300th Video: Behind the Scenes

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time it's the 300th explaining computers episode and to celebrate as how we take a look behind the scenes this is something that many subscribers are being asking me to do for many years now and so finally I'm going to show you everything involved in shooting a video recording from a computer and on into post-production but before all of those stages there has to be pre-production and for me that always starts by creating a script file in Google Docs normally on a tablet this for example is my tablet with their script on it for the Odyssey x86 SBC video I made recently and I don't fully script my videos but I do semi script and I always write quite carefully the start on the end to try and keep them a concise on camera and but in the middle of the document normally there's a lot of technical notes based upon my previous technical tests and research before I start making the video so want to know I'm going to be talking about I need to start talking to you down the camber like this and to show you that I thought I'd pick up this this is my Canon X a 40 camcorder mrs. Maier became most of the time but this started recording I can point it ahead and you can see if that's good I can see while I'm making and explaining computers our introduction or ending and as you can see we're looking at my Sony nex-5r camcorder and I'll show you this closer up in the next segment I'll also show you your next side boobs yeah Kevin XA forty but for now I thought we just look around this way this come out a bit and there we are up there you can see one of my lights this is an area 650 plus four now spotlight being a watched over by a 1980s Cyberman those you can see and if we go the other way around the room you can see the other area light or their focus please come on through the focus there we are it's slowly coming into focus you don't know may get issues like that and the explaining computers video do you anyway these lights as you can see are angled upwards to bounce off the ceiling which gives me a nice diffused light and it's not a perfect lighting setup but it does allow me to lie to myself without getting reflection by glasses and to light the green screen you know reasonably successful fashion talking of the green screen behind me as I'm sure whereas a piece of a green paper there it is we get nice noise from that and if you're wondering how its suspended in the air let's mix this shot from earlier this morning where you can see we putting up my oldest piece of photographic equipment and the only one used at every single expiry computers video right from the start which is this lighting stand that my parents got me when I was making super 8 movies nearly 40 years ago a single stand like this is not normally used as holding a background paper you'd only have to stands one at each end of a roll but I have my paper rolls mounted on a piece of plastic waste pipe with some washing line through the middle which allows me to hang them easily on a single stand in the confined space while the green screen is behind me to my left as you can see here I've got this at a Bosch recorder which is recording this shot right now there's a long HDMI lead comes out of the camera into the recorder so I don't record on to the camera I record directly to SSD on this Atmos device and then the high net emboss have got my television and this means I can actually do everything from this spot I can stay here I don't have to go to the camera check things on the camera I could do a take hopefully it's gonna be okay if I think it's okay I can check it back by playing it on the Atomos see it on the television and that allows me to be very efficient as a record to start and end to these videos right as promised we'll now take a look at my cameras the assonate HX r NX v r and r here the canon x a 40 which as you can see is considerably smaller and over the years i've found i prefer the look at the pictures you get from a sony camcorder a like the sony build quality but I've also found that Canon make the best at smaller camcorders which is why I'd use both a Canon and Sony so let's now get these cameras to film each other and we'll start out with the Sony nex-5r very much' camera to get you out of bed in the morning I've been affirming with this camera for just over two years now on this channel musical piece of equipment as you can see it's a three-chip Sony camcorder so it's got individual sensors for red blue and green HD sensors with a twenty times optical zoom lens and lots of physical controls you know focus and zoom and the iris nice little audio pod down there and it records to SD cards if you were she's got SD card to go in down here there's one of the two SD cards which you have in the camera you'll record if you want to but I normally take an output from its HDMI socket or from its a SD ID serial digital interface socket to record to an external recorder so there we are there's my primary explaining computer's camera via Sony and x5 or switching over here's my Canon X a 40 this is a single chip camcorder 4k camcorder as you can see very good for filming things like a 3d printers or ducks and my intention when I got this was only about two the five or six months ago which do a lot more location-based work on this channel but suddenly the moment of course that's not possible but it will happen I'm sure in the future now something else wanted to show you in terms of equipment links to this camera and the other one and it said these these are A+ to close-up lenses this is the one I use only and x5 are great big plus to close the lens and the use of a +2 lens out this surplus to diopter close-up lens you screw it on the front of the camera and it means