Media Creation or how I learned to edit video and cast a pod

Alt title: The search for a better thread title.

Hello! You might be wondering why I called you all here today. Well, while we have a YouTube thread for talking about internet videos and a podcast thread for talking about whatever on Earth the podcast thread is talking about, we also have a number of people involved in creating both of these things and talking shop about how we actually do these things has a tendency to be buried by the sheer volume of those threads. So here's to how the sausage is made.

VIDEO EDITING


Courtesy of @Somestickguy

Editing video? You have a number of options.

Windows Movie Maker: It's free. It's very basic. You probably shouldn't use it.

iMovie: It's free if you buy a Mac. It's available on IOS devices and it's not that bad, actually. I know a few people who shoot and edit on their iPhone and since there's considerable overlap between Apple's iMovie and their Final Cut Pro X, it's apparently quite easy to make the step up from iMovie to FCX. My own experience with it is limited, though, so I'm going off of other people's assessment. But speaking of...

Final Cut Pro X: It's not Final Cut Pro 7, which to this day pisses some people off. It's Mac-only. Had major issues at release but that's mostly been ironed out by now. In fact, in 2014 the Will Smith feature "Focus" became the first feature film to be cut on FCX. Costs $299, unless Google lied to me. I've barely touched FCX, I was taught editing on FC7 but lost access to a Mac that could run editing software before FCX was released. From what little I've used it, it seems perfectly competent.

Adobe Premiere Elements: Mac/Windows. Part of the Elements line of budget, pared-down versions of their Creative Cloud programs, along with Photoshop Elements. Premiere is the little brother of Premiere Pro and does most of what Pro does. There's some stuff missing that I could see being annoying as you improve as an editor and want to try your hand at more advanced things. No keyframes, no green screen (chroma keying), no GPU acceleration. The advantage of Elements is that you can actually buy it. You can plunk down $99.99 (again, assuming Google is to be trusted) and own a license of Premiere Elements 14 for ever and ever and ever, you'll be back, time will tell... sorry, I've been listening to a lot of Hamilton. Why is being able to just buy it an advantage?

Adobe Premiere Pro: Mac/Windows. Unlike Elements, Pro is only available as a monthly subscription. It's a better program than Elements, personally I like it more than FCX, but to use it you either have to pay $19.99 per month with at least a one year commitment for just Premiere Pro or $49.99 a month for the entire Creative Cloud suite, which includes among others Photoshop, Audition and After Effects. If I was working with video professionally, if I was making money off of it, I could see the Creative Cloud making a lot of sense. All three programs I mentioned are programs you could easily find yourself needing and Premiere Pro is an excellent editing suite. But as is, well, it's a bit of an investment.

Sony Vegas 13: Windows-only. It's cheap. $59.99 gets you a competent editing suite. It's on Steam, so any of the Steam sales will drop the price on it. Sony Vegas is probably what I've spent most time editing on, besides Final Cut Pro 7, and... well, I think "competent" probably remains the best way to describe it. Everything you can do in Premiere and Final Cut, you can do in Vegas, just not quite as easy or quickly as in those. 13 in particular has a thing where the UI has clearly been designed for touch screens and there's no way to resize it, so you have these enormous buttons just taking up screen real estate. I'd probably go with Elements over Vegas in a battle of the budget releases.

DaVinci Resolve 12: Originally a color grading program, Australian company Blackmagic Design got so many requests for this one editing feature or this other little feature, just to finish this thing up while doing the color grading, that they eventually decided to make Resolve 12 into a fully featured non-linear editing program. There are two versions, a free version and a $995 Studio version, but unless you're editing Stereoscopic 3D, there's no reason to bother with the Studio version. Really, the only thing that the Studio version has that I could see myself missing is some noise reduction and motion blur settings. Now it doesn't have as many video effect filters built in as Premiere or Final Cut but it does support OpenFX plugins and it's also a really cool color grading program to boot. It's a system hog, you basically have to spec for this program like you would for a gaming computer, but it's very, very quickly become my personal go-to editing program. Windows, Mac and it might be the only program listed here that's also available for Linux, if that's a decider for you.

There are other programs out there, I know Lightworks is available in a free version if you don't need to output to more than 720p, but these are the major players. And Windows Movie Maker.

