How does Dr. Dave create and post all of those videos online?
People often ask how I make and post videos on YouTube and this website. Here’s the procedure:
- Shoot raw footage with a Canon VIXIA HF G70 (HF G10 in earlier videos) HD (1920×1080) camcorder mounted in a 4-way adjustable tripod. For overhead shots, I either have the tripod fully or partially on the table, with the help of bar stools; otherwise, it stands on the floor. I often shoot multiple “takes” of the same shot because of missed shots, live narration errors, bad lighting or camera views, etc.
- Download the video from the camera to my PC through SD cards or a USB interface. Video requires lots of disk space.
- Use Pinnacle Studio to edit out the bad “takes” and trim the beginning and end of the best take. I also remove pauses and errors made (and later corrected) in the middle of a “take.” That’s why you sometimes see jumps in the middle of a clip.
- Use CorelDraw to create table-diagram illustrations. I export images as JPEGs and insert them into the video within Pinnacle Studio.
- Use Pinnacle Studio and then HandBrake to store the edited and produced video as a compressed MPG4 file so it won’t be so large.
- Upload the video to YouTube.
- Use WordPress to edit the website and add embeds and links to the new video.
That’s it … difficult to learn at first, but very easy once you have done it for a while. It also helped being at a university where there are people around who know how to do all of this stuff and were willing (and excited) to show me how.
The music I use is computer generated using the ScoreFitter feature of Pinnacle Studio. The song for the section intros is called “Electronica – Broken Spell.” For the end screen, video montage, and long clips with no sound, I use “Electronica – Breather.” For circus music, I use “Novelty – The Ringmaster.”
The old super slow motion video clips were filmed with a special high-speed camera. Other than the camera, the other steps in the process above are the same. I now also use the SLO-MO feature on my iPhone. The 240 FPS slow-motion HD video it provides is fast enough to capture most important pool effects.
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