you can get the front of the camera 50 centimeter to a little bit less from a subject and still use the whole zoom range so well I do very extreme close-up shots on this channel but I use a close-up the camera I've been using these for best part of 40 years now this is one the first I have ever bought this was bought from tot McCord Road in London for I think one pound 99 many years ago I've still got the box and look I wrote on this many many years back and this lens I got to use on a super 8 camera which I was filmed on the time but it will fit still on this camera here too it's still in use I love the fact that I'm still using a lens that is so old I got it secondhand nearly 40 years ago and it's still in use in my filming today talking about things which are in use in filming something else to show you is the microphone I use and this is an audio technica 88 o3 and actually got two of these now these are fantastic microphones been using for about 12 years this is a tight clip a leveler mic and it goes into a power unit like this which has a battery and so this so this goes into there and I've got two as I said so the other one about using right now and the reason I've got two is because when I was filming in Wales back in what December 2019 I suddenly thought what if I drop this mic in the sea or something I'm gonna be in terribly in trouble because I rely on this for everything I do so I got another one as a spare and also so I could go and do interviews which again I've not done because I've not been getting out to do it but it will happen I will use both these mics together at some point in time and finally talking in microphones I also use these two microphones on this channel the top here we've got to send Heisner k6o rifle mic powering module mic element and a softy on the top you have to give this a glass over milk every night at all so it wouldn't wouldn't be a very happy and down here we've got a a sennheiser md 46 reporter mic and like all the mics here they all are balanced audio so you just plug them in the anterior your balanced audio cable they click in like that one of the great joys of life I think is using a balanced audio cables you greetings here I am back again and I'm about to do a a table shoot which is one of the most common things I do with explaining computers where I show you things on this table that's why I call it a table shoot and specifically I'm about to unbox a new single board computer which in this particular instance is the Odyssey x86 J for 105 still trying to get that label right in my head I'm sure I will by the final video and to film this the camera is a way up in the air looking down at the table you can see they open up amongst the lights I will in a few minutes or hours time be taking the camera down much lower on the tripod fitting the close-up lens do the really extreme close-ups of the edges of the best borders have so frequently shoot on this channel but for now the camera is at up there looking down to it take this particular shot and as previously when I was shooting my introductions I'm going to be actually recording not on the camera itself but actually onto the atomos recorder which is a over here and again this allows me to see everything to review things as I'm going along I don't have to mess around with a camera way up there and if I look across the room over there I've also got the shot again coming up on my television so what I tend to do it to set a shot up make sure I've got the focus right the composition the exposure everything like that and then I can record on on the Atmos device and actually do the take over here and of course I've got some important things available I've got Maya tablet is over here with the with the script on I've got a mr. citizen standing the knife on hand in case I need them in this unboxing don't know bit up but I might but with that I think let's get on and they do an actual take over and explaining computers video right here we have the Odyssey x86 J for 105 in it's a rather nice box I do like the packaging here matte laminate on a very nice box all the specs there it's always good to see a board which is nicely presented by its manufacturer and before we open this thing up it's worth greetings here I am back again it's now there the next day explaining computers videos are usually recorded over several days of two three four days something like that and on this particular day of this shoot of the Odyssey x86 Singapore computer which is still sitting here I've moved on to actually recording output from the computer itself so I've still got a camera and play the camera still up there I've still got lights around which is why you've got these things in the way of this shot and this shot is lit for the board here not for me right now apologies for that but we look through the camera this is what the camera is seeing that's the shot you'll see in the final video if I use this particular shot but if I give you a broader shot of the the death this is what's actually going on which is it's chaotic in terms of what's going on when I'm actually putting films together do you like my screwdriver set by the way this is my ax DF robot screwdrivers now I really like my screwdriver so just for those show you that anyway what is going on is we recorded the output from this computer and so often this channel in a video I have to record the output from the computer and the way I do it is to take the HDMI output from the board itself which is going to this lead here which is going into this splitter and it's very important to use a splitter for two reasons one because it means I can take an output to an HDMI recorder which I'll show in a second and also to a monitor separately so I can actually work on the monitor see