One of the best ways to deliver a talking head video to your audience is by using a teleprompter.
It cuts back on the nervousness associated with delivering your dialogue whilst allowing you to make solid eye contact with the person you are talking to and there’s no arguing the effectiveness of that.
Having said that, using a teleprompter has one major downside which is relatively easy to overcome.
That downside is that because you are looking at the teleprompter, you may fall into the trap of seeming to be staring fixedly into the eyes of the audience in a very unnatural and unbroken way.
Let’s face it, if you were having a conversation with someone and you were staring directly into their eyes for the entire time, things would start to get awkward pretty fast!
To put it bluntly, you would probably look like some kind of psycho!
Check this video out for some of the finer points of taking advantage of a teleprompter without looking like and axe murderer!
This is a great example of where we are these days as far as the tools we can use to create projects.
If you just look at the title, it is crazy to think we can all do stuff like this now!
You write a plain old text file as a script, pull it into PowerDirector which turns it into subtitles and then you can use A.I to create a voice reading those subtitles… how cool is that!
This is an A.I. generated run-through of the newer A.I features that have just been added to CyberLink PowerDirector.
The one that I like the most is the Agentic Editor feature which is similar in concept to current deployments of Claude and Codex as editing agents.
The difference here is that the agent is “self-contained” within the PowerDirector interface.
I still would not use this as a deciding factor in choosing PowerDirector or not as my editing solution as it is still developing and to me, is not quite there.
The video itself runs for 3:41 and I caught one hallucination towards the end pretty easily.
So for me, PowerDirector is a great video editor and yes, it does have some useful A.I. stuff but I like it as an editor first… bells and whistles come later!
One of the reasons the Movavi Video Editor is one of the video editing software apps I recommend is illustrated in the video below.
I like Movavi because it is stable and doesn’t try to be something it is not.
It is not trying to be DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro or whatever because that’s not the people they are tailoring their software for.
They are aiming at the new or intermediate user who needs only enough effective tools to create videos for home or online distribution.
No-one in the Movavi universe is aiming at a full Hollywood cinema release any time soon!
So back to the video below as a good example of what it offers.
The effect they demonstrate could be achieved professionally if you were a pro colorist with pro software or, if you are using Movavi, just drop a LUT onto the footage and you are done!
This is a run-through of some of the more practical A.I. features you can access from within Filmora.
One quick point to address is why would you access these types of services from inside Filmora when you could do it externally just as easily with only a few extra steps.
The answer to that comes down to pricing.
Wondershare as a company have worked out bulk pricing deals with all the external A.I. services that you can find inside the software itself.
What that means for you as a creator is that when you use A.I. through Filmora you are getting a discounted usage rate because of that bulk pricing.
So yes, you can access most of these things externally but price-wise you are probably not going to be able to beat the costs.
Either way, here’s a look at some of it in action.
One area where the A.I. tools in Filmora have improved a great deal is that of audio.
A few years back treating audio was generally a round trip process where you had to export the audio, deal with it in specific audio software then re-import.
Of course it was ultimately effective but at the same time added a complication that no-one really wanted!
These days, unless the audio is really, really bad, you can just apply some A.I. based effects and you are pretty much done.
Here’s a look at the current state of things in Filmora.
Every decent video editing solution around at the moment is going to be equipped with the ability to use keyframes.
Years ago it was a rarity but these days the only difference between them all is how many things you can apply keyframes to.
In the video below you can see the keyframing capabilities available in CapCut especially as applied to text and graphics but that’s not the whole story.
If you are using CapCut and are looking to polish your keyframe game then this is a great video for you.
As a side not, make sure you watch to the end to see how the “ease in” and ease out” buttons can really make those movements buttery smooth.
Another great pro tips video from Chris Goor for this week showing how to fake your own camera crew!
He gives some great advice on how to maximize what you do have available which is basically you… and your camera or phone!
From my perspective one of the key points in this video is the rule of always shooting in 4K.
My own rule is actually always shoot in 4K widescreen and I do that for some very specific reasons.
My intention is not to export at 4K widescreen most of the time but by shooting 4K 16:9 footage and pulling it into 1080p projects, I can zoom in and out all over the place as well as pan around to my heart’s content!
Of course I don’t actually go crazy with it but I do have the freedom to replicate camera movements and shots without losing quality.
Additionally I can re-purpose that footage into 9:16 projects for short form videos and these days, just let my software automatically reframe it for me.
If you are not familiar with Audacity then let me introduce you to one of the most useful pieces of free software still around on the internet these days.
I say “still around” because Audacity has been available for over 25 years now and is one of the best Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) you can get.
A year or two back it was taken over by private interests and despite the nervousness of the existing community, death, destruction and commercialization did not occur!
In fact over the past two years the program has been continually developed and improved.
This week they released a totally new version of the software that has taken the program to a higher level.
Along the way they have also completely reworked the interface so that it doesn’t look like something from the year 2000.
Speaking of which, if you had a really good year in 2000 and want to stay there, you can still reset the interface back to the old look!
Anyway, take a look at the video below and you can download it for free here: Audacity 4.0.
If you are existing user be aware that if you use the Openvino A.I. effects by Intel such as Noise Reduction etc., they are a little behind and have not yet released compatible versions for Audacity 4.0.
The good news is that while you wait, your existing version of Audacity remains totally intact and operational when you install version 4.
Well it’s been a little while since DaVinci resolve updated from the 20 series to the current Resolve 21 series so some new tutorials are probably in order.
Kicking it all off for this week is one from Casey Faris re-visiting the subject of simple titles.
Of course we are talking about Resolve so don’t let the “simple titles” subject line fool you!
They may be simple to pull off but they are definitely not simplistic or hampered in any way from an aesthetic point of view.
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