Now that you have your video, it needs to go somewhere. Let's look at the options.

YouTube: It's YouTube.

Alright, moving on...

Okay, okay, there are actually alternatives.

Vimeo: It's hipster YouTube. It's a YouTube alternative that's mostly focused on short films, series and animation. If you just want to play some videogames and throw that on the net, Vimeo probably isn't worth it for you, but for animation or visual effects, if visual quality is real important, Vimeo is probably the choice for you. Now, when I say worth it, I mean that while you can get a free Basic account for Vimeo, the limitations on it means that it doesn't really make sense to switch to Vimeo unless you spring for Vimeo Plus at $59.95 for a year. Plus also gets you some customization options for the player, it removes banner ads I think, and you get some stuff like domain-level control over where your videos can embed.

I guess there's also DailyMotion but... there are places on the internet even I dare not go.

PODCASTS

Are you podcasting? I'm not. I have no clue about how to podcast. So here's a YouTube video where Will Smith and Norm Chan from Tested talk about pro-level podcast setups.



Granted, that was mostly about podcasts that require XLR microphones and gathering people in a studio. There's simpler ways of doing things and since we do have quite a number of podcasters on these forums, maybe we can get some insight on that from @Chincymcchilla of hit Power Rangers podcast Teenagers With Attitude fame?

Chincymcchilla wrote: »

Podcasting through the internet is pretty easy nowadays!

For Teenagers With Attitude, we literally just use Skype and Audacity.

You can use any communication software because most of the time you won't actually be recording the call itself.

Each person uses audacity and records their direct mic input. This way you can cut out background noise of each persons track which would be impossible if you were recording the call itself. The only thing you have to do is create sync points by doing a countdown and having everyone clap, then matching them up when doing the editing in audacity later.

For equipment, to get started you can use one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Microphones-Snowball-Condenser-Microphone/dp/B006DIA77E

or a bunch of other fairly good starting mics if you don't like Snowball. MAKE SURE YOU GET A POP FILTER, they're for like 3 bucks.

Here's @QuestionMarkMan with how Scriptlock handles multiple guests over the internet.

QuestionMarkMan wrote: »

Ok, so since we have multiple guests every episode, sometimes all over the internet, I wanted to try and find an easier solution than having them all record through Audacity on their end (especially since these guests are just on for one episode). I eventually found Cast, which it looks like has actually gotten out of Beta now so everyone can use it! It's all browser-based, and basically I create a room and it'll generate room links that I can send to each guest. They join, I click Record, and then Cast will simultaneously upload everyone's individual audio to the cloud while we're recording. Afterwards I can then download each individual audio file and edit away in Audacity (they also have their own editing interface in the browser that you can use, along with publishing tools, but I like having more control). The only requirements are that you have to use Chrome, and everyone needs a mic/headphones.

If you want to hear what it sounds like, the Brad Muir/Khris Brown episode was the first time we did two people over the internet at the same time with Cast.

There's been a couple of mentions of Audacity and that Tested video mentioned a couple of other programs, so let's just link them here.

Audacity: Freeware audio recording and editing program. Available for just about everything, I think there might be some potential driver issues for Windows 10 but I've been able to run it just fine, so YMMV.

GarageBand: Available on Mac for $4.99. Generally aimed at music creation and recording, it can also be used to record your podcast and, hey, maybe you can build a cool piece of intro-music from the loops, drums and MIDI options included.

Adobe Audition: Windows and Mac. Briefly touched upon when talking about Premiere Pro, this is another one of Adobe's Creative Cloud programs, with all that entails vis a vis pricing. That aside, it's remarkably well-suited to cleaning up audio, so if that's a persistent problem for you, it might be worth looking into Audition. As with all the Creative Cloud programs, there's a free trial version to try out.

Got a podcast? Want to host it somewhere? Well then, I still have no clue. PodOmatic, Libsyn, PodBean, ShoutEngine, SoundCloud, these are all words that probably mean something to someone. Someone like experienced podcaster @Stilts.

Stilts wrote: »

Okay, so, you've got your podcast recorded and edited, but now you have to figure out where the hell to put it. Unless you have your own webspace to upload episodes to (like T4CT has set up for the various Viking Rocketship podcasts), your two primary options are probably going to be ShoutEngine and Libsyn. Which one you choose depends on what's important to you.

