opposed to like holding it in front of you. So yeah, I’m not sure where my phone is.
This works out pretty nice for that when learning how to make a video course. I’ll end up throwing the Amazon links somewhere, but we have a Rode microphone with a little fuzzy thing that works as a wind deflector.
2. Stabilizer
Then we have this unit and it ends up working as a stabilizer. A lot of times those are the things we do when we walk around. Another very cool little tool is this setup. It is one-handed, it’s just like a little boom. I don’t know all the technical terms for these, but it’s just a one-handed mount and then you attach your phone to it or you can also attach a little GoPro and this is like a no-name GoPro. I ended up buying four of them so that I could do some multi-camera angle stuff in Final Cut Pro.
We have this and then this ends up extends, so you can throw your phone in there. So also nice for walking around when you’re capturing audio and video in person, full-motion video.
3. Camcorder / Go Pro / iPhone Video Capture
I get a lot of questions, your iPhone will work better, will work better than most camcorders. So this camcorder, HD camcorder, and I haven’t made a whole lot of use of this yet because I bought it to do live streams at my standing desk and I haven’t had time to install it, actually hook it up. That’s my process for how to make a video course.
This camera is going to feed through this little card and if you see there’s an HDMI, it’s right there. So there’s an HDMI mount on one side, and then there’s a USB mount on the other side. What it does is it takes the input from this HDMI cable, feeds it into this, which then feeds into the computer.
You can do it, you can live to stream it. I mean you can end up hooking up through StreamYard and stream directly from the camera to Facebook or YouTube. Or you can set up a hardware box called a SlingStudio. And I’m going to show you one of those in a minute, so you can have three or four mounts, so three or four cameras, including your iPhone.
Then it feeds through a controller, which you can manipulate. And then when learning how to make a video course, that streams out to the World Wide Web. So also very cool tools in terms of capturing video. But like I said, so the new iPhones they capture in 4K video, that unit captures 1080. I mean, it was a relatively cheap camera, it’s nothing too crazy, but it serves its purpose, which is capturing video.
At the end of the day, your video doesn’t have to be high-res because when you’re streaming from YouTube or Facebook or even Wistia. They re-encode your video anyway and it degrades some of the quality. You don’t need super high-res stuff, especially when you’re streaming on free platforms. If you own bandwidth as Netflix does, then it makes sense. You have a super high-res version.
I use these little mounts quite often. So this little mount is interesting. I think I got it from Amazon a long time ago, but basically, you can pull this off. You can pull off the camera and then this fits in just a backpack or whatever nicely. Just toss it in your backpack or your bag and attach a camera onto the front side of it or the top of it. So the GoPro, which uses a normal camera mount and then you can screw a GoPro onto it, and then now you have like a ready-made little tripod that you can set up on your desk just like that. So that works out pretty nicely.
As for how to make a video course, I use these quite a bit for capturing video. But my favorite is just sitting in a standing desk or standing at a standing desk and when capturing video.
4. Gimbal Mount
My all-time, probably the thing that I use the most often though is this mount. It’s a gimbal mount. So basically, this works as a stabilizer, and then so it orients the camera right there. It orients the camera and then it steadies it for you. I mean basically, you can hold out in front of you like a selfie stick and then there you go. You can hold it out in front of you like a selfie stick and it is moving with you as it’s going.
Let’s see. There it goes. Yeah, that’s not going to do it because I’m not on my phone on there. But there you go. There it is. It was hiding behind stuff. If you put this on, we have the phone and it kicks up. Now, so it follows wherever we go, which is pretty cool, right? What happens is you can turn your phone on. I’m just going to kick on the camera and we’re going to turn the video so you can see this. Yeah, you can see that. Okay, cool. So what we can do, you can …
I’m not sure how this is going to work. You can see how it’s staying nice and steady. Now if we switch the mode, when going through the process for how to make a video course, we’re going to switch the mode and now I can turn and it stays always in the same place.
See it staying always in the same place? If we switch the mode again, it turns with the camera or it turns with your movement. So these things are super cool. I think I got this one at Best Buy for a hundred bucks. There are lots of more expensive things. I also added a little attachment, which ends up being a little tripod. So you can set this thing down and then you can record whatever you want from there.
