After reading articles about the large and growing popularity of “streamers” on Twitch and YouTube, I wondered what all the hubbub was about. So over the last few weeks, I have dipped into several dozen streams. Mostly on twitch, a little on YouTube. I mostly look for software development/live coding streams, but also watched a few musicians, something that resembled a talk show, a broad category called “just chatting”, several gamers, and a streamer who streams about streaming. I clicked into some popular streams (thousands of viewers) and some with a single digit number of viewers.
Continue reading “A dip in the stream”Author: Kyle Cordes
Home office headsets: consider open-back
In my recent post about A/V setup, I skimmed past details about a headset for daily meeting use. Here is the rest of the story.
Continue reading “Home office headsets: consider open-back”Microsoft Teams for online classes?
Where I work at Oasis Digital, we teach a mix numerous (mostly advanced, developer-oriented) workshop classes. Historically these were mostly in-person, since March 2020 they are all online for obvious reasons.
For online sessions we’ve used various meeting tools, including Zoom, Google Meet, Blue Jeans, and others I’ve forgotten. Sometimes a customer’s IT department has our default choice blocked, we are always on the lookout for alternatives.
Continue reading “Microsoft Teams for online classes?”Design your content for effective video
This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:
- Technical setup
- Process
- Content (this post)
- Promotion (coming sometime)
Your goal is results, not Minutes Watched
YouTube is full of videos that take 10+ minutes to deliver 30 seconds of information. Why? Because this content is on channels that make money by showing ads. They need each video to be at least 10 minutes, and more minutes watched means more ad revenue.
But that’s not the context I’m writing about. This post series is about demonstrating expertise and competence on video:
Continue reading “Design your content for effective video”A small-scale, mostly-one-take video production process
This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:
- Technical setup
- Process (this post)
- Content
- Promotion
Create an outline
Outline your video in some detail, and make that outline visible (either on your screen, or printed on paper) during your video recording. Not too much detail, though; the outline shouldn’t take long, perhaps just a few minutes.
Then iterate on the outline, and get feedback from others if the video is important or if you are new to this kind of content. Rearranging text in an outline is tremendously easier than re-recording or video editing, so make the most of this stage.
Continue reading “A small-scale, mostly-one-take video production process”Audio-video setup for meetings and videos
This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:
So you want to show expertise and competence on video…
Recording a technical talk? Creating a video about a management tool, to be used as an advertisement for consulting services? Working on the perfect conference talk for an online conference, hoping to gain another 1000 Twitter followers among the community using a library you work on?
These are all cases where demonstrating competence and expertise in a video, to an audience who can leave with one click at any moment, pays off. Here are tips I have found around the web and from my experience.
Continue reading “Audio-video setup for meetings and videos”