/youtube

YouTube channel repo. Stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere.

MIT LicenseMIT

Jeff Geerling - YouTube

I currently have three YouTube channels:

Channel Subscribers
Jeff Geerling (main channel) YouTube Channel Subscribers
Geerling Engineering (second channel) YouTube Channel Subscribers
Level 2 Jeff (second channel) YouTube Channel Subscribers

This repository is a home for my YouTube production process, my thoughts on video creation and workflows, and sometimes stores things related to channel videos or series, if the work doesn't fit better in some other repository.

Since I started my work in computing, I loved the open source philosophy, and I develop almost every line of code in the open. This repo is an extension of that philosophy.

Supporting my work

Please consider sponsoring my work on GitHub Sponsors or Patreon.

I have Crohn's disease and a family I support, and I am thankful to be able to do the work I do with the support of people who've liked my blog, open source projects, or videos.

Equipment

Many people ask about what camera I use, what software I use to edit, etc. — instead of constantly emailing them back, I thought I'd keep a current listing of the equipment I use in my video production workflow.

The links below are mostly affiliate links.

Hardware

Software

My philosophy (why I'm making videos)

I've always wanted to teach.

There's a saying:

Those who can't do, teach.

That saying is complete and utter BS.

There are doers, and there are teachers, and some of the same requirements cross over, while others do not. In early 2021, I quit a very lucrative software development career and more than halved my annual income to devote my full work week to writing and creating my books, blog, open source projects, and videos.

And I can say, definitively: to be able to teach well, you not only have to know how to do. You have to know why you do, how not to do, and the entire history of whatever task is being done.

I think most people have had bad teachers. And most have had amazing teachers that radically changed their perspective on something.

I can vividly recall two teachers in high school who ignited my passion for writing, and they were both teachers who could run circles around most professionals in their field.

I've always wanted to teach like they did.

And with this YouTube channel, I can do that—in ways many teachers never could, to new and diverse global audiences.

Let me hop down from my high horse, though... if you've watched my videos, you can see I'm not always teaching.

I also have to entertain (for better or worse), earn a paycheck, and support my family. That means it's not 24x7 lecturing, like you'd get if you walk into a college classroom.

So I accept paid sponsorship (either via trade or direct payment).

Sponsorships

I accept sponsorships sparingly. Every sponsor I've had on the channel is a company or small business I've interacted with on a personal level—either through direct communication with owners or personal use or interest in the products they offer.

Sponsor Vetting

I'm picky about corporate sponsors and will never promote something I feel is either scammy or wouldn't be a good value for viewers who might click through the sponsor's link.

Paid Videos / Product Showcase Videos

I never do paid 'product showcase' videos (where a sponsor pays for a video highlighting their own talking points).

Review Videos

I do accept review samples, and sometimes devote a video to a particular product if I find it interesting, but I never accept any payment for those videos, nor do I give the company that sent the product any input into the creative process.

I also refuse vendor referral / revenue sharing agreements, as I feel that creates a perverse incentive.

Vendors are watching the video the first time when it goes live on the channel, just like the rest of my audience.

Pricing

The tech space is flooded with thousands of channels churning out paid review content and low-effort videos.

I create stories, not just videos that run through feature checklists and offer boring exposition.

As such, many of my videos—even on more mundane topics—are watched by a much more invested and consistent audience. My channel's AVD is high, and sponsored segments integrate into the video topic itself, leading to much higher viewership.

I have a fixed paid sponsorship rate based on my channel's CPM, or Cost Per Mille (cost per thousand views), and the CPM used in this calculation is currently $15.00 USD.

I update my sponsorship rate regularly, based on the average view count for all long-form videos posted in the past 90 days. The rate is negotiable depending on the specific video and sponsorship.

Process - How I make a video

  1. Ideation: Takes anywhere from hours to months or years. I have a running list of every video idea or topic jotted down in a Trello card in an 'Ideas' column. 90% of these never make it to production, but I always have at least 10-20 projects I want to work on in the wings. If it requires external help (collaboration, sponsorship, etc.), I will often create a folder in my active Video Projects directory for it to throw any notes and materials I gather.

  2. Rough Scheduling: I try to have videos scheduled out for at least 3-4 weeks in the future. Sometimes it gets down to 1-2 weeks, and that's when things get more stressful.