So then what you do is you just hit play and then you can talk to your camera, record it, it encodes, it adds it to the photo library. Then you can export it to wherever you want to go. So you can send it up to Facebook if you want. You can send it to YouTube, you can put it in iCloud. Once the material, once it’s in there, then you’re off and running in terms of what you can do with it. Your material, your content has been captured.
Now, all of this to say these are just some fun tools! When how to make a video course, you need a mic. Oh, and the other thing is this mic, I use these mics all the time. So this is Audio-Technica AT2020, so it’s my favorite mic. I love this mic. I use it for all of my videos, all the sales videos. It’s being used right now actually. So I’m just going to turn this off and, all right. So that is our video stuff. I don’t have crazy camera equipment. I will probably end up upgrading my camera equipment eventually because we’ve been doing a lot more video. These videos are super simple to do. Just a webcam is all you need.
Software for Creating Videos
All right, now we’re going to switch to some software. Is that cool? We’re going to go look at some software that you can use to edit and create videos when figuring out how to make a video course. Where do you want to go first? Let’s continue talking about capturing video and capturing information. Then we’re going to go and I think we’re going to edit some video. Is that cool? Want to edit some videos together? All right, perfect. And hello from France. That’s awesome.
Camtasia
Right now you’re looking at a piece of software called Camtasia. Camtasia is a screen recording and video editing software. There’s a free trial for it. It is preferred, I think is probably one of the only ones that you can use on Windows. So basically what it does is it lets you on a Windows machine, you can record your screen and then you can record your audio, and then you can edit that and it’ll record the webcam too.
It’ll record the different feeds and then it will let you move them around, splice them, cut them, you can even do some background noise editing stuff. So it ends up being a pretty nice piece of software too. When you don’t know too much about video editing, Camtasia works well.
ScreenFlow
ScreenFlow is its competitor, its rival, but ScreenFlow only works on Mac. It does the same thing. The interface is a little bit simpler, as with most things Mac, and I like ScreenFlow pretty well. So it’s what I do all of our screen capture stuff in.
It’s built by a company called Telestream. Also, it’s economical, 129 bucks for a free trial and super, super-nice, super easy to use and you can drag your clips in. You can do a screen share, screen record. You can record the webcam, you can record your audio. It works well from a linear video editing standpoint. Record one video, you’re going to edit some imperfections out. You might swap between cameras and mics and stuff, but you’re not necessarily going to do crazy multi-camera, multi-clip, throw-in background audio, all of that stuff.
When I do really simple video edits, even for full-motion video, I usually use ScreenFlow because it’s simple to use.
iMovie
If I do simple full-motion videos and I’m going to do some background music and stuff, then I’ll usually use iMovie.
Final Cut Pro
When I do some of the more complex stuff than I use Final Cut Pro.
Walkthrough in using ScreenFlow
Let’s look at a sales video. Do you want to see a sales video? What have I done in ScreenFlow? So we’re going to look at some VSLs. Oh, there’s one. Okay. So this is a web development video sales letter that I did. There’s no camera on it. So there’s no like face video, there’s no full-motion video. But I want to show you kind of how I built it, you know? Basically, what I did was I had a PowerPoint presentation. Here, I’m going to … Let’s exit out of this a little bit.
This is the inside of ScreenFlow. I had a PowerPoint presentation, I wrote a script and I added, I created some PowerPoint slides out of that script. So the script is typical video sales letter stuff and then I overlaid some video on top of it. But to get that underlying VSL pretty well dialed in, I recorded it using ScreenFlow. And you can see like right here, there’s a little applet. You hit the record button after you configure it, but you hit the record button and then your webcam is recording, your screen is recording and your audio is recording.
All of that stuff is recording. What ends up happening is you have this, so basically you have these channels. Now, you have your audio channel right here. So this is all audio and then you have your screen channel. And then if I was to do webcam, I would have my webcam channel. What I can do is I can just drag and drop the channels on top of each other and then go through and create a video. I do this for courses, I do it for sales videos. Anything that is video, this is what we end up doing. So here we have, so I’m just going to play this real quick and then I’m just going to kind of edit it up and chop it up. Here you go.
… address, phone number. Now, your website needs to attract-
Prospects and leads.
