MacMost Now 265: Making the MacMost Now Video Podcast

Hi, this is Gary. On this edition of MacMost Now, let’s take a look at how I make MacMost Now. So, I get tons of questions every week about how I make MacMost Now. What camera do I use, what software do I use, what mic I use, all that sort of thing. So I thought it would be good to have one episode where I just run down all the technical specifications of MacMost Now. 

So the camera I’m using is a Sony HDR HC-1, which was the first in line of many DV high-definition cameras that Sony came out.That now is the HC-9, if you were to buy it. Now, this camera's got Firewire out, so I plug the Firewire directly into the IMac, which is doing the recording so I’m not using tape at all, I’m just bypassing that and going straight to a file with each shot that I do. I record in standard definition mode; it saves processor time both during recording and during editing, and since im only uploading these as podcasts for youtube where bandwidth is a factor, I figure doing it in standard definition is fine as long as I’m able to get the information across that I plan to. 

Now the microphone I use is an Audio-Technica ATR-35S. It says Lavalier Microphone right here. Now, I find a Lavalier Microphone works a lot better than any other solution for this because it isolates the sound right around my voice, so it’s not picking up any ambient sound and I don't really need to record anything else besides just my voice for these shots. 

To bring audio into the mac I’m using a Griffin iMic adapter. So this just allows me to plug the microphone into the Griffin iMic adapter and then it plugs in via USB to the Mac. 

Now to record everything, I’m using software called Wirecast and it’s from Telestream, and this is kind of like a recording studio in software. I can record multiple cameras and also screenshots at the same time. It’s how I put myself in the bottom corner sometimes while I’m showing the screenshots. That’s all done in real-time; I’m actually showing you the things while I’m recording the video at the same time. Wirecast also allows me to add titling and all sorts of special effects, things like that, and it even allows me to do live green screen. Now, it’s expensive software so if you just want to do basically screenshots with yourself as a video in the corner, you might want to look at ScreenFlow, which is software by the same company. 

Now to record everything, I record stuff in segments, so I'm doing this as a quick little segment, and when I’m done with this thought, I'll stop and assess whether or not I recorded a good segment. If I did, I’ll keep it. If not, I’ll start again with the same thought. 

So in the end I just have a group of segments that now I can edit together in a final podcast. I do that using IMovie. I started with IMovie 08. iMovie 08 was very much disliked by a lot of people, but I learned to work with it and IMovie 09 really is a big improvement on it, and I basically take all the segments and I quickly throw it together in IMovie. Now, I could do that in Finalcut but I've tried it and it actually takes me a lot longer to put these segments, which are ready to go, together in Finalcut than it does in IMovie, so I prefer to do it quickly and end up with a product that I can get out in a timely manner rather than spending a lot of time with every single episode doing the fine-tuning. Then, when I'm done, I'm not really happy with how IMovie exports the video. I end up with a very large M4V file, which is great quality, but way too big for podcast downloads. So what I do is run it through a post-processor. Now I used to use FFMpegX which is great software and will post-process it into an MP4 file that is much smaller, about half the size of the original M4, but I recently switched to MPEGStreamClip, which basically does the same thing but has a little bit nicer interface, and I find the quality is just a tad bit better. Both are really good products to use. 

Then I end by uploading the video, and I upload to two places currently, although I used to upload to a lot more. I upload to Blip.tv which is a great service for uploading your podcasts and they will host the podcast stuff and also give you a high quality flash video that you can put on your website, and I also upload to youtube. Now, instead of uploading to two different places, I go ahead and use TubeMogul to upload once and then TubeMogul to upload to both Blip.tv and YouTube. Then the Podcast comes from the original RSS to Blip.tv. I process it and put it through Google’s FeedBurner, and once through there, it then is available on iTunes. 

Here’s a quick rundown on all the technology, software, hardware, and network that I use to get the show from an idea in my head to a video on your computer, iPod or iPhone. For links to all these different products, see this post at MacMost.com. 'Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.