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The Level Up Creators podcast is for digital creators ready to take their business to the next level. You'll learn valuable strategies and hear engaging stories from industry pros and digital creators who have walked the path of scaling up.
Whether you're tired of tap dancing for the algorithm or seeking to build real wealth - without the burnout - this podcast offers proven methods and practical advice to help you elevate your business, on your terms. Join us!
Hey, hey. You're listening to the Level Up Creators podcast. Amanda Northcutt here, founder and CEO. We help digital creators build thriving sustainable businesses they love. We're so glad you're here. Welcome. And my guest today is Aaron Francis, an amazing creator and keynote speaker who is best known on the internet for his kindness, expertise with MySQL, Shed quarters and of course, Screencasting.com, his new digital course where Aaron walks you through how to seriously up level your screencasts, aka any video content you make whatsoever. And he is joining us, actually from my hometown, Dallas, Texas. Welcome, Aaron. Hey. Thank you. That's quite an intro. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so excited for this conversation. I think it's going to help anyone who listens, for sure. But before we dive into our main topic today, which is how to make high quality video content, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your journey so far as a creator? Yeah, absolutely. I'm reading over or listening to that intro you just gave me, best known for kindness expertise with MySQL and Shedquarters, which is just such a random collection of things. But yeah, let's see. I'm a software developer and I have been for a super long time and as of the past maybe two or three years, I've really kind of started to put myself out there publicly on the Internet. And that has kind of been, I guess, the catalyst for a lot of what's happening in my life today, up to and including launching Screencasting.com. So I've just kind of had this turn of like, man, what do I want to do with my life and what's stopping me? And I found a lot of what was stopping me was like, fear of what other people would think of me. And so I just have kind of pushed past that and the world has opened up before me. Nice. And that's why we're here today, actually. I'm so glad that you have been sharing on the Internet and that you came up with Screencasting.com and that's actually how you and I got connected was we were starting a video podcast, which here we are with Level Up Creators and I was pretty overwhelmed and nervous about my video and lighting set up. And you have been an audio too, I guess, the full AV thing. You have been so incredibly helpful and specific and this was far less of an intimidating undertaking after getting your advice. So thank you. I've personally benefited and love your course and just thank you. Thank you for putting out there and pushing past the fear and walking straight into the pain of especially putting yourself out there on Twitter or X. You say Twitter or X. I know that dates me as an old person, but X is a ridiculous name, so I will continue to say Twitter. Touche. Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, so what exactly is Screencasting.com? And tell us a little bit more about what prompted you to create this course specifically. You have so many different areas of expertise. So how in the world did you land on this? Yeah, so this is kind of like my Meta course. So I've done several video courses, screencast, series, that sort of thing, and they've been more specifically in my other areas of expertise. And so I've created one on the database called MySQL for the company that I work for, Planet Scale. And that was like a 65 video, eight hour course, just teaching people how to use this tool that I know and love. And that was, I think, maybe my third or fourth video course that I'd ever done. And after I did that, people would ask me this was earlier in this year, people would come up to me and be like, hey, the course was great. Love the content. By the way, can you teach me how to make courses like that? Can you teach me how to do screencasts? Can you teach me how to do video? And I was like, this is really interesting because I had never thought that I would be the one to teach people how to make video. But I think I realized that I had a lot of expertise in making video after all these years. And I think I had a point of view, which was like, anyone can teach you how to make video, or maybe not even anyone. Several people can teach you how to make video. Only I can teach you how to make video the way I make video, which is with a focus on how do we do this efficiently, because we got other stuff we got to do. But how do we do it in a high quality way? By just knowing the five or ten things you got to look out for. It's not that hard to go from a C plus to an A. You just got to know like, all right, I got to make sure that I do these five things. And so that's when I realized, wait, maybe the market is speaking here and I should just put this all into a course. And so that's what I did. Nice. That's awesome. And one thing that I really appreciate about you is you will pursue wholeheartedly any area of interest that you have. And it is so cool that you then share your learnings with your following on Twitter, which has been growing quite quickly, as is your new YouTube channel. And I think that's great because people who have great things to say and to teach others deserve a platform and an audience. And you are just a perfect example of a modern creator who is building a following around a number of area of interest. But I love the commonality. And actually I want to talk about your rules for Twitter also really quickly. But the commonality seems to be that you are this Internet nice guy. You are this antithesis to tech bro, and people really resonate with that, which you wouldn't think honestly with Twitter being your primary platform at this point. So tell us about your Twitter participation rules. Yeah, so I'll pull them up here. I have actual written down specific rules that I have tweeted and pinned to my profile and been like, if I'm going to show up on this platform, this is how I'm going to do it. And I'll read those out in a second. But just generally, I think there's a lot of cynicism, especially in kind of the circles that I run in, which is a lot of engineering and developing, and there's just a lot of people really trying to prove, I guess, how smart they are. And so when you put something out there, oftentimes people are going to come back with reasons it won't work, or a way in which you screwed it up, or I've actually done that before you did, and this happened