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:

  1. 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.
  2. Download the video from the camera to my PC through SD cards or a USB interface. Video requires lots of disk space.
  3. 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.
  4. Use CorelDraw to create table-diagram illustrations. I export images as JPEGs and insert them into the video within Pinnacle Studio.
  5. 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.
  6. Upload the video to YouTube.
  7. 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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