How to produce a 2-person video blog post

March 5 2009, 6:54pm

We've produced a handful of bloggingheads video posts the past few months (here, here, here and here), sometimes resulting in polite golf claps.Afterward, a common question has been: how do you do them? Here's a 9-step tutorial. On a Mac, the technology is pretty simple. If you're on a PC, sorry, we can't help.1. Download the Mac beta version of Skype (version 2.8.0, free). Skype is your connection engine. The beta version features dramatically improved video and sound capabilities. (We previously used Ooovoo, which has a sweet display of side-by-side videos, but Skype's video and sound quality are vastly better. Plus, Oovoo kept crashing on my Mac, even after a reinstall.)2. Download Call Recorder ($14.95, demo version available). It plugs into Skype; only one of you needs to have Call Recorder on your machine to record your interview, chat, or debate.3. Click on the "recording" settings of Skype. In the Preferences menu, here's how we set our options: Audio encoding: AAC compression Audio quality: High Video encoding: H.264 Video image size: 320x240 Video frame rate: Maximum Record video: Two Track

  1. We use the built-in iSight cameras that are standard with most Mac laptops. You can buy add-on software called iGlasses ($9.95) that lets you adjust camera color, brightness and contrast. It also sharpens the picture.5. We set our cameras at eye level so it doesn't seem as if we're staring down a well. To do that, we perch our laptops on a stack of books. We try to record in early afternoons, when sunlight streams through each of our respective windows, giving us the best light source.6. Wear earbuds. Both of you. They make it easier to hear the other person better and more importantly, prevents an echo of the other person's voice feeding back into the microphone. We hide the cords behind our necks. (We use the Mac's built-in mic, but a plug-in mic sounds much better. A relatively new variety of USB-driven mics sound great.) 7. We direct-connect both laptops to a broadband source rather than using wi-fi, whose signal can drop out for myriad reasons, causing glitches in sound and/or video.8. When you're ready to record, push the "record" button in the Call Recorder window.  When you're done, run your video through a translation program that comes with Call Recorder, called "Convert for Internet." This takes the two audio tracks and converts them into one. Depending on the length of your video, the conversion can take anywhere from 10-60 minutes. 9. We upload everything to our YouTube account. Translation there is S-L-O-W. Paint the house, or go house shopping while waiting. Not to give YouTube too much good-natured grief, it recently changed its file-size limit from 100MB to 1GB. Nice. To embed the completed video into your blog, copy the "embed" code and paste into your blog post. On Typepad, which we use, you'll have to switch your view from Rich Text to HTML. Remember that your RSS subscribers probably can''t view embedded videos, so include a link to your video on YouTube (or Vimeo or Blip.tv or whichever site you use).That's it. The easy part is the technology. The hard part is picking an interesting topic, staying relaxed and keeping the video to under five minutes. Let us know in the comments if you decided to produce a bloggingheads video after this tutorial, then link to it.

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