to me actually just yesterday. So I've reached this point where anytime I learn something new or discover something, I try to think, all right, how can I share this? And so I tweeted one out yesterday, and somebody replied and said, why are people surprised by this? You could do this in Fortran, which is like some super old thing that I've never used in my life. He's like, Why does anybody care? You could do this for the past 20 years. And my response to him was just, yeah, I just learned about it today. And that means that maybe the ODS are good that other people don't know about it. And so if I learned it today, maybe other people don't know about it, and I'll share it. And I think I finished with, like, you could say that I'm pro learning. I thought it was cool. And so my point of view on putting yourself out there, especially on Twitter, is there are a lot of people that don't know the things that you know. And I think we start to surround ourselves with other experts, and we start to think like, oh, everybody knows everything that I know, or worse, everybody is smarter than me, and I have nothing to say. And we forget that the world is huge. The world is enormous, and the Internet is enormous, and there are tons of people behind you on the road or in the journey that are like, man, I wish people would share more because I don't know anything. And so that's kind of like part of my philosophy on what I share. But then these rules so I'll read these rules out. There are three of them. The first one is encourage other people, saying if you like the work that someone is doing, tell them, because it is a reality that most people get critical or cynical feedback. If you see something that you like and you tell the person you're going to make their day. So that's the first one. The other one is be positive. A feed full of negativity is zero fun to follow. And this is like 50% life advice and 50% content strategy. It's a good thing to be positive. Of course. Also, I'm not going to follow somebody who's always complaining about everything. And so that's kind of like the life advice content strategy. If you're always moaning about how a Fortune 50 company has made your life harder because of the emails that they send or the baggage that they lost, I'm sorry, that bums me out. And I don't want to follow somebody who's always moaning about everything. Like, life is hard. I agree. That's what your group texts are for. That's what your private group texts with your friends to complain about. American Airlines definitely do that. I'm just not that interested in seeing that. And then the last one is share what you're working on because people are drawn to other people in motion. And I think this is probably the most important for deciding what content you want to share. Just share what you're doing. Because I think once we get in the trenches, we're like, man, none of this is interesting because I'm seeing how everything is done, but to the outsider, they just want to see cool stuff happening. We just want to watch other people do things, partly because in our deepest heart, we want to be doing things ourselves. And there's some part of like, oh, man, I can watch other people do it. And that makes me feel like a little bit like I'm doing it. The other thing is it can inspire other people to actually do things and be like, wait, that guy Aaron, he just posts whatever he's working on that day and whatever he found interesting. That's not that like it doesn't take a super genius to figure that out. And hopefully that pushes other people to say, yeah, I do stuff. Why don't I just talk about it more? I love that. I love all those rules. And I think there could be full on applied for rules to live by. And I've got so many things running through my head here. Like, what's the saying, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care? I'm thinking about the FDR quote that Brene Brown cites a lot. Know if you're not in the arena, if you're not down here in the middle of the arena on the floor with this huge audience breathing down your neck, like, shut up. If you're not showing up and bringing it, stop. I was going to make a joke about being in your mom's basement. I'll leave that there, though. But I love the approach that you take to sharing content online and it is really inspiring to other people and kind of seeing a regular guy. Other people, I don't think, see you as a regular guy because you have an audience and are creating content and putting yourself out there. But in some ways, like, you're a dad. You're a family guy, and I just love that you share what you do. And I think you teach other people. And man, that comment that the guy made about the platform that you mentioned, I have no idea. I'm not a software engineer or anything close. You don't want me anywhere near any code. But the lack of empathy in a comment like that is just that makes me so frustrated. I've realized I don't get in fights online. I just don't do it. And I think part of the reason why is because I've realized it's always a guy when a guy makes a comment like that, that's like, why did you share this? Or Why is anyone resonating with this? I already knew that the only thing that that person wants is to feel special and feel validated and feel like they are worthy. And so I just respond. I don't want to fight with them. I don't want to get into a nitty gritty debate over details or anything like that. I just want to say, yeah, other people don't know that. You do know that. That's awesome, congratulations. Other people don't know that. And it's really disarming. I think it's really disarming to approach that kind of negative reply guy with, that's really great. I honestly didn't know that until this very day. So you've got a leg up on me. And that's the thing that's really I think that's the meta principle here is honestly, it doesn't matter who knows the most. And this can be really frustrating for hyper analytical people. It doesn't matter if you know more than someone else. It doesn't matter if your product is better than somebody else's. It doesn't matter if your anything is better. What matters and the outsized benefits accrue to the people who are doing it publicly. And so there are engineers, there are scores and thousands of engineers that are way smarter than me everywhere. Even in the company that I work at. I'm probably one of the dumbest engineers, and I say that without false humility. I just am. But the perception of me in the public eye is that I'm really smart and this great database guy, and it's just like there just aren't that many database people talking publicly. And so you attribute to me being really smart, but honestly, I'm not that good at it. And I just talk about it a whole lot more than other people. And so that's