Let’s say I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that particular piece of it. All I have to do, I’m just going to go through and just make it. There’s our audio track right there. I’m going to select both of them and then I use the hotkeys. And in this T is cut, but it looks like in the edit is split clips. So there’s all your content here. But what we do is we split it and then let’s say right here we’re going to split this guy. We’re going to split it and the hotkey is a T. Its going to split this and then so we’re going to do this and then we’re going to just delete that out and then we’re going to move this clip and we’re going to join these clips up. So that’s how you would end up editing video.
If you had a clip that you wanted to go above it, you just drag it above. You would drag this one below, which accomplishes the same thing. You can drag them all up. So that’s how you would edit sales videos using ScreenFlow.
Walkthrough in using Camtasia
Camtasia is very similar. You’re going to have your different channels and then you’re going to edit those based on where it needs to go. Does that make sense so far? So, you record the video and then you edit it, and then what you do is you hit export and you’re going to export it. We’re going to export it to the desktop, it’s going to be normal, letterbox content and that’s it. We just hit export and then all of a sudden it is exporting as an MP4 format to our desktop and then we can use it for our courses. Does that make sense so far? All right. Awesome.
Walkthrough in using iMovie
Now, next level up in terms of video editing, we’re going to go play with iMovie. So if you don’t have an Apple, then shame on you. No, I’m just kidding. From a video editing standpoint, I had a client call me yesterday and they asked and I think movie and photo editor on Windows is a kind of an editing tool. I’m not sure. I’m not sure what some of the more advanced video editing software is. I know that there are some, Adobe has one. Also, I tend to kind of stay in the Apple wheelhouse with iMovie and Final Cut Pro just because it works well. At least for me, it’s kind of how I learned. That’s all.
All right, so we’re going to go look at iMovie now, and we’re going to look at some stuff there. So, we’ve got some projects. All right, I’m going to save that guy. And then let’s see. This is just the testimonial video. Oops, looks like the video is missing. Okay, cool. This particular video from here, so this is our video track and we can pull different videos and different stuff down. We can add this stuff to our library or our video. Lots of different stuff here.
But basically what we’re going to do is if you right-click, all of your options are here. We can detach the audio, and then it detaches the audio and makes our video clip kind of float above the audio clip. Then we can go through and we can pull this audio clip down to like the master audio. We’re going to make this guy the master. So this is now the master audio clip and it is unlinked from the video clip. And then what we can do is with this, we go back to edit and then we split. Let’s see.
Again, I use the hotkeys here. The hockey for splitting a clip is commanded B. So it splits and then we can go through and we can split it here. And if we want to split the audio too here, and then we can delete out entire chunks, and then we can start moving stuff around. And so basically again, it’s layered, layers on layers. You have your channels, you have your audio channel and your video channel. So that’s how you would end up moving stuff around on iMovie and creating. And then from an export standpoint, you would export as a file. You save it on your desktop and then bam, you are now exporting your video file to your desktop and you can upload to Wistia, you can upload to Vimeo, which we talked about yesterday. That’s where you would have your videos hosted.
Walkthrough in using Final Cut Pro
Let’s see, I think the next place we’re going to go to is Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro is the next level of video editing software. When you want to do stuff that isn’t necessarily in iMovie, you’re going to go to Final Cut Pro next. Final Cut Pro I think is $299 which is a steal for video editing software, especially as good. Final Cut Pro, you can do professional editing in. I have mastered 1% of Final Cut Pro, all the things that it can do and I can get around okay.
So, let’s see, I got to go find the library to open up. This is where I do like … So I’m going to pull up my DIY Builds videos. So the DIY Builds videos, I have a channel on YouTube for just doing stuff around the house. And so this is a, I pulled the tree with a tractor, so I like did a little video on how to do this, but you can see again, it’s professional-grade stuff. I mean, so you have like your collections, your projects, and events over here. And then you have your media and then you have your video window. And then over here you have your library properties and any kind of properties for the project.
Here we have our title clips and you can drag those around and then we have these guys and you can move them. You can move these clips up and you can kind of stack stuff on top of each other. So I’m just going to not do any of that stuff. So there is all kind, but it’s the same thing. Like I have a track here. So this track right here is our video track and there is an audio component to that video track. And then I have a little bit of background music. So we have …
What we’re doing here is we’re pulling a tree out of front landscaping, the front gardens.
And then you can hear the background track, the background audio kind of start to kick in the background. And then this is my voiceover. So like if I was to put all this down, then you hear just the tractor, then there’s a little bit of background, then there’s my voice over there.
