775-3_nd_-U.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          Hello everyone, welcome to the focus channel and my name is Paul. Hi everyone. Welcome to my home and today we're going to look at how I make a lang focus video.

Speaker 1:          00:27          You know, it seems like people think I exist inside a video. Sometimes I'm walking down the street and someone sees me and I can tell that they recognize me, but 90 percent of the time they don't actually talk to me. They just stare at me confused like, Hey, isn't that the computer simulated humanoid from Lang Focus? Maybe that's because most of my videos aren't just me sitting in front of the camera and talking to the camera. I put a lot of effort into crafting each video and producing it and basically creating a new little world that you can step into today. I'm basically taking you behind the curtain and I'm showing you all the different steps in that process of creating a length focus video.

Speaker 1:          01:04          So the first thing that I have to do when making a video is choose a topic. Now I have a long list of topics in a word document that I keep on my computer and in dropbox and I add topics to that list whenever I get a new idea that excites me and for the next couple of months I always have a short list of topics, a short list of topics that I want to do in the near future, topics that are currently on my mind or excite me or motivate me to make a video, and then once I finish one video, I look at the shortlist and I choose the next video and I think which one excites me the most? Which one do I really want to do right now? Now the reason I do it like that is because it really takes a lot of work to get through one of my videos. So if I'm not really excited about the topic or if I don't want to learn about the topic for myself, then it's just torture to get through the time and effort required to make a video. Now, just as an example for this video, let's say that I'm choosing a topic. Let's say I'm choosing the languages of Canada because that's the topic that I'm really excited about right now. That's really not one of the topics on my shortlist, but let's just say it is. The next step is research.

Speaker 1:          02:15          Nope, I'm not an expert in every topic that I cover. My videos are basically like projects and I researched the projects. I dig into the topic and I learned as much about it for myself as I can and I share it with you as a way of learning for myself. Of course, sometimes I have background in the topic if it's a language I've studied or I've read about before, but that's not always the case and even when it's a language I'm familiar with, I usually dig in and learn things that I didn't know before making the video and it's important for people to know that I don't like people thinking I'm sort of linguistic superman when I'm not. I'm just a regular guy who's interested in languages and likes to learn more about them.

Speaker 1:          02:54          So back to the topic of research in the comments for every video there's always some person says, hey, you just copied wikipedia. No, not quite bro, but I often do start by reading a wikipedia article on the topic just to get a general sense of it and basically to see what kinds of things I want to learn about it, what kinds of questions I want to ask and find the answers to and more reliable sources. So for this dummy topic, the languages of Canada, we're looking right now at a wikipedia entry and I can see some types of information that I'd like to look up, but for this topic I knew immediately right off the bat that I would need to look at the stat can website that Statistics Canada because it has information on the number of speakers of different languages and a statistics on immigration to Canada and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1:          03:40          And that's the kind of official source that I like to use whenever possible. Whenever researching, there are new questions that come to mind and I use good old google to find the answers. I normally look at lots of different sources while keeping my eyes open for academic sources, and that includes published books as well as academic papers on the subject. This is especially true when dealing with history or historical linguistics or when researching a language that isn't very widely studied, so there aren't a lot of materials about that language. For example, when I made my video on Kurdish, I almost exclusively used academic sources because there aren't that many commercial sources dedicated to learning Kurdish when dealing with a more widely studied language. I often use language learning books, the commercial type, because I have a lot of these at home and they're a good source of information about the language.

Speaker 1:          04:27          I also use phrase books a lot. I have a lot of these as well. Phrase books are good because they helped you to learn inductively. If you're that type of thinker and you'd like to just look at examples and figure out how the language works based on examples. Phrase books are really good for that, so that's basically what I'm doing when I analyze sentences in the videos, when I break down the sentences, I'm basically doing what I do with phrasebooks. I'm looking at the sentences and figuring out what all the different parts of the sentence mean. While researching. I often use regular nonacademic websites as well, for example, commercial websites or just websites written by someone who's very interested in that language and has knowledge of it, but when I use regular websites like that, I look at a wide range of them and I try to make sure that the information I use is backed up by all the different sources.

