One tiny little detail that is often missed on lighting tutorials is the idea of positioning one of your lights to cause a little reflection in the subject’s eye.
One of the most obvious examples of this is when beauty vloggers use a ring light situated directly in front of them.
The reflection of that ring light in their eyes creates a very desirable effect adding beauty to those eyes.
In a three point lighting setup you can usually get that light right by positioning the key light then checking the image to see if it is there.
That effect by the way, is called a catch light or an eye light and is anotehr of those little touches that can really elevate the look of your subject.
This is another great video from Gabriel VIP this time looking at setting up an area to look professional given that the space you have is limited.
Very often you will see tutorials on the subject of setting up for an interview style video that on the surface looks great but when you try to apply in, it all falls to pieces.
The reason for that is that many of us do not have the luxury of being able to spread everything out in a large dedicated space.
In the end, by the time you have crammed everything in, you can barely fit yourself!
So here’s a more realistic look at the subject.
These days most of us have access to a bunch of storage space on our phones and cameras for shooting videos.
That wasn’t so much the case “back in the day” so we all had to consider to at least some degree, whether or not what we were going to shoot was something we would actually use.
Nowadays it’s a matter of shoot first regardless and we’ll sort it all out in our editing software later.
Personally I think that’s a good thing because it allows (forces?) the newcomer to review what was shot from an editing point of view rather than the original shooting point of view.
On the downside though this can become a rather tedious task involving scrubbing through seemingly endless footage most of which may end up being discarded.
Fortunately within PowerDirector at least there are a couple of tools available to the budding creator to assist in this task.
Those tools are the “Scene Detection” and “Precut” modules demonstrated in the video below.
Now this is a use of A.I. I can really get onboard with because it treats the A.I aspect of the process as a tool and not the process itself.
One of the keys to success on YouTube, and there are sooo many, is the creation of compelling thumbnails.
If your thumbnails suck you will never get that click through which means your video will go nowhere.
If you talk to any successful YouTuber you will soon learn that behind the design of their thumbnails lies a whole bunch of research into many, many things.
Stuff like the expected audience, data on what that audience is responding to currently, possible audiences that they may not be aware of and on and on.
That kind of market research takes access to big data from the platform itself and a lot of work or… you could tap into A.I. to do it!
That’s very much what this tutorial is about plus a proven strategy for directing A.I. to make those thumbs for you.
This is another video for this week covering the importance of thumbnails as well as titles for YouTube videos.
It doesn’t really matter how many times YouTube serves up your content to users they think will be interested.
If the title isn’t appealing and the thumbnail isn’t attractive to them you will not get that click to start them watching.
You could have the most awesome video on YouTube but it will amount to nothing if no-one clicks to play.
Of course if you have spent any time at all trying to create and run a successful YouTube channel then you would have come across a bunch of people claiming outrageous earnings.
Some of them may be telling the truth, some of them… maybe not!
What I do know is that I have been watching this space for a long time now and there are certain individuals that have been around for a long time who are still being successful.
Those people are the ones that will openly acknowledge that although those big numbers can be real, there is work to be done before that can happen.
Derral Eves is one of those people and someone who I know for certain has the knowledge and experience to make those results happen.
In the (long!) video below he takes an existing channel and live, goes through what the owners would need to do to take them to that level.
Well worth watching if this is what you are wanting to achieve.
Now that my wife is basically editing her own videos these days I have been reduced to the “color and audio processing” guy for her.
Trust me, I am not complaining!
The workflow is that I take the raw footage, normalize the audio, color correct then fine tune the audio all in DaVinci Resolve.
The only real problem at that point is that because that footage was recorded in 4K at 100mbps the files are still pretty big.
Eventually those files have to make it on to my wife’s computer and whilst not trying to be mean here, that thing is a cluttered mess!
For her, space is at a premium so I have to try to keep those files as small as I can.
One way I do that is by removing all the silences in the original file using that feature in Resolve.
Like most things in Resolve it is very controllable but you have to know what the settings are actually going to do.
Here’s a run through of the tool.
Recently Daniel Batal posted a #Short on YouTube showing how to use some inbuilt features in DaVinci Resolve to create animated circles and arrows.
While he was recording the #Short he of course created a few animated circles, arrows etc. cos’ that’s what he was doing!
Anyhoo a few of his followers asked is he could provide them with those assets he had created.
The link to the file is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tOIrGJGNH8zgC3gJkvsk_ytyfgy89WXG/view?usp=sharing
Instructions for how to get them into Resolve are in the video.
Because it is Resolve you can save stuff like that for future use so he has posted them for anyone to download.
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