My You Tube improvements | New App & New Hardware

Like most people, I am a self taught You Tuber.  A lot of trials and a lot of errors.  I began with a simple tripod and a non HD video camera with basic room lighting.  If you look back at my first videos on my You Tube Channel (MadeByEJP) you will see poor lighting, upside down footage, and basically videos that were not very good quality.  

When I applied to be a design team member on the Paper Crafter's Library - one of the requirements was high quality videos that were not upside down.  This forced me to search deeper into my video editing software and I found that I had the ability to rotate my videos all along - I just never searched for it! So I was able now to rotate my videos and I was thrilled to be chosen as a design team member!  

VIDEO CAMERA: I got an HD video camera that was on sale at Best Buy.  I am still using it today.  It is a Toshiba Camileo X200.  I have not had any problems with it.  It also came with a remote control, which makes it easier to film while it is on a tripod above me or away from me.  

LIGHTING: I use Ott Lites from JoAnn's that have natural light bulbs.  These now are my primary light sources when I am recording.  I turn off all the other lights and only use these. I have two of them and they sit on my desk and are to the right and left of my recording space. This helps with the quality of videos so that the colors show up more true.  This also helped me get rid of unwanted shadows when I had the lighting over my head.  

SOUND: I'm fortunate to have a husband who is a DJ and Sound Engineer that was able to help me get a microphone to use for voice over recordings.  Before that, I was speaking as I was recording - which made recording more tedious and if I made a mistake it was hard to edit out or I would have to rerecord the footage which meant repeating my stamping or cutting.  This caused me to waste a lot of supplies and time.  So doing the voice overs was a great step forward to make it easier to produce and edit videos.


Just last month - I upgraded my microphone.  Look at this thing!  It is high end for podcasting & general sound recordings.  It is called a Yeti from Blue.  It has a USB connection which is a much better quality than the basic microphone input connector.  I now use this microphone for voice overs and I recently was able to use it for my introductions.  Now I don't need to hold a microphone as I speak.  It is able to pick up my voice from a distance and still provide a high quality recording.  

NEW APP: My coworker introduced me to a new app called Imotion.  I have been looking for something like this for a while.  This is FREE!  It allows you to create time lapse videos.  This app allowed me to produce my new chalkboard title and subscribe animation on my videos.  Since this app is on my Iphone, I did not have tripod to hold the phone above me at a flat 180 degree angle.  To record these chalkboard motions, I had my iphone laying very carefully on the bar of my video camera tripod - not the best thing to do with my phone.  So...this prompted me to purchase this Iphone tripod!  It is called the Istabilizer Flex.  This has a ball on it so I can rotate the phone at any angle!  The legs are flexible so I can wrap it around something to hold it up if there is no flat surface.  There are so many options with this, and it provides a chance to capture different angles of recording.  And now the more I can record on my iphone, the more apps I can use to edit or modify the recordings. 

I believe I have come a long way over the last 3 years since I've started my channel.  I continue to watch other more experienced You Tubers to get ideas of how they put their videos together and how they have them edited.  This helps me grow and learn when I see what is possible.  Recently I learned how to add the annotations on my videos. Now you can actually click at certain images and you will be taken to another video or web page.  I've seen so many other videos have that feature and I didn't realize it was part of You Tube!  I just did some research, on You Tube of course, and found so many helpful videos from fellow You Tubers on how to do this.  I truly appreciate the community of You Tube and how the videos are truly helpful, educational, and enjoyable to watch.  I'm glad to be part of it and hope to teach and inspire others too with my videos.

Thanks so much for watching and sticking with me on my journey of self improvement on You Tube.

-Ezlie