Speaker 1:          05:17          I try to make sure the information is consistent, but it's important to point out that when dealing with linguistics, there's always quite a bit of variety of information and there are some different opinions and there's different data depending on the source. Even when you're looking at academic sources, the next step is writing for almost every video. I write a script. I don't stick to the script 100 percent of the time. I use the script as a sort of skeleton for what I'm going to say and then I can veer off of that and I can ad Lib and change things a little bit while I'm filming the video, but I do always have a script or almost always have a script that I worked from the difficulty of writing the script basically depends on the complexity of the topic and research. I try to present the information to you as efficiently as possible.

Speaker 1:          06:04          Basically presenting you as much information as I can in a shorter period of time as possible while keeping it as clear as possible. So I really tried to cut things down to the core takeaway, anything unnecessary and make sure that everything I present is linked to the other information and basically I try to make it easy for myself to understand. I'm someone who gets easily overwhelmed by a lot of detail, so I basically rewrite the script until I can understand it and if I can understand it, then I get. I guess that you can understand it as well because I know that I get easily overwhelmed. The next step is to actually film the video. Now, some people think that this is the entire video creation process, but no, this is the easy part. This is the least time consuming part. Filming the video usually takes under an hour, but it can take up to about 90 minutes depending on how long the video is. So here we're looking at my studio. Really, it's just an extra bedroom that I converted into a studio and I set up a green screen that my camera and lights and I actually moved last year. I moved into a bigger apartment so that I could set up a studio like this.

Speaker 1:          07:15          This is the camera that I used to film my videos until early 2017. It's a Canon Ivis h f r 52. It's a fairly affordable, um, cam quarter. It costs about $300 I guess, and it's fairly easy to use except that it's difficult to get the focus right. And a lot of people used to comment on my video saying, why is your face out of focus? Or why is this lang focus if you are not in focus? And that kind of thing. Um, so I really had to get a new camera as soon as I could afford to do so. This one right here is my current camera. It's a Sony cyber shots are x 100, it costs about a thousand dollars and it's much better to focus as much better. And just in general, it's a great camera. The only thing that I have a problem with is that digital cameras like this usually time out after 30 minutes of video. So sometimes I'm in the middle of filming and I don't realize that 30 minutes have passed. And then later when I checked the video file, I see that the ending was cut off. So I have to refilm part of the video.

Speaker 1:          08:16          The hardest part about filming is the lighting. Knowing where to put the lights, how close I should be to the lights, um, how bright they should be, what kind of light bulbs to use, that sort of thing. You guys probably don't notice it when you watch youtube videos, but lighting is essential. I actually have two lights near me right now. There's this one over here and there's another one in front of me, uh, just outside of this room. Let's just warm up for a minute and talk and talk and talk and talk some more and then get into talking with this clear voice while I'm breathing so that I don't hyperventilate. I am right now. And just get into it normally as I always do. Okay. Just going to talk for a minute, get warmed up, get into the zone so I can speak normally as I always do on camera, just like this, except this time it's going to be about French, which isn't really different than usual except that the topic is different and that's why I'm just doing another video just like this.

Speaker 1:          09:11          It's no different than usual except that I'm wearing a blue shirt and the green screen is behind me, but that's the same. And I've got this time. I'm not going to hold the phone in front of the camera. I'm going to be very careful not to do that. And it's also hot in this room. So I have some water and I have a towel just in case I start to sweat a lot. Hopefully that won't be a problem in this video. I guess we'll see while filming a video, I usually have my iphone in my hand. Sometimes you might see my iphone pop up into the screen when I fail to keep my hands down low where they should be. I use the iphone for two things. First of all, I have a script on the screen which I refer to when necessary. And also it connects to a microphone.

Speaker 1:          09:53          You can see right here, I'm wearing a level II or microphone. This is the smart lab. This is the rode smartlav leveling or microphone, which is quite good, uh, cost about $100 button. It gets something near to studio quality. So I quite like it and I use the road recording app on the iphone and you can see that that the audio file is being recorded as I speak right now. And later I can use dropbox to deliver the file to my computer and then pop it into the editing software. And it's all very easy. And convenient,

Speaker 1:          10:30          the next step is to find the images that I want to include in the video, so I read through the script and I tried to imagine what kind of images I want to include, what kind of images should accompany my voice and the narration. This includes background images like scenery or maps or sometimes a photos of people from a certain country. If I'm talking about that country, sometimes historical photos, that kind of thing. I often use a site called Pixabay, which is a source of copyright free images submitted by users, so the images are all free and it's actually pretty good. I think a lot of professional photographers upload some of their photos to picks a bay just to get some exposure or just for fun or whatever. I also buy some stock images as well as using some public domain images or noncommercial images.