  3. Research: I have a Trello column for 'In Production'. I limit myself to two videos at a time (my personal WIP limit), no matter how much planning is required. Research often involves installing something ten different ways, taking it apart and putting it back together. Sometimes breaking and un-breaking it. Then benchmarking it for hours, checking thermals, debugging issues I find, contacting vendors, waiting for accessories required to complete testing, etc. Sometimes, this is the bulk of the work for a given video, and it can take days or weeks. Rarely, months.

    Sometimes I also record some 'b-roll' during this portion. I'll take screen recordings of relevant parts of the process, I'll take some product pictures, get a little footage of my setups, that sort of thing.

  4. Script Writing: Once I have a good body of research, and feel I understand the topic enough to speak coherently about it, I open up a script document, and write. I write as fast as I can, focusing first on overall structure (I often put a few section headings in, with one or two notes per section), then on the introduction. I spend a lot of time reworking the introduction, to try to give the most important information in the first 5, 10, or 15 seconds. YouTube rewards the ability to 'hook' viewers in the first 30 seconds, and I've found an interesting first 5 will go a long way towards keeping someone's attention.

    The rest of the video has to be good, too, though. And at my speaking rate of around 170 words per minute, I try to limit my videos to 2000-3000 words tops.

    I have never added fluff/padding to my scripts—on the contrary, I am often ruthless in cutting out parts I don't think serve to highlight the main topic of the video, or the story I'm trying to convey.

    During the Script Writing process, I also tend to throw out two or three title ideas, along with thumbnails to go with them. If I'm doing really well, I'll even make sure the title and thumbnail tie in strongly to the first five seconds of the script!

  5. Script Read: When I feel like I have a good script (usually after two or three drafts), I read the entire script out loud, usually twice. During this time, I tweak the text to fit my spoken style, like changing "would not" to "wouldn't" and "going to" to "gonna". The key is to make my brain translate what I read from the teleprompter into something close to how I normally talk.

  6. A-roll Recording: I record most videos in one long take, with pauses between every few paragraphs. Sometimes I'll take a 2nd camera and teleprompter to another location to record parts of the A-roll elsewhere, if the script calls for it.

  7. B-roll Recording: I often put this off until after I begin the editing process, but I shouldn't. I'll record inserts, product shots, and screen recordings that help illustrate certain points in my video. There are often 10 or so B-roll clips per minute of A-roll, and some of these shots require many minutes or even hours of preparation, so sometimes I incorporate B-roll capture into my research. Frequently I'll assemble and tear down a particular setup five or six times in the course of making a video. It can get quite tedious.

  8. Ingest: After all this is done, I stash every asset—A-roll audio and video, B-roll clips, screen recordings, product images, illustration files, etc.—into a 'Scratch' folder in a project folder for the video I'm working on. Then I'll create a new Final Cut Pro Library and import all assets into it.

  9. Edit: As a rule of thumb, assembling all the footage in the edit takes at least one hour per minute of final video. Sometimes two or three, depending on the complexity of the edit. Some aspects, like fixing audio mistakes, adding motion text or graphics, or even mundane things like tracking a blur on something, can double or triple the time required editing a video.

  10. Pickups: During the editing process, I note any timestamps where an extra insert (like a motorized dolly shot of something) would spice up the video. Then I spend a few hours gathering the missing pickup shots that I didn't get in my initial B-roll acquisition. Then I incorporate the pickups into the video.

  11. Final Review: I watch through the entire video, full screen, both with and without headphones. I listen for any audio gaffes, make sure I have decent transitions, and try to catch any flaws in titling, effects, and overlays. After I'm happy with the edit, I export the video using Final Cut Pro's built-in Share tool.

  12. Metadata: While the video is exporting, I work on metadata, and choose my final title and thumbnail idea. Then I fill in a description, go through the video and translate my script sections to timestamps, add relevant tags, and note any times when I want to add cards to the video.

    Because YouTube's built-in closed captioning is a train wreck for technical content, I will also run the video through Whisper (here's how I do it), and hand-edit the final transcription before submitting it as the video's English language subtitles.

  13. Upload: The end is in sight. I upload the video to YouTube, copy and paste all the metadata over into YouTube, upload the subtitles, and schedule the video for the appropriate day and time.