like the unfair thing that is the reality of how the world, the marketplace works is the marketplace doesn't reward your hidden knowledge. It just doesn't. And that's what I realized a few years ago. You say I'm a normal guy. Like three years ago, I think I had 1000 followers on Twitter, and now I have 24,000. And it's like I'm still the same guy. Nothing changed except that I started putting it out there more. I like that. And I really appreciate your growth mindset and your willingness to go out and solve problems and do that publicly and fail publicly. And yeah, it's like kind of a group learning social experiment almost. I mean, your whole Twitter account, but yeah. All right, I'm going to pull us back in here to screencasting because I think we could talk about how to behave on the Internet and how not to behave on the Internet all day. All right, so I approached you. I came to you because I was pretty overwhelmed with the whole getting started thing. And so recording video online and so it requires camera setup, lighting, microphone, and the right technology editing can be a really big headache. What are the biggest barriers to video production that you are seeing and how did you address those in your course? Yeah, I think the biggest barriers are it feels like so most people that want to create video, they are a technical expert in some field, right? So they're a software developer. They're a notion expert. They're a wizard with Excel or something. And so they're really good and technical in a certain vertical. And then they look at video and they're like, oh, this is not my field of expertise. This is a new technical field of expertise I will have to gain. And it's a new medium that I haven't conquered yet. Right? And so I feel like the big hold up for most people is they jump to big video editors and they jump to complicated video and audio setups, and they're like, man, this is a lot. I'm not theater kid who knows all of this in my blood from high school or whatever. I got to learn this all from scratch. And so I think that's a big hang up. I think the other hang up is putting yourself on video. If you don't like listening to your own voice, boy, are you going to hate looking at your own face. That's even worse. And so recording video and then editing video of you feels really cringe. But once you push past that and you realize the kind of connection that you can make with the audience by actually showing your face, I feel like you start to understand the benefits of it and you kind of just leave the cringe part behind. But the gear is a big like you said, you didn't know what all to pick. And so that's a big thing that I address, is like, hey, here are some levels here's good, better, best. Pick anything and just move on. I like the good, better, best model a lot, actually. And I really like about your course that you GTFP with everything. I mean, I am a very busy person. I'm very tied on time and just the hunting and gathering that would have been required online for me to go and figure this out on my mean that's just a non starter. I don't have the time to dedicate to that. And so to have a trusted expert who's put all the information together and then some, and has put it into well organized, bite size chunks with this good, better, best model, total game changer for me. And that just reduces the barrier to entry so significantly. And I'm a big fan of talking to experts and trying to get as much of their knowledge, squeeze as much of their knowledge out of them as humanly possible in as short amount of time as possible. Because that's, I think, how you can move the quickest in business and in life. And so you came into my life at exactly the right time, and I super appreciate it. Okay, so let's get into it. We've talked about barriers to entry. I think people probably feel that viscerally, and it is a pretty anxiety producing thing if you haven't done video production before. So let's talk about key ingredients for producing high quality video. Yeah, I think there are a few, and they start way before the camera. Microphone, ready, set, go. I think it starts all the way back with like, who is your audience and what is your angle? And honestly, this is something I messed up for the course at the beginning because I had viewed my audience as primarily developers. And then I think after we talked several times, I thought, wait, my audience could be way broader. It could be like, content creators, experts in any field. And so that was one thing that I had recorded a video on, defining your audience for the course. And then I was like, oh, shoot, I defined my audience way wrong. So I think defining your audience and picking your angle are super important up front. And so defining your audience could be picking, let's say, attorneys or stay at home moms or developers or whatever, just saying, who are you teaching? And then kind of ranking them on what's their current level of expertise with my so what is if I'm teaching beginners, if I'm teaching attorneys who don't know anything about Microsoft Excel, that's going to shape your content quite. A bit versus attorneys who are pretty good with Excel but want to get really good because they're going into some specialized field in legal field. I don't know anything about attorneys. So I think determining who they are and where they kind of rank on the scale is good. And then that can help define what your angle is. Is your angle bookkeeping for disorganized people or bookkeeping for people with ADHD? Like, hey, that's a pretty good angle, right? And so if you can define those things up front, I just came up with that ADHD angle. That's a great good one. If you can define those things up front, that'll really help you plan your content better and it'll help you market better, because somebody that's like, yeah, I've got ADHD, and you better believe my books are a mess right now. And so this course must be for me. I think those are really important things up front to help define what is the question, what key ingredient for producing high quality videos? You got to start with knowing what you're going to say. I feel like that's pretty important. Yeah, I love that. That's right offer, right time, right way, right price point, all those kinds of things. So, yeah, getting it together on that front and meeting people where they're at. So content is still king because if you're producing beautiful videos, the content is well, dismal. You're not going to get anywhere. So. Yeah, I love that. That's a great starting producing the best screencast on in depth Excel for attorneys, and then you take it to the market, and attorneys are like, hey, so what's the sum function do? It's a total mismatch. And the attorneys are going to be like, I need a beginner's course. And then