My Video Content Creation Process
Tags: audio, general, misc
Published: 2021-08-17 19:29:41

---
title: My Video Content Creation Process
published: true
date: 2021-07-09 07:45:57 UTC
tags: Audio,General,Misc
canonical_url: https://daraoladapo.com/my-video-content-creation-process/
---

As you may know, I make videos on [YouTube](https://youtube.com/daraoladapo) (and [TikTok](https://tiktok.com/@daraoladapo)) and I stream (although that has been on break for a while). A lot of my contacts have asked me how I make the videos and how I manage to be consistent. I hope to share answers to the first of the question in this blog post. In coming posts, I will write about consistency among other content promotion strategies. Let’s get started.

### What and When

The first thing I think about is what I want to talk about in the video – it might be a video to answer someone’s question, or some video about a dev or cloud technology, it might be an unboxing video.

When I think about this, I put it in my To-Do List, so I do not forget about it. I then have to decide if I want to make the video soon or later and set a reminder to do such in the To-do App. If I have things to do to get ready to make such a video, I will list them also as sub-items in the to-do item.

### How

The next thing I think about in the process of making a video is how to deliver the content – and it could be one or more of the following.

- Would I record the screen video first and do a voice-over later?
- Do I need to create a script for this video or freestyle it?
- Do I need/want to show my face in this video?
- Do I use my local machine or a machine in the cloud or a sandbox environment?

### Tools

After I decide on how to make the video, I would then think of the tools to use for recording and editing. This is mostly from my list of software tools ([Check out my media kit](https://kit.co/DaraOladapo/all-kit)).

Do I need lights, do I need the camera (which of the cameras should I use), should I shoot in 1080p or 4k?

After that, it’s pretty much left to creation.

### Create

Creating is a lot of work – arguably one of the hardest parts of making content. You can spend 30 min or more recording just a 3 min video if not prepared mentally, physically, and technically. There was a particular time I “recorded” a 1-hour video only to realize I did not hit the **record** button.

My creation process is easy if I have everything planned out (which I sometimes do in my head).

I set up NCH Mix Pad to and test all the audio II want to record and I close the door leading to my home studio. If I am recording video, I turn on the lights and camera, ensure I am getting the right feed in and set my teleprompter (if running a scripted recording).

An extra step for screen recording is to set up my screen capture software to the right screen and input and verify that it’s getting the right feed. I also verify that I have the right amount space and all unnecessary tasks are stopped.

Next is to HIT RECORD, wait a few seconds to ensure all recording channels are recording and then start speaking and/or capturing the screen. Sometimes, I record more than once when I make mistakes, or my devices just decide not to be nice to me. But on most days, I only record once. For unboxing videos, I most times record the unboxing first, then narrate over it.

### Edit and Encode

This most times is the hardest step in the creation process for me. Here are the steps that go into that:

- Remove any noise from the recording: if I am lucky, there would not be so much work here
- Compress audio: so that I have some professional feel to it
- Export audio: most times I export WAV for video post-production, this give me high quality audio.
- 
I get video in from the camera into my storage and post-production software.

  - If it’s just a talking video, I use Filmora Pro
  - If I do screen-recording, I will use Camtasia
- I sync audio and video: with Filmora Pro, it’s automatically done most times. For Camtasia, I still must do this manually (I wish auto sync can be added to Camtasia).
- I cut out the fluffs – all the unnecessary silence, unforgiveable mistakes and I speed up some long running screen captures.
- I put some background music if I feel the need to
- I play over one time to be sure everything in place
- 
Final sub-step here is to export(encode) the video to a .mp4 file.

  - If it’s a tutorial video, I mostly do 1080p (that’s 1920×1080)
  - Head talk video, I do 4k (3840×2160)
  - For TikTok and YouTube Shorts, 1080×1920

### Publish and Design Assets

After encoding is done, I upload the video to the target platform – YouTube, TikTok mostly. As upload goes on, I get on Canva to design the thumbnail for the YouTube video. Nothing fancy. Just a text with the title and an image. I then export the thumbnail image and upload as custom thumbnail for such video.

For YouTube, I do the following:

- Modify the title.
- Set description.
- Put 2 or more hashtags.
- Add tags – I use [Tubebuddy](https://www.tubebuddy.com/daraoladapo) and [VidIQ](https://vidiq.com/daraoladapo) to help get the right tags based on my title.
- Make the video go live right away or schedule it for a later date (which I mostly do these days)

For TikTok, I put a short caption and some hashtags and post. Most times I leave multiple videos on draft for posting later.

### Share

After I’m done publishing, I then start the final bit which is sharing the video link to various platforms. I have set up some automation to tweet and post to LinkedIn once I post a video for YouTube – so I have that bit covered. Next is to share to Facebook – my personal profile and page. I then share on my WhatsApp Status and to my special contacts on WhatsApp.

Over the next couple of days/weeks, it gets automatically posted with some of the automation that I’ve setup.

That’s it. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know if this helped you and the way you create videos.