Making Youtube Videos…

Without Breaking the Bank — Part 2 of 2

That MVP overhead camera rig is now complete.

Ever! (You will end up defending bad ideas)

I wanted to share the making of the rig with you all and sorry it took this long as I got my hands dirty with some editing skills and I was looking at Final Cut Pro as one of the options.

Read part 1 of this story here — http://ow.ly/o7r830f2S3O

Its a really cool software (a bit advanced though if you are starting out but really easy to start with if you understand the layout. Its all about the layout of the application and if you know where the tools are, you have won half the battle!

I teamed up with one of my friends (an Apple Certified Pro trainer in Final Cut Pro. ), based in Chennai, India to learn video editing. Final Cut Pro does not come cheap but it boasts of some really strong loyalty within video editing bracket.

A lot of people I spoke to (in Chennai) were in awe of this software and pretty much the whole of South Indian movies are edited using Final Cut Pro (that’s their opinion). Thats some market share!

A lot of my friends from the movie sector in Chennai (Kollywood; Bollywood is the entire move industry in North India predominantly Hindi movies) use Final Cut Pro and these are some really die hard fans of the software.

Then there’s Tollywood (Movies made in Hyderabad — A city famed for it’s amazing Biriyani & Nawabs and rich heritage, mostly Telugu language ones…). There’s usually one slot for every other kind of cinema made in India (No wonder it’s called Incredible India!). That’s another tangent…

Lets get back to the story..

Well, all these discussions with friends and pros from the industry pretty much convinced me to try out the tool and see if I could learn anything at all.

More about Final Cut Pro here (Costs about £300 but you can download a free trial for your Mac).

If you are interested, try out these Youtube tutorials to get you started (or before you decide to invest money on this tool) -

David A. Cox

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nklZhdbP5cw

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7-zZkHJHas

Izzy Hyman

- https://training.izzyvideo.com/courses/final-cut-pro-x-tutorial

Ripple Training (Paid)

- http://www.rippletraining.com/products/final-cut-pro/final-cut-pro-x-core-training/

I got interested in editing and started chatting to this trainer during my trip to India in April this year and he was busy running 2 day bootcamp style workshops in suburban cities in South India. I found most of his participants were really happy with the outcome of the workshop. These guys were newbies, when it came to video editing and they picked up some really awesome skills during these 2 days.

That got me thinking…

Why can’t I learn some basics of video editing and maybe my videos won’t have to suck anymore…

We decided to set up 2 hr sessions (on weekends over Skype) to get me started. We did about 3 sessions and that has given me a lot of confidence to edit my videos. I wanted to try out this new found skill and went looking for more video clips to edit. The next stop was my son’s youtube channel (YT Channel — Ryan Says).

I picked up a video where he is teaching how to draw a character (Superhero I guess) — this video is made up of 2 parts, the first intro and then the actual drawing session.

I tried to add a bit of style based on what he does in the video and he liked it and some of his school mates liked it too. Thats some validation.

Check out Ryan’s video below…

Ryan Says on Youtube

And that’s how I spent the last couple of weeks learning the basics (whenever I got time from my full time job as a UX guy!).

When I started building this overhead camera rig, I did have a plan to record what I was doing and put it up on YouTube. I ended up with a collection of about 5–7 clips, that I had to put together (I won’t say edit, because I have not reached that stage yet).

For me, the most important thing at that time was to get all these clips into one big clip that you guys can watch.

That part is done, I guess. Check out the video below and pls comment on what you liked and what you did not…

How I made the Overhead Camera Rig

The top of the rig still does not have a decent grabber for a phone or a DSLR. Its just a makeshift mobile phone grip for now, but I thought of a really neat idea. why not use the iPhone packaging box as a holder and let it hang from the corners? Sounds really basic, but I am sure this will do the job.

Remember, Done is better than perfect.

This video ends the 2 part series of this journey. What’s next? — Probably a story about how I started learning Final Cut Pro. But thats for another day.

Hope you enjoyed this series and helped you think about what you can do to make your own YouTube videos, without breaking the bank!

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