you're hosed. Yeah. So first things first. Yeah. All right, what else? Yeah, I think beyond that, so you've defined your content. I think it's really important to have a research phase at some point, and that can look really different if you already are the domain expert. I did a video course once on it was accounting. I was an accounting major back in college, and I took all of my time at school, which I spent three or four years tutoring this one specific class, and I recorded a video course on that. And my research phase for that was like, three or four years tutoring that specific class. So that was really easy. But for the database course, I did a ton of research, and I just read a bunch of books and read a bunch of blog posts. And anytime I found something that I was like, this kind of fits the shape of the angle that I'm going for. I just wrote it down. And then after I had a huge text document of ideas and little half ideas, I started to kind of coalesce and merge those into a linear structure of like, well, we'll start here, we'll work our way through, and we'll end here. And so that research phase is really important, but you can't do that without knowing who you're teaching, of course. And then after that, you turn on the lights camera and you start recording. And there are a bunch of little things that you can do to make your screencast feel really high quality. And it's stupid stuff, like, okay, don't show the clock and don't show the menu bar and don't show the dock and hide your desktop icons and don't have a family photo as your background. Like, all of this stuff that takes it from, oh, Aaron is recording his screen in his bedroom to, oh, this know, they elevate you. This guy is a professional teaching me with professional videos and it's like I'm the exact same guy. This is still a room off the kitchen, but now, because I've thought about a few things, you feel like I'm some big guy in a studio, and it's like, I'm not. But I'm glad you think so. Of the kitchen. I didn't know that. That's great. Yeah. This is the double doors right there. So this is the kids nap time, which is why it's so quiet. I figured. Yeah, I thought as much. And you just moved, right? And so you no longer have your shed quarters to retreat to. Big detached building, ten x 20 building in the backyard. That was air gapped from all the chaos and no more. Just two little glass doors right there that are incredibly permeable. You're working it out, though. You look and sound like a pro. No worries. See, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, totally. And I want to circle back for just a second. You made a quick offhanded comment a few minutes ago that I think spoke to sort of your philosophy about sharing online. And I can't remember the exact line that you delivered, but it was something about kind of putting yourself out there increases your chances of luck. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, sure. I mean, this is another one of those seemingly unfair things that when you peel it open, it's very obvious. And so a lot of where I am today is because of luck and good fortune, and that's just incontrovertible fact. I got lucky a bunch of times. The thing that most people don't realize is that the amount of luck in your life is controllable the form it takes, or like, I can't force myself to win the lottery, but I can point things in the correct direction such that unexpected opportunities come my way. So what does that mean for me? Well, I started sharing. Like, I started sharing that I was working on this little open source library and I didn't know where that was going to go. Right. But I started talking about it and putting it on Twitter, and somebody that runs a conference reached out and was like, hey, do you want to do a talk on this on this thing that I've been watching you do? And it's like, wow, that's really lucky. And yeah, you better believe it's lucky, but it would have never happened if I wasn't being public about the work that I was doing. And so I think where a lot of people get hung up is they're like, oh, man, I would love for a conference organizer to reach out to me. Yeah, it's awesome. Why would they reach out to you? What have you done and what have you shown that puts yourself in the way of a conference organizer? Noticing, I need somebody to speak. Oh, that person is doing something. Let's just have them speak. And from there, it's like, all right, I spoke at that conference, and then I submitted that video to a different conference, and then I have this little body of work that's like, hey, I've done some speaking. I could do some speaking. And then you start to apply proactively. You're like, hey, look, I promise I'm good at stuff. And you apply, and they're like, yeah, you look good at stuff. We'll have you come do the thing. And from there, it just kind of like it snowballs. And the more that you put yourself out there, the more chances you have of somebody random finding your stuff at the exact right moment and literally sending you a DM on Twitter, being like, hey, do you want to come work at our company? Which is how I got the job that I'm currently at. So I work at Planet Scale, and I was just writing these articles about MySQL because I was planning to build a course on my own. And then the CEO was reading these articles, which I didn't know. I couldn't have known that. And he was reading these articles, and he sent me a DM, and he was like, hey, why don't you just come do this for us? It's like, cool. Couldn't have planned it, couldn't have made it happen. But by putting myself out there, it happened. And that's again, the same thing with publishing video. It's like, people are going to see it, and they're going to ascribe to you almost unmerited expertise. Merited or not, it doesn't matter. They're going to think of you as like, oh, they must be a leading voice in the field, because who else does video? Only leading voices. And you're like, you could do it too. Yeah. Oh, man. We talked a little bit about reducing barrier to entry and video, and that's the reason this whole course exists, right? You want to help other creators, no matter your domain expertise, do video, because it's almost like you've increased your personal SEO quotient. I don't think that's a real thing. But you have put yourself out there in a way that makes you discoverable and public and yeah, I love the concept of the snowball effect, too. I mean, I've heard more of your story than what you just shared, but it is a pretty incredible ride that you're on right now. And it seems like there's no end in sight to the snowball effect that you have put in motion by positioning yourself to capture the luck that is out there to be had. And it seems like that started with sharing content and then sharing