Prerecording Conference Talks: 15 Tips to Make It Bigger and Better

hi i wanted to talk to you about pre-recording your next conference talk the reason that people are moving towards pre-recording is pretty simple because most conferences have moved online and the online conferences are really finding that there are a lot of technical issues that are the result of live connections right like your internet failing at the last possible moment your slides not working whatever pre-recording removes all the technical risks and shifts it ahead of time so that actually reduces the amount of stress for conference organizers but it does increase the amount of work that needs to be done by speakers so you not only have to be a developer content creator slide maker whatever you now also have to be a video editor and producer and to have a sound set up to have like a lighting setup to have screens set up accordingly there's a lot of things that you need to do i've done my fair share pre-recorded talks i'm not an expert and this is a not a very nice room to do it in but i wanted to do this video because i have 15 tips for you to share to pre-record your next conference talk so let's get into it you're probably wondering what that double snap sound was and that's the way that you do edited videos so let's play this back to record to pre-record you can see the double snap in the sound waves so that's actually a nice very visual indicator for you to delete this part like that and you can play it back now and it will at least be a bit smoother 15 tips for you to share to pre-record your next conference so let's get into it so the average video viewer will not even notice that you've just made a mistake and you can continue not breaking your flow when you talk i'm going to give you the bottom line out front because i'm going to throw a lot of tips at you but there's one thing that i really really care that you take away from this which is when in doubt make it bigger make your code bigger make your slides bigger make your text bigger make things bigger please understand that people have poor eyesight or they may be watching your video on a small mobile screen make it bigger compared to all the other tips that i have to give you this is how important make it bigger is okay so make it bigger all right with that said i'm gonna go into pre-recording your conference talk with 15 tips there are three sections to what i think i advise people on so the first is recording yourself the second is recording your screen which is the thing you're looking at right now and third is editing your video after you've recorded both things so let's get into it the first tip is to write a script it's better to have a script when pre-recording i rarely have a script when speaking live it's more natural to be able to improvise and command attention when not scripted but the pre-recording restriction takes all the benefit out of speaking of script so here the expensive thing is now recording and editing so you should try to reduce as much as possible the amount of editing you need to do and that means trying out words and phrases in writing first when it's cheap instead of taking a million cuts and improvising writing a script may feel like extra work but trust me that it saves rather than adds time you can still improvise of course like i am doing right now i'm talking to you i have a very natural conversation but i still have a base uh to return back to because i have a script and that means that i've really worked out the words and the way i want to phrase things to you before i commit them to audio you should also try to front load value to get attention because people have far shorter attention spans online than in person they could be deciding whether or not to listen to your 30-minute talk like this one based on the first 30 seconds which is by the way why i chose to have my face even though i don't look particularly interesting people like to look at faces they could be playing you in the background while working on something else so you know you may not have their full attention like you might in a regular conference if you start out flat and monotone i'm going into now grab attention use pauses videos cliff hangers and whatever you can think of to get them to actually watch tip number two let's talk about lighting this is bad lighting this is better lighting this is even better basically make sure you have a diffused light shone on your face this is what it looks like when light is shone directly at me so my face is too bright and too light i'm bouncing it off of a white surface so it's more diffuse and that creates softer lighting tip number three is about backgrounds uh this is okay it's not the best it's not terrible but look at the screen let's change that and look at that guitar basically it's nice to have something simple in the background that represents your personality but doesn't distract from your overall talk um it's nice to have sometimes books or a bookshelf i just don't have it in my apartment and that's okay and we all operate under constraints mine is i'm living with my parents doing covid tip number four let's talk about the camera what you're looking at right now is an external web camera it's not a mirrorless dslr like some people buy this one only costs about 100 to 200 and this is the kind of quality you get from a typical macbook pro inbuilt camera that you get with the laptop so you can compare the quality between this one that you're seeing right now as well as the professional standalone camera from everything that i read from experts laptop manufacturer is always cheap out on the built-in camera so it behooves you to buy one of these or if you really want to upgrade to something with dslr be my guest but that's too expensive for me tip number five is the microphone and this is maybe the most important one out of this entire section because you can listen to a video with bad video but you cannot listen to a video with bad audio and so you may have noticed that i had varying audio quality in the previous sections and that was actually not intentional that was probably a demonstration of the different types of audio quality there was a lot of noise you know in some of the previous sections and that was because i was recording from my macbook microphone um and that's spinning up the fan according next to the macbook here's an example of me recording right now accidentally recording with the macbook pro microphone instead of the one