ShoutEngine starts out free, so that's definitely nice to have when starting your first podcast. There are also no storage or upload limits, so you could be putting up 500 MB episodes every day and they wouldn't care (please do not actually do this, though). The primary limitation is on bandwidth, which is typically not an issue for a podcast that's been around for less than a year or two. A high-quality, long-form podcast (i.e. two hours) would be around 100 MB, so at 10GB a month that's 100 downloads per month. The upgraded tiers are pretty cheap, too, unless you get a LOT of downloads. They've also got all the typical blog integration, analytics, XML creation, and other utilities that any podcast hosting service worth a damn will have.

Okay, so what about Libsyn? There's no free options, so it's gonna be more expensive when starting your podcast. Unlike ShoutEngine, though, Libsyn's monthly fee is based on upload bandwidth, not download. So if, like the example podcast I mentioned previously, your episodes consistently average out to 100MB, you'd never need to pay more than the tier that gets you 400 MB of monthly storage. You could have 10 or 10,000 listeners and it won't matter to Libsyn, which means the prices actually end up being better than ShoutEngine's for podcasts that have gathered a large listener base. Also, Libsyn was one of the very first dedicated podcast hosts, which means it's had a whole lot of time to add some nice bells and whistles to its service. Aside from the standard stuff, it has options for automatically publishing content to social media like Tumblr, Facebook or Soundcloud; options for publishing bonus content along with the episode; built-in monetization options through ads or subscriptions; and extensive WordPress integration. So yeah, Libsyn might not be the best place to start your podcasting career, but it's a great place to migrate to once you've started getting an audience and/or want more publishing tools to work with.

There is one piece of advice I have that applies to every podcast host, though, and it's VERY IMPORTANT: when it comes time to give iTunes a link to your XML feed, DO NOT use the "raw" URL that your host of choice gives you. Instead, go to Feedburner, stick the raw URL in there, and then give the Feedburner URL to iTunes. Why go through this extra step? Well, aside from the handy tools and analytics Google provides for free, the primary reason is to give yourself flexibility. For example, let's say you start by hosting on ShoutEngine, but then your podcast gets big and you decide to migrate over to Libsyn. If you had given iTunes the ShoutEngine XML feed, you'd have to go through the rigmarole of submitting a new XML feed to iTunes; and you'd have to inform anyone who's subscribed to your podcast directly through the XML feed that they'll need to jump over to a new XML feed. But if you have that Feedburner wrapper over your feed, you can just give Feedburner the new XML URL and your subscribers won't miss a beat. So please, do yourself a favor and use Feedburner!

OTHER STUFF

I mentioned music earlier and, well, sometimes you just need that perfect tune to finish up your video or welcome people to your podcast. That's when YouTube can be a dick. Well, not so much with podcasts, but if you're anything like me, you want to be sure that you're not gonna get your video taken down because someone owns the rights to O Fortuna. Actually, if you're like me you just use the Bastion soundtrack for all your videos and no one ever says anything, but still, what you really need is Creative Commons licensed music. That link has a list of places that has CC licensed songs, but I personally mostly just use the Free Music Archive, although YouTube actually also has a lot of music and sound FX at their YouTube Audio Library.

Now that you have your CC licensed song, well, I'll quote from CreativeCommons.org:

Can I use any song with a CC license on it?
Almost — you need to make sure that what you want to do with the music is OK under the terms of the particular Creative Commons license it’s under. CC-licensed music isn’t free for all uses, only some — so make sure to check out the terms (you can find these by clicking on each song’s license icon).

Most importantly, you need to use music that is not licensed under a No Derivative Works license. This means that the musician doesn’t want you to change, transform, or make a derivative work using their music. Under CC licenses, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video.

Also, make sure to properly credit the musician and the track, as well as express the CC license the track is under. For example, you might include text like this at the end of your video:

This video features the song “Desaprendere (Treatment)” by fourstones, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Of course, there's more to this than just video editing and podcasting, so if anyone has a good setup for streaming or capturing game video, please share. I'm if possible even more blank on that than podcasting.

Also if y'all feel there's something missing in the OP or something to add, just at me and I'll add it in.