Speaker 1:          11:14          I put all of these images into folders on my computer so that I can find them in the next step during the editing process. That brings me to the next step, which is editing. Now this is another very time consuming parts of making a lang focus video. The editing software I use is called Sony Vegas, which is all right. It's pretty good. There might be some better software out there like adobe premier or something, but I just stick to what I know. Sony Vegas is familiar to me so I just keep using it. The first thing I do when editing is I take the video and audio files from the filming process and I lined them up on the timeline so that the audio from my mic lines up with the audio from the camera and then I turn off the cameras so that all you hear is the audio from the level ear mic. So right now let me play you something using just the audio from the mic.

Speaker 1:          12:01          Hello everyone. Welcome to the Lange Focus Channel and my name is Paul, but if I turn on the audio from the camera, it sounds like this. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Lange Focus Channel and my name is Paul, so you get a much cleaner sound if you remove the cameras, echoey audio. After that, what I do is go through all the footage and I cut it. I removed all of the pauses and that remove anything that I've repeated, like sometimes I repeat the same sentence several times just to get the delivery right and when I'm editing all listen to all of the versions and they'll take away all the ones I don't want and just keep the best one so it usually takes a couple hours just to go through the footage and cut it down. A typical 10 minute video probably begins with about 45 minutes to an hour of footage and then I cut it down to about 10 minutes.

Speaker 1:          12:46          Next I removed the green screen background using the Chroma key function. I'm basically removing everything that's bright green so that it becomes transparent and that means that I can't wear a green shirt because I'll become transparent, but you can see that my green screen doesn't actually cover the entire space behind me because of the layout of the room. There's just not a lot of space to put the green screen rack in there. So the positioning is kind of awkward. So I have to create a mask and cut out everything that's outside of the green screen. Okay. So now that there's nothing behind me, we're ready to place an image behind me

Speaker 1:          13:24          there. Look guys, I'm in a classroom, as you've probably noticed. I use a lot of visual elements in my videos and the large amount of information that I try to cram into one video means that I have to include a lot of visual detail and arrange it so that it's all clear. While editing, I make a lot of infographics now. This can be a very time consuming process because of how detailed languages and linguistics can be and what looks like one infographic to you is actually a lot of different files so that I can animate the graphic and make different elements gradually appear on the screen. I make these infographics screens using a couple of different tools. One of them is picmonkey and the other is paint.net. Depending on exactly what functions I need to use at the moment while I'm editing the video, I take the images that I've gathered and the screens I've created and I import them into the Sony Vegas Media Library so that I can arrange them and layer them on the timeline.

Speaker 1:          14:20          I also add any audio that I need to the timeline. Sometimes I have to rerecord some parts of the audio because the sound was muffled or because I said one word wrong or something like that, and I also sometimes use audio from volunteers like language samples from volunteers. When I find volunteers to record some language samples for a video, I usually do that during the editing process. If you follow Lang focus on facebook, you've probably seen me post a request for volunteers. For example, I'm making a video on Greek. I need a volunteer speak Greek or something like that. Uh, and I get a lot of responses. Then I choose one or two people and they record their samples for me. I can't choose everyone, but I'm grateful for all of the offers. So after I have those audio clips from the volunteer, then I add those onto the timeline and that's usually one of the last steps of the editing process.

Speaker 1:          15:11          So you see I'm wearing these glasses right here. These glasses are actually blue blockers. They help block out the blue light from my computer screen and from the lights I use while filming and all of that blue light I guess ignites your brain and keeps you up at night. It makes it harder to sleep because your mind is activated. So by wearing these like just block out that light and rest a little bit more easily when I go to sleep. So these are quite helpful. I wear these every day after editing. The next step is to choose music usually after editing sometimes earlier, but typically after editing I get music from a few different sources. One of the main ones is the youtube audio library, which is a source of copyright free music that Youtube creators can use for free. And some of us end up using the same songs, the same tracks.

