I wrote this and I want to know what else someone would want to know, if I’m dead wrong on any of it, etc.
the channel: https://www.youtube.com/@pivottoai
How I do the Pivot to AI YouTube videos
Cat: site news
Img: a title card, or me looking horrified at s/t
The Pivot to AI video series is getting views and subscribers, which is nice!
It’s a couple of hours to write a post and expand it into a script, fifteen minutes to record if nothing breaks or falls over, and another hour or two to clean up the audio and assemble the video, including screenshots of sources.
The philosophy is: your content is what matters, everything else is a bonus. Put in effort, not money. We’re making punk rock here. I did fanzines in the ’80s and books in the 2010s on the same principles.
Fortunately, cheap consumer electronics is good enough in 2025. Here’s how I do videos on a budget of zero.
– read more –
Camera: I use my phone, which is the best camera in the house. It does 1080p on the front-facing camera. This records H.264 video and 96kpbs AAC sound, which is fine for voice.
I try to do everything in a single take. Fancy is my enemy. “We’ll fix it in post” is a film-maker phrase meaning “well, that was a cock-up.” Everything you fix in post takes ten to twenty times longer than getting it right the first time.
Camera mount: anything that will mount a phone stably. The loved one and kid got me a ring light for Christmas and told me to rant on TikTok when something annoyed me. Unfortunately, ring lights are incompatible with wearing glasses - you get virtual googly eyes projected perfectly onto your lenses - but the phone holder bit still works well mounted on the desk. I also have an older phone mount for a camera tripod.
Microphone: Your video can be iffy, but your sound has to be good.
I use my Jabra Evolve 40 headset, which was designed for work Zoom calls. This is not great, but it’ll do. I turn the bass up in post-production and it sounds better.
I really want a Røde - the loved one has a Røde M3, which is all the mic you need for a remarkable range of use cases, for around £80. The M3 really needs phantom power - if you use a battery, you will forget it’s switched on and it’ll go flat - which is another £20 box. But Røde make an enormous variety of good podcasting mics of professional quality and you’re unlikely to go wrong. A Røde is the next piece of kit I’ll spend money on.
Lighting: A 9W daylight bulb above, a 9W daylight bulb to my left, and a 9W yellow bulb (“warm white”) to my right are doing the job so far. The lights to my left and right are in clip-on gooseneck mounts attached to the shelves.
Teleprompter: Elegant Teleprompter on Android. This puts a floating window over your camera app. It’s free with unobtrusive ads and the developer is very in-touch with his user base and likes to fix problems.
Sound: I edit the sound in Audacity, which is free, open source, and just works. If you know what you want to do, you can probably do it. I normalise the very quiet phone audio, do a noise reduction, pump up the bass 4.5dB, then go through the audio de-umming and removing breath noise, the latter being the main reason I want a microphone that isn’t up my nose. Then compression, then it’s ready.
Screen shots: I take these in Firefox and edit them in GIMP. I also make the title cards in GIMP. Just make things 1280×720.
Video editing: I use OpenShot, which is a bit open-source, but it basically works and it’s free. I get the raw video, the cleaned audio, the various still images, and the theme music, and assemble the final video. Export at 720p as “MP4 (H.264 va).” I could go to 1080p, but this is a talking head show and you don’t need my nose hairs that sharp.
ffmpeg: this is the Swiss army knife of video and about as fiddly to use. I’m very into tweaking things in ffmpeg.
OpenShot had trouble with the Nature video, which kept freezing in rendering the 7-minute raw file late in the video. I ran the raw video through ffmpeg to add a key frame every ten frames, which is probably overkill, but it worked, so I’ve kept doing it. I do not recommend you do this unless you specifically have this problem. But, to generate an oversized video with no sound (because the cleaned-up audio track is separate) and a ton of extra key frames:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx264 -x264-params keyint=10:scenecut=0 -crf 14 -an output.mp4
I can also do things like stretch a clip to 1.2× length to make speech clearer:
ffmpeg -i fatima.mp4 -vf "setpts=1.2*PTS" -af "atempo=0.8333" fatima2.mp4
When you finally give in to the urge for fancy with equipment, pro podcaster kit is super cheap on Alibaba and hence Amazon. Go through surplus listings and see if you’re lucky.
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We’re making punk rock here.
