Ultimate Guide to Capturing Cinematic Moody Footage In the years I have been following Aidin Robbins on his journey to becoming quite a skilled video maker it has been interesting to watch his journey. Over time he has moved away from shooting pretty straight up “How to” videos to making mostly his own work. His tutorial videos are few and far between these days although when he does one it tends to be an extreme deep dive! The video below is no different where he covers in enormous detail his process for creating dark, moody videos. I don’t really expect most of my readers to be operating at ..read more

YouTube Content Creation Process A while back now my wife decided she was going to start a YouTube channel so of course it fell to me to do all the shooting and editing of her videos! As her productivity increased she began utilizing some of her other staff to help with the process. That turned out to be a double edged sword! There was way less for me to do on her videos which was a good thing but! In the office it all descended very quickly into a morass of disorganization with half done shooting and editing projects spread out all over the place and no real way of working out what was happe ..read more

Learn the Ninja Walk Yup! The Ninja Walk is actually a thing! Regardless of whether you are using a gimbal, mechanical stabilization or even in-camera software stabilization the results you get will vary andsometimes not in a good way! All of these methods will give you results depending on the shooting circumstance you are in and their ability to deal with any camera shake will depend on how they were designed. One of the best ways to ensure the best possible result is to minimise camera shake at the point of shooting so that brings us to the “Ninja Walk!” Remember that getting the best look ..read more

Important Camera Settings For Videography If you are shooting video with a reasonably good camera or with a smartphone App offering access to advanced settings, then this video is well worth taking a look at. These days both of those choices are going to give you pretty good results based on strictly auto settings. Both camera and phone camers technology have advanced to the point where they will treat you quite well if they are left to their own devices. However, the reality is that you are leaving a lot on the table that you could be using to improve the quality of your videos. One barrier ..read more

Sora by OpenAI OK so first up let’s all get past the clickbaity title of the video below and gain some perspective. Up until now any videos generated by A.I. have been clearly created with A.I. I mean some of them are very good but at the end of the day you can easily see what they are. Well that all changed this week when Open.A.I. announced Sora which is their new video generation A.I. model. At the moment it only produces 60 second clips but the quality and reality is pretty amazing however there has been no word on when anyone other than inside users will be able to get access. Of course ..read more

13 Cinematic Drone Moves To Fly Like a Pro. These days good quality drones offering excellent video quality are becoming more and more affordable. Even very small, simple drones can create great looking footage at little cost. However what I see as the elephant in the room is that in order to get great drone footage you don’t actually need to be a great cinematographer. What you actually need to be is a great drone operator! You are absolutely not going to get good footage if your drone is at the bottom of a lake! So here are some drone moves you may want to copy with the emphasis being on le ..read more

How to Get Views on a Zero YouTube Channel I wanted to include a couple of YouTube specific video tutorials this week as we are still at the beginning of 2024. Getting started on YouTube is not too hard these days and there are a ton of videos online explaining how to do that. However just because your channel is up and you have uploaded some videos you are by no means “set for success!” When you have almost no subscribers and practically no views it’s all a bit like pushing a car on the road when you have run out of gas. That initial push is the really hard part and once you get going things ..read more

Best YouTube Editing Workflow First up if you have followed along with the Friday Roundups for any amount of time you will be aware that I just loves me some workflow tips! The reason for this is that video editing and production is largely a repetitive process filled with lots of little repetitive processes! For that reason it is a process that can get boring and become arduous very fast. The answer to this is to set up a workflow that is repeatable and can get you through the boring bits as fast as possible while still retaining quality and your own peace of mind. So here’s a workflow from ..read more

Cringy Editing Habits You Need to Break in 2024 A bit of fun this week from Casey Faris on the subject of just awful editing decisions people make and are sadly, still are making in their editing. The gist of it is they set out to make the cringiest video they could using all the mistakes they see in videos around the traps. The results are pretty bad but it is still worth watching just to make sure you are not doing any of this! YouTube Channel Promotion Mistakes That Will Kill Your Views It is no secret that the competition on YouTube has been fierce for years now but that does not mean Yo ..read more

How to Create More videos in Less Time – 10 Life Hacks The harsh reality that just about every YouTuber hits up against sooner rather than later is the ever present demand for new content. No matter how you look at it the Youtube algorithm is a voracious beast that rewards new content creation. It generally doesn’t take too long before your bright and shiny attitude towards making videos starts to lose that shine and pretty soon it all descends into a daily grind. Funnily enough for many people, avoiding a daily grind was the goal in the first place! The good news is that it doesn’t actually ..read more