video content specifically. Yes, and I'm out here trying to tell everybody all the secrets and tell you I've been very public along the entire journey. And so if you want to check the notes, you can go all the way back to podcasts I was on years ago talking about, hey, this is my strategy. This is how I'm going to do it. This is what I'm doing. This is why I think it's working. So I'm trying to share all along the way. This is totally doable. And here's the secret, and I don't even know if it's a secret anymore, but it's still really hard to just get over the fear of being public. But once you do that, everything is available to you. I totally agree. There's a book that a now famous psychiatrist wrote. I think he's like a celebrity. Oh, there's a Netflix documentary. He's like Jonah. I can't remember this guy's name. Oh my gosh. Super famous actor. They did a documentary on him on Netflix. And I just read his book called The Tools. And one of the I think the number five tool is walk straight into the pain. And if you can walk straight into the pain and face your fears, there's no end to what you can do and accomplish and conquer. And so I think he was citing that as advice he'd given to actors repeatedly. But I've actually been teaching our twelve year old son about this specific tool. And if you're not afraid of a failure or what could go wrong or the twists and turns or the unknowns or anything like that, the whole entire world, I feel like, will just open up to you. I've been a behind the scenes executive for years at this point, and consultant and coach to other CEOs, and now I find myself in this seat and it's totally about just swallow that fear on down and walk straight on through it, because that's what needs to happen. And level up creators. Our mission is also to reduce barrier to entry for subject matter experts who have something to say, people are listening to them, to take them to new heights and help people create their own luck, create generational wealth. And I feel like we have a lot of oh, I can't think of another word besides synergy. I don't like that word at all. But synergy works. Screencasting and level up do because we're kind of in this business of helping creators level up do better. Reduce the barrier to entry. Go out there, put your knowledge into the world, because there are going to be the jerks on the internet who are like, well, I knew that you could do that for 20 years, like you mentioned earlier. But guess what? Your information is always going to be novel to someone. And so, again, going back to obviously audio and video stuff, I've done a couple of audio only podcasts in years past, but again, that seemingly huge Insurmountable wall in front of me going from audio to video was so big and you just knocked it right off in front of me. And so, yeah, it's just so much easier after just taking your advice and spending 90 minutes going through what I needed from your course. Okay, we're getting sidetracked again. And I have more questions for you. So we can again reduce that barrier to entry. But yeah, sorry. What do people most often get wrong when recording video? What are the easiest things to make better? I think one of the easiest things to make better is just go faster. I think, like you said earlier, the whole course is really get to the point. And that's one of the things I value really highly, is respecting the viewers time. And so, one, I don't do long rambly intros. I just start, so go faster. Because you have that person, boy, you have them for a few seconds before they start to wander. And then I also will be ruthless about redoing it. If I feel that I'm rambling or I do something wrong, I'm like, no, that's not good enough. Now I know what I want to say, having messed up the video five times. So now I know what I want to say, now I'm going to do it. And there are strategies in the course of how to cut that time down. But I think respecting the viewer's time and getting to the point as fast as possible is a big one. And then there are a lot of little technical gotchas, like the thing I talked about, like hiding the desktop icons and you're like, boy, that doesn't matter at all. What a silly thing to care about. Agreed. However, if you add up five silly things, ten silly things, suddenly you look at a video and you think, I can't quite put my finger on it, but this is really good. And that's the same thing that really good physical products have, right? So anytime you pick up an Apple product, you're like, I don't know, it's good though, I like it. And that's the thing where it's like they've thought about a million little things, right? I'm just asking you to think about five or ten, hide a few things, change a background to something that's pleasing. When you're doing your cuts, don't have long awkward pauses like cut it down, make it shorter. And so I think that's the thing that once you are made aware of it, it's really easy to do and really easy to see. But that's what a lot of people miss, is they're just never aware of it. And so I come in with a lot of experience, but also a whole lot of opinions. If you don't like my opinions, the course isn't going to benefit you. But I have a lot of opinions. And so I come in and say, do these things. And that's where you're like, all right, I'll just do those things. And I feel like that's really helpful. It is definitely helpful. And yeah, like, you're talking about this kind of like, intangible quality of like, what makes that video so good? An Apple product is a fantastic analogy there. But all these things that you talk about in your course and the few things that you just mentioned, they're all additive and so you can take your video very quickly from pretty amateur verging on unprofessional to quite professional by all these little tips and tricks, they add up to a pretty significant difference in your finished product. Real quick, you mentioned you will just record a video over and over until you know what you want to say and then you've got it. Do you use a script or what's your workflow? Yeah, that's one of the things where I say at the beginning of the course, hey, I'm about to tell you all my opinions with the script no script thing. I try to represent both sides as fairly as possible because I know it's such almost maybe even divide. The way that I do it is no script, but that doesn't mean I don't know what I'm going to say ahead of time. And so the way that I do it now is I go through that research phase. I parcel out like, these are the topics. Here's the video that I'm going to record. So I already know, all right, I'm going to hit these three, four, five main bullet points, right? The thing that is hard for me is figuring out, like, okay, I've got the three signposts. How do I get from one to the next, right? What's