what's going on we'll also have a record output separately but also using this splitter means that I can actually remove any a content protection signals at many computers output there were very few computers that easily record directly into an HDMI recorder without having something in the middle which happens to be a splitter or in other words something it removes for every signals from from the board so this is connected into a HDMI recorder and that recorder is this one this is a Blackmagic Design video assist 4k I've shown you this in a few videos before and I've made a video all about my HDMI recorders and the thing I really like about this recorder is that it's got not just HDMI and SDI inputs for recording from a computer or a camera whatever happens to be it also got its own mini XLR inputs so I can plug my microphone into this device and record that on one channel we called the Apple from the computer on the other channel so that's how things all work so I think I now get on with it recording something here in Linux Mint on the odyssey board and I'll talk to you again will I've moved into post-production well it's now the next day I'm sitting at my desk as you can see I started to edit the Odyssey video I'm even wearing a blue shirt which is something that's permissible once I've come out of the production process and the computer I'm using to edit the videos here in the main PC at this desk is two pcs at this desk but the world does well my other thing is a computer down here it's a very old Supermicro case and for many many years it had a Core 2 quad system inside it but it was fairly recently upgraded so it's now an i7 6700k with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 ram it's got a 2 gigabyte passively called GT 1030 graphics card it's got a 1 terabyte samsung pro SSD as a system drive it's got a 6th terabyte western digital black hard drive for storing video files and it's got a 250 gigabyte samsung pro SSD as a cache drive so if we now move to look at what I'm actually running on this PC you can see that here I'm editing in Adobe Premiere Pro we're looking to many you'll see it's adobe premiere pro cs5 i still use the cs5 adobe suite I'd be very happy to pay for the latest version but I'm certainly not going to rent it from Adobe and I run everything using a Windows 7 this is Windows 7 Professional using a classic skin and this allows me not least to set up very nice menu fonts and highlights and things you can see things very clearly here in a way you couldn't necessarily using for example Windows 10 I run this by the way off line and in addition to using Premiere Pro for the editing I also use other programs we Dobie suite quite extensively I use a Photoshop to do my graphics as you can see here I use a Adobe Audition to do my audio as you can see here and I'll use Adobe After Effects to do a compositing so this is for example the start of the Odyssey video.you concedes built up in elements we go back a bit you'll see here there's a caption we've got a caption can be turned on and off we've got a background down here and we've clearly got green screen footage which has been turned into the element of Mila and in fact this is quite a tricky shot because we just go through there that particular element which is the green screen I can turn it off prove to you it really is green screen there we are layers are going back again but we go forward again here you'll see the box here is a bit of a problem because here you can see the box that the logo has disappeared it's because it's green this box was a real problem to shoot because it was sort of blue and sort of green adventure I shot it against green but I've got an additional element here which was adds a bit more colour into the box and I've also got an additional element here which is a an articulated element articulated mat here which just basically handles the fact that I've got to take out that particular elements we just so know that you'll see this is a hand elevated element to basically deal with the fact that box has got a green logo sometimes it's worth automating these through tracking sometimes it's quicker just to hand animate them but this does show that sometimes putting a shot like this together can be a little bit more work for any retention you think it might happen to be final piece of software running here I want to show you is a light wave light wave is split into two parts and his useful 3d animation this is like Waiver modeler and I use light wave for doing all my 3d animation this for example is a the custard pie it appears in the explaining computers title sequence it's white has a bit bigger and doing when it's very exciting isn't it so I didn't have any 3d graphics to do for this particular video on the other seaboard but clearly I do do them now and then and they always appear in my title sequence so there we are after 300 episodes I've finally given you a glimpse behind the scenes here on explaining computers and whilst have been making this video the channels also passed 600,000 subscribers so a great many thanks to all of you who subscribe and continue to subscribe and who watch the channel but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed you see no peace pass title like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 62,445

Keywords: ExplainingComputers, Explaining Computers, making of, making of video, behind scenes, behind the scenes, Barnatt, Christopher Barnatt, Sony NX5R, Sony HVR-NX5R, Sony NX5R camcorder, Blackmagic Design Video Assist 4K, video assist 4K, Blackmagic Video Assist 4K, Canon XA40, Audio-technica AT103, AT103 microphone, Audio Technica AT103, 600K subs, 600K subscribers, 300th video

Id: 176aHXO1Pwc

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020