Speaker 1:          15:59          So sometimes in the comments I get comments like, Hey, you stole that song from h three, h three, or hey, that's the dubs content cop song or something like that. But in reality we all got those songs from the same source, from the Youtube Audio Library and there are other sources of copyright free music as well. Some of them are youtube channels that offer copyright free music. Some of them are websites, but it can be a little hard to find something suitable so you might notice the same music in several different videos on my channel. That's because when I find something good, it's hard not to use it again. After adding music. The next step is audio mastering, so I go through all the footage through the whole video, listening to each individual audio clip, making sure that everything is consistent, that the volume is about the same and that the quality of sound is about the same for all the different clips.

Speaker 1:          16:48          This includes adding audio compression and also eat q to bring out the right frequencies and if there are audio samples from a volunteer, they often have a different sound to them and they can get lost in the mix quite easily, so I try to eat q them so that they are clear on standout. The final step is rendering. Rendering means you're creating the final video file, so basically the editing software, Sony Vegas takes all of the individual clips from the timeline and puts them all together and create one file out of them. This can take a long time depending on your computer and depending on how long the video is and depending on how many different files are on your timeline. With my current computer, it typically takes around an hour to render a video, but on my old computer at sometimes three or four hours while the video is rendering, I put together a thumbnail using picmonkey.

Speaker 1:          17:37          There's usually an image of myself in the thumbnail and that's not because I want attention or because the video is supposed to be about me or something like that. It's really not. I just do this as a way of my channel because when people who like Lang focus see me in the thumbnail, they know that I have a new video and they click on it immediately. I try to make the thumbnail, catch people's eye using a background image behind me and using some texts that stands out and I also run the thumbnail through a filter sometimes like through a photo filter, the way people do on instagram. I don't notice a lot of other youtube creators doing this, but I find it gives us sort of, um, interesting, unreal effect to the thumbnails. So once the video is finished, rendering of the thumbnail is ready, then I upload them to youtube on my old Internet connection.

Speaker 1:          18:24          This used to take hours and hours. Sometimes it took six hours to upload a video, but currently I have vdsl internet and it only takes like five or 10 minutes, which is heaven. After adding a title tags and description to the video, then it's time to publish it and share it to social media so that all you wonderful people know about the video. This is actually quite important because youtube judges the importance of a video based on view velocity, the number of views that the video gets in a shorter amount of time right after it's released, so if I upload a video and a lot of you immediately watch it. If a thousand of you watch it in the first two minutes, then youtube says, hey, this must be an important video, and they share it with other people that promote it more, but on the other hand, if only a couple of you watch the video in the first couple of minutes, Youtube says, oh, his fans don't care about this video.

Speaker 1:          19:14          It must suck. Let's not promote it. This happened with my video on Japanese. The original thumbnail of the video wasn't the typical Lang focus thumbnail style. I didn't appear in the thumbnail and it, it just looked different so people didn't realize it was my video at first and the number of people who clicked on the thumbnail in the first couple of minutes was lower than usual and youtube set up. This video isn't worth promoting. So the video really struggled to get as many views as it should have, so that means when you guys rushed to watch one of my videos and you write first in the comments and that's actually a good thing. So that's the basic approach I take to making a lang focus video. My experience making the video is probably quite different from your experience watching the video. It's really a lot of hard work and I regularly clock 100 hours making a single video.

Speaker 1:          20:03          Uh, I'm trying to cut that down actually. I'm trying to do more concise, shorter videos on narrower topics basically for my own sanity and to make a, to make everything more sustainable over a long period of time. But I do intend to keep making videos that I hope you find interesting and educational and motivating, which is really the goal of losing focus and has been since the start. So shall we do a question of the day as usual? Sure. Why not? Was there anything about the video making process that stood out to you or surprised you? Let us know in the comments down below. If you don't follow Lang, focus on facebook, twitter, or instagram, please do at least one of those, and I'd like to say thank you again to my patrion supporters, especially these people right here on the screen who are my highest tier of Patrion supporters.

Speaker 1:          20:51          Thank you very much to them and to all my patrion supporters. This video is actually a patrion milestone video. I made this video to celebrate reaching a certain goal on Patrion, so thanks to all of my supporters who've helped me reach that goal. If you'd like to become a patron as well, if you'd like to support me on Patrion, then please visit patrion.com/lang focus. But that's completely optional. It's up to you. I'll never hold it against you if you don't, so don't even stress about it. Alright. Thank you for watching. I hope you found this type of video interesting. Thank you for watching and have a nice day.