my connective tissue? What's my turn of phrase? Or my transition to bring the viewer along with me? But also we got to move on. And those are the things that I can't figure out for the life of me, I can't figure out without actually starting pretending to take the video. So I think there are some people that they want to sit down and write a script, and that really works for them, does not work for me even a little bit. What does work for me is turning on the microphone. I've come up with a new process in the past year or so where I turn on the microphone and I open a Google doc and I hit transcribe and I just pretend like I'm giving the video. And that's really helpful for me because I don't actually have to turn on the lights and the camera and actually do the screen recording. But it gets those first one, two or three bad takes out of my system and it puts it in text, and so I can go in and be like, actually, that block needs to move down and then I can see the whole thing. And then what I do is I'll look at this doc that I've transcribed and I'll read through it and be like, okay, yeah, that was my connection from A to B to C. All right, here we go. Turn on the camera and do it fresh. And so that helps me because I know the path that I'm going to take. But you still get that energy of this is not canned. And so that's how I do it. A lot of people do it with a script and it turns out wonderful. I just can't do it without it coming off, like really stilted. Well, I appreciate that. I mean, everybody's got their own unique process and sometimes that takes some trial and error to get there. I, for one, love writing. Writing is a great clarifier of my thoughts. And so I typically start with outline that I flesh out into a full fledged script. And then I may go way off script for podcast recording or video recording or whatever, but I have a great degree of confidence if I do have something resembling a script in front of me. So I at least hit my key points and know that I've fully fleshed out the idea in my head. So, yeah, lots of different ways to go about it. Yes. All right, walk me through a basic lighting, audio and camera setup. What are must haves versus nice to haves? Must have is external microphone. So if you're doing video or just straight audio, my strong encouragement would be do not ever record with something built in. So if you have a laptop and you're like, oh, it's got a microphone on it, you're going to sound like you're talking through a potato, so don't do that. And honestly, AirPods are the same way because of the way Bluetooth works, it's going to sound so crunchy, you're going to sound terrible. So my must have is a microphone, external microphone. And there are a few, I think it's like the at 2005 USB and the Shore MV Seven. You can put them in the show notes. But there are a few external microphones that I would recommend. I would start with just straight plug and play USB microphone. That's totally, totally good enough. You do not need to go into audio engineer territory. I'm not even in that territory. That's just a space that I don't need to go to. Then you start thinking about what's a nice to have. I think my encouragement is always going to be show your face on video because people will connect with you better. And so you'll need some kind of camera. There are really good webcams for like 100 and $5200, maybe $300. And a lot of the Elgato products, they have, I think, two face cams. It's like face cam and face Cam pro. They're both awesome. I would totally go with that. If you already have a decent webcam, just stick with that. Stick with that until you feel like, okay, I'm in this for real. Let's level up. To borrow a name, let's level up here and get something better beyond that, I think maybe having an external light, so I don't rely on overhead lights because it's directly above me and it makes me look really dead. And so I've got a couple of lights in here, but I think even just one light that fills you up so I can turn off all of the other lights besides this big guy right here. And even that just makes me look like it just makes me look dramatic and well lit. And it helps my camera a whole lot to have a hearty, adequate source of light. And so that's kind of the levels. Definitely. Get an external microphone, put it on an arm, so that when you're tapping on your desk, it's not like shaking around. So get an external microphone, put it on an arm, get it as close to your mouth as possible, then use whatever camera you have. Or grab something in the low end, the high end of webcams, but the low end of cameras in general. And then if you really want to grab a light that can be softer on your face than something like an overhead light would be. Yeah, totally. All right, cool. Yeah. And you've totally won me over to the whole Elgato suite of products. I mean, I've got, like, key light, key light mini, key light mini, the little hair light, the highlights here, and then the cool LEDs on the bookshelf. I feel like that's a total game changer. Yeah. I'll show real quick, just even this backlight. Let's see. Huge difference, right? Huge difference on and off. And so I appreciate that extra tip on that. That was a really inexpensive way to just completely change the whole camera frame. And so thank you for that. Yeah. All right. And you, of course, speak at length about equipment in your course, but you've mentioned a few products, but let's kind of, like, distill that down to a few. That if you're going to go what's kind of maybe in the good better, best lineup, what's maybe the better option for light camera mic? Yeah, so the better option so the middle of the road before you reach into, like I'm a video producer, so I think the shore microphone, which is what I'm using here, the shore microphones are named incredibly bad. I think there's an MV seven and an MB seven, which is gosh insane to me. So I think it's the cheaper of the two, the one that has the USB interface, I think it's like a $250 microphone. Very good. Highly recommended USB. Plug it straight in, move on. If you want to graduate out of webcams, which that Elgato face cam will take you such a long way. But if you want to graduate out of webcams into DSLRs, so those big, bulky cameras with the actual lenses on it, I would recommend the Canon M 50 50. That's what I'm using right here. And it works great as a webcam. You can just plug it in through, like, a camera capture card by Elgato called the cam link. And then you just plug that into your computer as USB. It's like it just shows up as a webcam. And I have a different lens on this camera. It's a sigma 16 millimeter lens, which makes the background blurry. And this room truly is tiny. This is a nine foot by nine foot room and so it's really small and so that extra