that i have it right in front of my face because i didn't check the settings this i have right here is a sure mb70 i think microphone that was sent to me by the egghead.iot i think generally you want to have your microphone as close to your voice as possible so you can pick up the most quality but i like to have it a little bit off so that when i say peas and any anything with plosives i don't have it i don't speak it directly and have and pops into the audio one of the problems with fixed microphones is that the audio levels are going to vary based on where you are physically like if i if i start speaking here or if i start off in a slightly different position i'm going to sound different so you might actually want to get one of these lavalier microphones that are clip-on to your shirt so it's the same distance wherever you go i don't tend to move a lot and i've trained myself to not move a lot so i don't actually use these but it's a good tip and it might help some people okay so that was the first section about recording yourself which is we covered script lighting background camera and microphone and now we're going to talk about the second part which is recording your screen and obviously the first tip is to make it bigger make everything bigger i cannot stress this enough let's look at something that's typical on the screen if you do not optimize it and you know the keyboard shortcuts to making things bigger right so try to do your readers the favor of make everything bigger this also applies to code this is the font size at which i typically code for my own work but you may also wish to make this a lot bigger so that your readers and viewers can actually see what the hell it is you're trying to to view try to make everything fit within one window so here i don't quite fit everything within one window so i'm going to minimize it and then now everything fits so this minimizes the amount of scrolling scrolling is very distracting for viewers you want to just have everything in one screen and no more than that tip number seven make everything clearer there's a lot going on on the screen and this is a normal screen for a lot of developers but we can reduce the amount of distraction for our viewers and actually improve ourselves and make things easier for us to edit when the time comes so the first thing to do is to set your dock to auto hide so this just goes away the second thing to do is look at this menu bar we can actually go into our settings and turn off this thing as a bonus when you do any edits you don't actually have the passage of time so you can jump by 20 minutes and the user will be none the wiser then in your code editor you can actually hide as many windows as possible you can even go so far as to hide the activity bar in vs code so you have a very very clean screen if you want a shortcut for this most ideas have a zen mode so you can just toggle on zen mode and that is a nice little shortcut for that but sometimes that can be overkill lastly let's talk about recording your browser again i have my font zoom in on the text that i actually want but i have this little bookmarks bar here which isn't really adding anything so i can go ahead and hide that and i also have my chrome extensions here which can be a little bit annoying so i might want to do i might just want to launch an incognito mode to get rid of that but i can also set a different profile so i can have a guest profile for example and here i just have no extensions loaded and that doesn't interfere with anything that i do so it can be nice to have a presentations profile just for recording tip number eight is to mind your keyboard i'm recording this on the macbook pro microphone just to let you know that everyone can hear you typing because your fingers are literally right next to the microphone the macbook microphone so that try not to do that have an external mic that improves your audio quality that's another tip that we had but also if you use a mechanical keyboard and you like clicky clacky it can be very very very very annoying and noisy for people who are trying to listen to you talk while you type so you may want to switch to a quieter microphone or at least mind how much noise you're injecting into your typing tip number nine is to do something with your face so a lot of people have just their face in the bottom right corner of the screen whenever they're doing their talk the entire talk and that's actually very boring most of the time you're not no one's actually looking at you so you might as well not have your face on there you can use your face to create engagement right you can use it to actually make emphasis on the particular section of the talk that you're talking about so here i'm talking about section two and then i can move to section three or i can actually switch things around and talk about something with visual aid in the corner there are a lot of ways you can handle this i'm just trying to open your mind as to what you can do with your face on a video that you record tip number 10 is slides you do want to use some slides but you don't have to use slides all the time because you can code and if you ever make a mistake you can just edit so you'll never make a mistake and that's the major downside of live coding so that's a that's a big tip which is you don't have to use slides all the time i'm not using slides in this talk but i do i do like using google slides slides.com is also very good i've used some of these for some of my biggest conference talks apple keynotes as well as microsoft powerpoint both at their strengths in terms of making professional slides for example typography is not a strong point of of either these web-based platforms and you might be able to use other tools like canva or figma to do slides as well the reason i keep coming back to google slides is because of this button the share button because people always want a link to your slides and you can drop a link and have them clone it and share it and it's a very nice experience compared to keynote or powerpoint if you do use google slides everyone is very familiar with the default slide templates which are okay but you can actually get pretty good free templates from slides mania or themeforest where it actually looks a bit nicer so here for example i was able to find a movie themed slide deck for pre-recording conferences so i could use any of these templates for making slides and that just adds a little nice theme to it if you're a web developer you