Not cleanse a whole a lot but …
Is that pretty cool stuff?
This is our …
Yeah. So this is Final Cut Pro, it’s video editing. It’s a high level when it comes to how to make a video course, but it works nicely.
Now, you don’t need to get into Final Cut Pro. You probably don’t even need to get into iMovie to create video courses. But this is where you will end up going if you turn it into something that you’re going to do a lot of, you end up going to more expensive cameras, better editing stuff. Do you know what I mean? So it ends up working out pretty well that way.
Now, in terms of, so we talked about editing, we talked about capturing, we talked about ScreenFlow, *which is a low level when it comes to how to make a video course… And we talked about Camtasia software. Is there anything else I’m missing?
Streamyard
Oh, StreamYard, we can talk about StreamYard a little bit. This is the software that we use for live streaming. Nice stuff. And currently, we are living. You can see that I’m using the software right now. There’s another one that I have used restream.io, which is also very nice software, but I like StreamYard better.
SlingStudio
There is a hardware solution called SlingStudio, which is a badass. So this SlingStudio is perfect for how to make a video course!
It’s a hardware device and, you plug, it has little packs that you plug into the cameras and then through the HDMI port, and then those packs send the video to this hub. And then this hub is the thing responsible for the switching of the camera feeds. And you can see here, he’s actually on an iPad switching the camera feeds. This device is awesome. I think one of the reasons I’m geeking out on it is because I had a call with a new friend yesterday. And so, he walked me through his setup, and like literally he’s got a multi-camera set up with a SlingStudio. And I’m like, I just need to go build one of those.
Don’t be surprised if we radically upgrade our live streaming solution in the next little bit because of him and how he’s put together his process for how to make a video course. You’re going to meet him next week. We’re going to talk about software.
This ends up being a great, another solution to give you some like studio capabilities without actually having to spend an arm and a leg on studio stuff and it integrates with mobile phones and all that stuff natively too. So this works out well. From what I understand this thing sends traffic through Restream so you can do multicasting, multiple broadcasting in the same place. So I think from a video, audio standpoint, that’s it.
QuickTime
I mean the other nice, the other probably potential thing that we can talk about is QuickTime. QuickTime gives you a simple quick way of doing a movie recording, which is your camera. You can hit QuickTime and movie recording and start a camera record. You can do an audio recording, you can do a screen recording.
Audacity
Another piece of audio recording software that I’ve used is Audacity, Audacity Project is the name of it I think, Audacity recording. Yeah, free, open-source, cross-platform audio software (which is important when it comes to how to make a video course). But anymore, I mean with your voice notes app on a phone or there are so many MP3 voice recording apps that those work just as great. You can export them as an MP3 file and you’re perfectly fine.
And then I would say the only other probably tool that I use a lot for video and it’s on my phone is this app.
Teleprompter
It’s an app that just basically’s a teleprompter app. It’s a teleprompter app for how to make video courses. And what I can do is I can put a sales video or put a script on.
It’s showing through the camera and then what it does is it counts down for you and then it starts scrolling, so you can see and read. Notice where you’re looking right there and you’re reading right below it. Pretty cool when figuring out how to make a video course, right?
You don’t even seem like your eyes move, which works well and it works even better with this thing. So you can hook it up so that this is sitting up in front of you and then you are recording your videos, your sales videos right in front of you. So it ends up working out pretty nice to record sales materials.
Content ends up being more of a stream of consciousness kind of thing. Like you don’t necessarily record courses from the script, although you could. It’s probably more of a pain in the ass than anything to record them from a script. So that would work too. I think that’s all I got. I mean, we talked about video, we talked about audio, we talked about editing, we talked about live streaming, we talked about even a teleprompter and how to make a video course from scratch.
For Questions and Guide
If you guys have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start, sign up for a strategy session with me. We can put together an action plan for you.
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about membership sites. We talked about eBooks Monday, video, yesterday, and today. We’re going to talk about membership sites tomorrow and locking all of it in. I think I’m going to show you the inside of a membership site and a couple of ways to kind of set it up and how to manage permissions and stuff. Then Friday, I don’t know what we’re going to talk about, but we’ll figure it out.
I will talk to you soon. Book a call, doneforyou.com/start, if you want to go through an action plan call and I’ll talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.