background blur that I get makes the room feel a little deeper and that all comes directly from the lens. And then for the lighting, I would recommend going with all Elgato products. So they've got a key light, key light, air, key light mini. I think I, behind me, have a key light mini and you can kind of see the effect there. But I would recommend doing that and getting maybe a big fill light on one side and a little light on the other and that would probably be good. I do like again, because it's a small room, I do like having this little ring effect from the light behind me, but you and I are very extra and it's kind of fun at that point. So I would at least get a big light on one or both sides of you. Yeah. And I think you told me to get that sure microphone and I ended up getting a different one, says Audio Technica. I don't know, 2000 and 580. Yeah, I think they have sales where it's like $70. Wow. Yeah, and if you're graduating out of like AirPods or built in microphone, that at 2005 USB is the microphone I used for like five years and it was fine. And then I got some gift card and was like, hey, I'm going to buy a new microphone. So I didn't even really need it, I just wanted it. Yeah, totally. And it's a beautiful microphone as well. But you do a good job hiding it in your videos. Yeah, I spent $700. Maybe. I happen to already have the, I think, good, better, best, better version of the webcam that you recommended. But then, yeah, I just got the key light key light mini? Key light mini, a mic and the microphone stand arm, what's it called? Yeah, mic arm. Okay. Which Elgato also has, I should have mentioned that. Yeah, they have a Wave arm. That's the brand name wave. And it's very good. That's what I use. Yeah, it was fairly easy to set up and everything is controlled from one little control panel on my desktop. I know it's really simple and I'm not a super technical person. I mean, fairly, but not at software developer level. And so you don't have to be at software developer level to get this set up for yourself. Okay, cool. It just takes it from really harsh, clearly recording on basically a home office zoom call kind of quality to a professional video quality. And honestly, it takes several few hundred dollars and some thought and you go from harsh shadows with weird lighting in the background to everything's a little bit softer and your skin tone is right. I think it's worth it. Even if all you do is video calls, I think it's worth investing $300 to make yourself look super good on camera. I fully agree. It is just a complete game changer. And I think that, like you said earlier, the perception of the person that you are watching on camera or in a zoom call with or whatever, you see them in a different light, pun intended. And so, yeah, I fully agree with you. And do you know how much that DSLR camera is that you recommended? I think this Canon M 50, that comes with a lens. Not the lens I have, but it comes with a lens I think is 550. Okay. And that's a pretty significant yeah, it's a big jump step up. And the face cams, I mean, the face cams are very good. And so at that point, you're only doing it because you're like, well, I really want to start playing around with the lens and the background blur and that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I would stay out of that, unless that's going to be partly a hobby for you to be like, I want to do the camera thing. Okay, got it. I think that's my next step. Next step from here, maybe next podcast season, I'll move up to the DSLR. When it's a write off, you're like, oh, my God, it's a business expense. Like, just whatever, 30% less. Yeah, exactly. And you also have your camera on its own tripod, right. It's not like, attached to your monitor or your desk. I do, yeah. My desk is relatively shaky. It's like an eight year old standing desk. And so it's not quite as stable as it once was. And what I found is when I was typing, when I had this big heavy camera on my desk, it kind of just wobbled. And it was fine, except the background wobbles a lot more. Right. Because of perception. And so what I have now is I have my webcam, which is this Canon mounted on a tripod that sits on the floor, not attached to my desk at all. And that was just like, the camera is heavy, the desk is kind of wobbly, and maybe I'm an aggressive typer, but that was one of those things where I noticed this is a little bit disorienting and nauseating to watch. So I can fix that. Yeah, it was a good call. I wouldn't have thought of that. That's a good pro tip, for sure. All right, let's talk about editing. And in your course, you talk about kind of this concept of beginning with the end in mind. And so you talk about ways to record your screencasts in a way that makes it much easier to edit and edit faster. Can you share a couple of tips and tricks faster? Fast and high quality is the goal. And it seems like those are diametrically opposed. But by thinking about those things up front, like those 510, 15 things up front, we have eliminated a lot of the problematic areas when it comes to editing, right? So a benefit of hiding everything that you're not focused on while recording is it keeps the viewer focused on the thing you're teaching them. A secondary benefit is it's a lot easier to edit when there's only one thing going on on the screen, right? If you've got a bunch of windows on the screen and you're dragging them all around, there's a 0% chance those are going to stay in the right spot. If you have to kind of hide something or cut out a chunk later and you redo a part and you're like, I can't set these windows all up the exact same way, so minimize everything that you don't need on the screen. I think another thing is when you're recording, if you know the structure of your video and you know where you're going to switch between talking head and screen, or you're going to change what's showing on the screen, you can start to, while you're recording, basically do some of the editing work just mentally. And that's by thinking, okay, I know for this portion of the video, it's just me, just full on, full screen talking head. I got to nail this part, right? Because what I don't like to see, I don't like to see the YouTube style where every two and a half seconds is a cut. Maybe I'm too old, but I find that distracting, and I want to see 15, 30 seconds a minute of just talk to me and tell me exactly what's going on. Don't chop it all together. And so if it's a big talking head, I know, all right, I got to nail this part. Maybe it's 30 seconds, and maybe it takes me six tries, but I would rather do the six tries than spend ten minutes in editing trying to chop out all my mistakes. I'd rather just be like, Forget that. I'm just going to do it again, because at that point, I know