Hell yeah
Seems reasonable. I assume one of your lights is on the left and another on the right, not two on the left.
Better sound recording would definitely be your best upgrade; you may be able to pipe your phone camera in to your PC as a video source (search DroidCam), in which case you can set up for simultaneously recording audio through some better channel – your initial capture determines the extent of what you can do with it, so a good mic -> USB is probably what you want.
oops yes, it’s on the other left - fixed!
yeah, better sound is the next thing. Røde make a mic specifically to plug into phones! Comes with a big fluffball outdoor-grade wind protector too.
If you’re cleaning up the audio separately, I don’t know if you’re really winning much by having a mic that plugs into your phone directly (unless you are actually planning to shoot outdoors).
If you’re going with a condenser mic (and stick to recording at the desk), I recommend skipping the battery power shenanigans and getting a proper USB audio interface. Focusrite Scarletts are popular. I have a Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD and while Behr gear can be a land of contrasts, I’ve been very happy with it. The 2-port UMC202HD is about 50 quid from Thomann. Both the Scarlett and U-Phoria work fine on Linux if you’re into that kind of thing.
Worth checking out the T-shop’s store brand t.bone mikes, too. The Shure SM57/58 clones are perfectly cromulent instrument/singing mics, so while I haven’t personally tried the “MB 7 Beta”, it seems like the thing I’d try if I were in your shoes. Half the quality of the venerable Shure SM7B for quarter the price is probably not a terrible deal. I’m not a paid shill of Thomann, caveat emptor etc.
At our student radio we use Røde NT1-A mics, which sound great, but you have to talk to them from a very close distance, which is not ideal if you want your mug on the video. Also while they’re very reasonably priced for the product category, they are still about 200 reichsmarks a pop.
USB mics used to have a pretty bad rap a few years ago, but they might or might not have gotten better since Røde and other companies what know what they doing started peddling USB dildos for podcasters. Would still recommend the XLR route for a tried and true approach.
I’m not going to tell you to splurge hundreds into gear. You sounded passable with the Jabra. Angela Collier’s videos are straight up fire despite teetering just barely on the edge of listenable when I’m wearing my shitty work headset. Saying good words is obviously more important than the words sounding nice.
Clap your hands at the start of every take to get a sync point for audio. Edit it out so you don’t look like a poser. Do not hold the microphone in your hand to try and look like one of the cool kids. You’re not too old to be cool but you’ll want to be too cool to be a kid. Talking head shows aren’t my #1 jam, but they can be alright as long as you’re not emulating TikTok zoomers.
Keep the audio from the phone microphone as a reference and emergency backup. It will probably save you trouble at some point along the way.
so sound is actually almost more important than the visuals, and actually more important a lot of the time. There’s a reason sound is a whole job in AV …
The USB mics are fine these days, yeah
The philosophy is: your content is what matters, everything else is a bonus. Put in effort, not money. We’re making punk rock here. I did fanzines in the ’80s and books in the 2010s on the same principles.
this is brilliant, and it’s worth keeping in mind for anything independently produced or self-hosted. for our instance’s infrastructure, I do as much as I can with what we’ve got before I increase our monthly bill, and with proper planning you can make the compute you’ve got stretch to handle a lot more requests and users than you might think from modern cloud doctrine, which is built around throwing money at your problems.
to return to the subject of media production, it’s very easy to spend money and damn yourself into spending more later: an expensive microphone might need an XLR soundboard or newer audio computer to work well, the expensive video editor likely comes with a subscription fee or paid upgrades, and so on. it’s unwise to start out by splurging, because working on the style and content of what you’re producing will get you better results for much cheaper, and you won’t trap yourself into paying more than anticipated.
Export at 720p as “MP4 (H.264 va).” I could go to 1080p, but this is a talking head show and you don’t need my nose hairs that sharp.
this is an excellent point too, and it’s something that’s easy to forget just viewing videos. as a viewer, I usually want 4k if it’s available but will go down to 1080p or 720p if bandwidth’s a concern. for production: chances are 720p’s more than enough to start with, especially for YouTube, and it needs a whole lot less in terms of resources and attention to detail to look good than 1080p or especially 4k.
i mean. Sometimes you just spend the fuckin’ money and it solves so many problems. YMMV.
I’d do the video at 360p if I thought I could get away with it.
“How I do the Pivot to AI YouTube videos”
AI SLOP
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