STEP 4: Record & Edit Your Video

This fourth action step gets you to the point where you’ve recorded and edited a short video lesson based on the slide deck you created earlier.

1) Practise your “micro-skills”

First, spend some time practising those foundational “micro-skills” you learned in the lesson.

I recommend using the slide deck you already created and recording yourself using your screen capture software so you can review your performance.

As a reminder, here are the three micro-skills:

Once you feel reasonably comfortable handing these three skills, you can get ready to record.

Relevant lesson:

2) Get everything ready to record

Next, set aside some time to record your video and get everything ready for recording.

As a reminder, here are the preparation steps from the lesson:

Relevant lesson:

3) Review the presenting tips

Once you’re ready to record, review the presenting tips one more time.

Here they are again for convenience:

Relevant lesson:

4) Record your lesson

Next, keeping the presenting tips in mind and using the same process you used to record your test clip, go ahead and record your lesson.

Expect to do this a few times before creating a result you’re satisfied with. The process will become more familiar with time.

Instead of stopping every time you make a mistake, I recommend trying to get through the whole lesson in one take, even if you know you’ll discard it.  (Otherwise you’ll over-rehearse the early material and under-rehearse the rest!)

If you do make a major mistake, keep recording, reset the current slide, clap to create an audio spike and start again from the beginning of the slide.

What do I mean by resetting the slide?

If the slide has any animations (e.g., unfolding bullet points) you’ll want to make sure you “rewind” those to their initial state, i.e., when the slide first appears.

Tip: If you’re consistently stumbling over some part of your slide deck when presenting, consider editing the content. It might simply be that the ideas on adjacent bullets or slides don’t flow together as well as they need to.

Relevant tutorials:

5) Make any edits required (and save)

Finally, you’ll need to make any edits to your lesson video and save it in preparation for the next action step – exporting.

How the editing looks in practice will depend on your choice of tools.

It may be an extension of the recording process and happen inside the same tool. Or you may need to save the recording and import it into a separate tool to do the editing.

Just refer to the tutorials for the details.

Here are the tasks you’ll need to complete.

Trim any “dead time” from the beginning and end

Usually there’ll be a few seconds between pressing “record” and starting to speak where you’re mentally composing yourself, taking a breath, etc.

You’ll want to trim this from the start of the clip.

Likewise at the end of the clip, there’ll be a second or two where you’ve wrapped up but haven’t stopped recording yet, so you can trim time there too.

But be wary of cutting things too abruptly. Try to leave a second or two at the start of the clip before the audio starts.

This is also true of the end of the clip. Don’t stop the clip immediately after the last word spoken. Leave a second or two of space.

Remove any major mistakes from the middle

If an otherwise good recording has a major mistake in the middle (and you had the presence of mind to redo that section of the slide deck while the recording was still running) you can edit out that section with your chosen editing tool.

Here’s how to do it:

Remember, the edit doesn’t have to be so seamless as to be invisible, just slick enough to not be distracting.

Save the edited file

Once you’re happy with the edited file simply save it to your computer with an obvious file name in preparation for the final action step.

Relevant tutorials:

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