  14. Thumbnail: Sometimes I'll have already worked on a thumbnail if I was able to think of a good idea earlier in the process. But usually between the time I upload the video and it's publish date, I'll set up my greenscreen and some lights, and either use my camera remote and self-timer or my wife's assistance to get ten or twenty different thumbnail image options. I try to minimize 'YouTube Face', but I also know without a certain amount of clickability, my video will get buried. I aim for a happy medium of 'mildly clickbait' expressions, while not embarrassing myself—at least not too much.

  15. Blog Post: After uploading the thumbnail, I usually write a completely separate blog post on the topic. Sometimes I'll have already written the blog post's outline during the Script Writing process, other times I'll start from scratch.

    But I've found that writing a video script and writing a compelling blog post require a different style of prose, so I usually spend a few hours writing a separate blog post covering most of the topics in a given video. Sometimes my blog post is more of a short summary, though, if the video is highly visual or process-oriented, and the topic won't translate well to written form.

At long last, the day the video posts, I run through a checklist, sharing the video to my audience on social media, publishing my blog post, and interacting in the comments section for at least a couple hours. I'll come back a few points through the day and check recent comments again.

The community on YouTube is generally constructive and supportive, and even those who detract on my channel often do so in a respectful and helpful way, so I get a lot of value out of the comments section.

Editing - Titling

Titling used to be a separate editing stage, after cuts were made. Nowadays, NLEs have made titling a lot easier, at least in simple cases.

But titles can still get quite complicated. I like to keep things simple—most of the time—and my current title style is:

  • Font: Montserrat
  • Face: Bold or ExtraBold
  • Color: White
  • Size: (choose a size that fits with the title displayed)
  • Style: 1px black outline, 3px black drop shadow

My main goal is for titles to be legible, and only to be used to enhance the visuals or spoken word.

Title Templates

I am slowly building up a Title template library for custom titling I do on the channel. For quick pop-up caption titles, I use my 'Caption' Motion template, and for references to other YouTube videos (overlaid when playing a clip from one of those videos), I use the 'YouTube Video Title' template.

These templates are inside the fcpx/motion/titles directory in this repository. See the included README for where to place them for use in Final Cut Pro X.

Editing - Sound Design

I started my career working in radio. I did mostly IT-related tasks, but radio is an inherently audio-focused industry, so I spent a lot of time working around audio and voice processing chains during the era when everything converted from analog to digital.

So I have a pretty deep understanding of audio, and I think anyone who's successful in video knows how essential good audio and sound design are to making a great video.

For my YouTube channel, I mainly focus on getting the cleanest audio possible in my footage, so I only have to tweak things slightly during editing.

That said, almost every audio clip I record gets a baseline level of processing to bring it up to a good YouTube standard, suitable for playback on devices ranging from smartphones with tinny speakers to home theater sound systems.

I use music and sound effects sparingly, so I try to make my vocal tracks as good as possible. Nobody likes listening to mud.

My minimum processing for a clip in Final Cut Pro X looks like this:

  • Loudness enhancement enabled (light compression)
    • Amount 35%
    • Uniformity 4%
  • Voice Isolation (AI assisted) enabled, if necessary
    • Adjusted based on environment
  • Limiter (FCP Effect)
    • Release 210 ms
    • Output -0.5 dB
    • Lookahead 0.2 ms
    • Mode Legacy (Soft Knee 'ON')
    • Gain (adjust as fit to push peaks between -6 and 0 dB)
  • Volume
    • Adjust if needed so peaks hit near 0 dB (avg just over -6 dB)

Recording devices

If recording in my 'studio', I also have an analog Symetrix 528E Voice Processor, with very light compression and a noise gate, which reduces processing time in post, and is very useful for live streams, so I don't have to tweak software controls.

I could easily do without it, but it's just nicer to know the mic input into my computer is already close to as perfect as it needs to be.

In the field, I use a variety of mics, depending on the situation. I will put a Rode Wireless Go II on my camera for run-and-gun style shooting (vlog-style), or for A-roll when I don't have time to set up my boom arm and shotgun. I'll also use an on-camera Sennheiser MKE 200 for environment and backup audio, if recording to a separate audio recorder (either my phone with Hindenburg Field Recorder, or a Zoom H6).