what I'm going to say. I just have to do it without flebbing, and I can do that for 30 seconds. And then when you're recording the screen, I like to just record in chunks as much as possible, so I know when I get to my next signpost, like my next point that I'm about to transition, I can just kind of stop there for a second and know that I got that last chunk down. Like, I nailed it. And I can just stop there and think like, okay, I know what my transition is. I know where I'm going. And if I'm on the screen, like my face is on screen, I just hold still. It looks insane, but I just hold super still, and I'm like, okay, the next thing is this, all right, and here we go. And I start that chunk or that part, the next part, if I'm not on screen, it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier to just edit the screen without your face on video because you don't notice jumps whatsoever. And so doing a lot of that thought up front makes the editing process really easy. And then there are several technical ways to cover edits and make it seem like it was all one consistent take. And those are the best because then it doesn't feel like you did any editing at all. It just feels like, oh, now they're switching back to the screen, and now he's going to explain something with his hands. And now he's switching back to the screen, and it just feels very smooth. Now he's going to explain something with his hands. Yeah, I do that a lot. They say about people that gesticulate a lot, their brain is working so fast, and they can't get the words out of their mouth fast enough. So I think it's a sign of intelligence if you're gesticulating. Yeah, let's just go with that. Okay. It's good for me. So yeah, I agree. Cool. And I mean, I have a short checklist that I follow before we start recording any of these shows. Just like minimizing windows and distractions and turning your phone off and turning off your Slack notifications and email notifications and all those kinds of things can eliminate a lot of headaches in your editing time. So you're talking about ten minutes of editing, and I'm sitting here thinking, oh, my gosh, that's super fast. Yeah, I mean, the process is crazy if you do this. Basically, if you spread the load over recording and editing, then you get to the editing part, and the first thing you do is you look at all of like you look at the entire video, and you can see the waveforms, and you see where it gets silent, and you just go in and you're like, oh, that was a bad take. Jump to the next one. Oh, that was a bad take. Oh, here's the good take. And I chop all of it out. And so you do this rough cut pass where you're like, all right, take. It's usually the last take because why would I do another take if that one was good? So I jump to the last take, and I'm like, there's the good chunk. There's a good chunk, there's a good chunk. All the rest of that garbage, I barely even watch it. And then I have those, like, three or four chunks that I'm like, all right, let's fine tune here. Oh, let's cover this little mistake here. And we're done. And so spreading that load over the recording and editing section just makes my life so much easier. Yeah, I mean, that is a great tip in and of itself to ensure that you're leaving adequate pauses when you know that you're going to need to edit a section out. So, yeah, that's a great tip as well. I like that idea of going through and just doing a quick run, removing those. Yeah, okay, that's great. And I always encourage people to do the rough cut. I call it the rough cut pass. Do the rough cut immediately after you finish recording because it's still fresh on your mind. Like, oh, I know that this part I messed up, so I'm going to do the rough cut. And as you do it, you can kind of watch it back and maybe one out of ten times, I decide I just really didn't explain that very well. That's just a bad video. But I'm still in the zone, right? I'm still in the mindset of this particular video. So I will do the rough cut and then not do the fine tuning or anything and move on to recording. But sometimes I do the rough cut and I'm like, this is garbage. And I just rerecord the entire thing. And much better to decide that in the moment than a week later when you're like, all right, now it's time to do all my editing. I'm free of recording. And you realize, oh, this was bad, but I really don't want to record again. And so you leave the bad version and it's like, oh, shoot. So do the rough cut immediately after you're done recording, and if it's good enough, then you can move on to the next video. That's a great idea because it's so fresh, and things move so much faster when they're fresh in your mind. And you have great self awareness, too. I like that you're always thinking about it from the viewer and the customer's perspective. As your customer, I appreciate that. Yeah. I've just watched so many courses or videos where they'll say something wrong and then they put the text on the screen of, hey, wait, actually, I meant to say this thing here. And I'm like, I totally understand that trade offs need to be made, but I just paid, like, $500 for your course, and you're pasting in text descriptions about how you messed up. I'm like, could you just have maybe reshot that one video? So that's one of my opinions that I bring to this is, hey, if somebody's going to buy a thing that I make, you better believe I'm going to try to make it as good as I can. And sometimes that means redoing stuff. Yeah, definitely. Especially for things that you are selling for real dollars. I think there's a little bit more tolerance for error and humanity in just regular old Instagram, YouTube or Twitter content. 100% different ballgame with the long form videos than anything you are asking people to pay for. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Aaron, and for sharing so much of your knowledge with us. If you listener make content online, do not skip this course. Go to screencasting.com and buy it now. It's like $300, and you'll save that much in a heartbeat on the equipment that Aaron recommends. And Aaron, we're excited to see where your creator journey. Takes you next. I cannot wait to see what luck comes around the corner in 2024 for you. Where can our listeners find you online? First of all, thank you so much for having me. This has been super fun. I love talking about this kind of stuff. People can find me on Twitter at Aaron D, francis D as in Daniel or let's see, aaronfrancis.com. Either place, but mostly Twitter. That's where I spend too much of my time. All right, we'll give Aaron a follow, and we'll link all of these recommendations up in the show notes. And we know that time is precious. Thank you so much for sharing yours with us. 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