may want to build your own slides framework and actually design your slides in the code that you write so for example if you're a react developer you might want to use spectacle from formidable labs which is actually a very well maintained and very popular slides framework this is very tempting but the reason i don't recommend doing it is that the moment you run into bugs you're spending time on code when you should be spending time on making your presentation better so use the right tool for the job uh that's specialized for that the one caveat i guess is if your presentation needs interactive components within your slides then sure embed a react component inside of your slides i don't care you probably don't need it you can switch things in and out because you're pre-recording okay so we just went through part two of all the tips make everything bigger again make everything bigger make everything clearer by moving removing uh random noise on the screen mind your keyboard noise here i have a much quieter keyboard you can barely hear it um mind your face or you know position your face and get creative with where you put your face or not have your face on it at all and slides make them if don't overuse them because you're pre-recording so you your ex possible space of creativity just expanded tenfold so don't use slides if you don't need them but when you're using slides get a custom slide design or get something that's just free but not default uh google science themes and definitely don't use your own javascript slides framework okay so we're almost done we've got five more tips left on editing in the video after you've recorded yourself your screen now it's time to bring everything together and make the final product so having the tools and knowing your tools well is a really good idea i tend to use screenflow that seems to be the industry standard it's 129 bucks but you get a lot out of it and for those who want a free and open source alternative you can use caden live which i have never tried i'm not the best video editor in the world i'm not even a good one so for some inspiration i wanted to show you what i think a well-edited video looks like so let's check out rich harris's fellow society conference talk to see what i mean so let's take a look at how he starts his video so that's a very high quality sort of b-roll type start that's very different from a typical conference talk and makes you sit up and pay attention immediately and also of course you notice the background you notice the high quality of the video everything that we just talked about in the previous tips applies here and that's a very good sign for an example of really high quality b-roll you might want to check out sam selikoff's youtube channel because he really puts a lot of effort into this i don't recommend doing this for conference talks but it's nice to have this in your pocket when the opportunity is right if you talk to anyone who knows they'll tell you just how bad so that's an example of really good uh editing which uh i don't have but i know enough to at least get my message across and that's the most important thing you don't have to be the world's foremost expert in video production to at least have effective pre-recorded conference video and that's what we're here to talk about today so i'm going to show most of my examples in screenflow but you can adapt this to whatever tool you happen to be using we already talked about the layouts let me show you the layout the fancy layout that i did so the first tip is really about layouts and we already covered that somewhat so i'm just going to recap it again in screenflow this is how the video that you just watched happened so i'm just going to play it around you can actually switch things around talk about something with visual aid so that's this is how the layout looks under the hood uh that we needed to switch around from this being the background and this being the foreground and the the face being the foreground to this video this screen being the foreground and that screen being the background you can get pretty creative with the layouts um you can check out the rest of this video for the other ideas that i've kind of squeezed in here alongside but you know i i think layout is is a important one because that determines the visual structure of how you're going to have your video come across to other people so it's an important one to think about i don't have much more tips here if you have any other layout ideas let me know the 12 tips are going to be about transitions and there's two transitions that you primarily see me using so one is the fade and this is pretty easy within screenflow so let's check out an example here i'm transitioning between two types of uh video presentations profile tip number eight so that's a hard cut and that can be a bit visually jarring so if you want you can actually just add an ending transition here and a starting transition here and that will actually fade in and out that tends to fade the audio together with the video so you might want to separate the audio so you can do something like detach audio uh and this would not have the transitions of the audio so this one at least have a nicer transition length to it you can also of course um shorten the amount of transition and then as well as cross fade the transition as well so this is how it looks which is a much smoother transition the other transition that you see me do a lot is the zooms and i only recently learned how to do that it's actually called actions inside of screenflow and the command shortcut for that is command k so i'm going to use that here so let's say i want to zoom in on a particular part of this thing i can just command k and that's the transition and that will let me tweet between two frames right so between here and there i can just make the zoom so that's a way to zoom um and between basically any other property that you want to set so that's how i did the uh opacity thing i can do the rotation thing there's there's a lot there's a lot that you can do uh with cropping um let's just make this you know like 500 down um and then down here so that makes it a nuts very dynamic video um so it's a very powerful piece of software uh and once you're done you can actually snap back the zoom so this creates a nice reversal action there you go so those are the two transitions that i use uh quite a lot they're obviously way more than that but i think those two will stand you in good stead tip number 13 is to speed things up so here's a demo of a create react app okay this is sean from the future that was a very long video about 45 minutes of not doing anything um and it takes that long to get up a running crate react app so one of the ways in which you can speed this thing up because there's no sound going on fortunately is that you can actually cut it so here i have some sound and here is where i cut it i want to go all the way till i hit enter when i hit enter i can hit yes and here's where all the automated stuff happening and i can just speed things up so i can use i can press t to cut these parts and then hold shift to speed it up so that it just completes a lot faster it's a much better watch so that's that's how i do the editing here um and it's a very unfair advantage that you have when you're pre-recording a talk to speed up speed up the boring parts uh and of course to edit out any of the mistakes like the one i just did which went to the start my 14th tip is to superimpose text and i'll let rich harris show you how to do it because he does it way better than anyone does felt scale like your x-axis on a chart is the number of components in your application and the y-axis is the the byte size of that app then you know svelt will start pretty low and then it'll sort of increase like that whereas if you had a more traditional framework maybe it would start higher but the incremental cost is lower like the additional bytes per component is lower so a certain point you hit um you hit an inflection point where your app is going to be larger because you built it with felt than if you had built it with another framework in theory my final tip is to leave breadcrumbs it's pretty much guaranteed that people viewing your talk are going to have less of an idea of the argument and structure of your talk than you have so you always have a clearer idea in your head of what you're saying then uh and what's on video than your viewer so it's helpful to give them visual aids to guide them along especially for a long talk like a 20 to 30 minute talk that's much easier to lose track of than in like a seven to ten minute lightning talk so this can be as simple as a table content slide like this one which we've been coming back to constantly to remind you of the ground that we've covered and the ground that we have left yet to cover but it can also be a little bit more creative and this is a device that i use constantly in a lot of my pre-recorded conference talks so for example here is a talk i did on open source knowledge where i presented the four parts of my talk and i only colored out the ones which i'm talking about right now so here i am talking about open source code here i'm talking about open knowledge and this actually reminds you of the stuff that we just covered and the stuff that we're about to cover and then here we're going to talk about you know the the four sections and then at the end i'm going to remind you of all the four sections that we covered just as as visual hints so this here is very subtle right like i don't actually have any words to evoke it but um if you cover the content and tell the stories it actually starts to tie the image together with uh the the the code here's another one which uh introduced a visual organization for organizing the react ecosystem and it starts here at the bottom and you can see the other parts that are kind of grayed out but it gives you a sense of progression and returning to something familiar and this actually helps you to understand how we're progressing and what we've already covered so you don't lose track as you go along and then it also gives you an opportunity to group things together like this so you can explain supersets and broader structures which are which are very interesting opportunities as well i got this idea from gary bernhardt so let's see him use this breadcrumbs technique in a talk is there things that's running against the mailer but in reality the test system actually looks like this there's only a mock and a stub there's no user mailer involved there's no user involved so that is test isolation and test doubles mocks and stubs there have been attempts to fix this to solve this problem while keeping the benefits one of them large numbers of tests so right now in this talk everything is bad we there have been all these sort of proposed solutions none of them are convincing to me they they either solve only a small piece of the problem or in the case of the integration test solution it's really not a solution it introduces other huge problems to actually get to what i think is is an actual solution we have to switch gears entirely for a minute and talk about values for free now this is not the grand solution to everything um as you might have guessed and to get to to get to why it's not let's quickly talk about the the various programming paradigms i'm going to talk about three of the big four because logic programming is too weird for me to talk about so that is my example i apologize i couldn't show you more of the code because i don't have time but finally i want to make a couple of connections to other ideas in the software industry in what may seem like very different ideas okay you get the picture the ability to use breadcrumbs in your talk is extremely powerful for helping your viewers to keep the logical flow and of course because you're pre-recording you can superimpose uh your breadcrumbs and help people track what you're talking about at any point in time especially if they're scrubbing through the talk like you're about to do so that's it that's my 15 tips remember i gave you a lot of tips and i gave you a lot of examples and you're not going to master all of them for your first pre-recorded conference talk if there's one thing that you take away because it is the most annoying thing and it will make your talk useless for people who can't see it make it bigger for those who are interested in more advice from me i did serve as a mentor for global diversity cfp day last year and i actually wrote some cfp advice for you so you want to actually get the conference talk uh this is my best brain dump of all the advice on how to get a conference talk slot so good luck all the best uh you can reach out to me on my twitter or my email and i look forward to your pre-recorded conference talk good luck

Channel: swyx

Views: 308

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Tz1Fotm-hnk

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021