Make your own science videos and share your knowledge with the world
Category Archives: Science Video Tutorials
I produce tutorials showing how to make science videos, for example with an iPad. Other tutorials include how to do animations for your science video project, how to use the rule of thirds in video composition, and many other aspects of videography.
Would you like to record a PowerPoint presentation along with your voice explaining your slides…perhaps to put on your website or to submit as a video abstract for your next journal article…but don’t know how?
An easy way to record your computer screen and audio is with QuickTime, the video player software that comes with the Mac operating system (also available for Windows). You can also record the screen of your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with Quicktime…as long as the mobile device is attached to your computer via the lightning port and is running iOS 8 or later. In addition, you can record yourself with the built-in camera on your laptop or create a podcast by making an audio recording with QuickTime.
In the following video tutorial, I show how to make movie, audio, and screen recordings with QuickTime, which can then be edited (the previous post shows how to edit QuickTime clips).
As GoPro Hero cameras and other POV (Point of View) cameras become more popular, users increasingly need quick and easy ways to edit the footage. For example, drone footage shot with a GoPro (or other camera) may produce long sequences composed of different views, perspectives, and subjects. If you need only one short clip from that footage for a video project or to send to someone, how can you easily and quickly extract that particular clip from a 15-minute long reel?
You could import the footage into a movie-editing program and extract the clip that way. But what if you haven’t mastered iMovie or GoPro Studio or just don’t want to fool with a movie-editing program to do some simple edits on your footage? One option is QuickTime, which is a movie player that comes bundled with Mac computers (there is also a Windows version). In addition to playing video files, QuickTime has some basic editing tools that can be used to trim, split, and combine video clips.
In the following video tutorial, I show how to use QuickTime to make basic edits on some GoPro drone footage. Although I’m focusing on GoPro to illustrate QuickTime’s editing tools, this application can be used with any video file (e.g., .mov, .mp4, .m4v, H.264) or audio file (e.g., .wav, .MP3) that QuickTime can open and play.
I’ve given many presentations at international conferences as well as seminars at foreign research institutions and departments. One thing I learned from these experiences was that non-native English speakers appreciated it when I made an effort to aid their comprehension of my language. In addition to speaking slowly, I would add a single sentence on each slide that summarized what I was describing on that slide. This approach helps because people often can read English better than they understand the spoken language–especially if the speaker has a strong accent. I know that adding extra text to slides is often discouraged by presentation gurus, because the audience’s attention is split between reading the slide text and listening to what the speaker is saying. However, the advice not to add extra text to slides falls down when your audience is struggling to understand your spoken words. You have to balance the design of your slides with your audience’s needs.
That experience in giving presentations to international audiences made me acutely aware of how captions can increase an audience’s comprehension of my material. In this blog post, I’d like to talk a bit about why and how you should add captions to your videos.
When people first start making videos, they often focus on the audiovisual aspects of the project and don’t think much (if at all) about providing closed captioning text. It’s an extra step that many video makers avoid because it takes time and because they haven’t thought about the makeup of their potential audience. People typically think about closed captioning as mainly helping viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. However, there are probably many more people who simply can’t understand the language being spoken in the video but whose comprehension would be improved enormously by captions.
If you post your videos on a media-sharing site such as YouTube, your potential audience is the entire globe, where many people may not speak your language. For example, about half of the viewers of my videos on The Scientist Videographer YouTube channel reside in countries in which English is not the primary language. YouTube uses speech recognition technology to produce an automatic transcript for each uploaded video. It’s not perfect, but is pretty good; the few mistakes can be easily corrected. You can alternatively upload a text transcript, and YouTube will synchronize the text with the audio. Then, all a viewer needs do is click the “CC” button to turn on closed captioning.
Captions help viewers who struggle to understand your spoken language but can read it. Another reason to include captions is because YouTube provides the option to translate the captions into more than 60 languages; however, this works only if the video creator provides captions. This means that those viewers who don’t speak or read your language can also watch and understand your video. A final reason is that a text transcript contributes to Search Engine Optimization by providing information to Google and YouTube that allows more efficient indexing of your videos. By ensuring your videos are discoverable by search engines, you will reach a much larger audience.
Adding captions to your videos thus increases your global audience as well as the discoverability of your science videos.
So part of my workflow in making a video includes preparing a word-for-word transcript of everything audible in the video. Because I often develop a script prior to filming, I usually can use that text file and only have to revise it a bit to reflect minor changes in the final film. That transcript file is uploaded, along with the video, to my channel, and YouTube then automatically aligns the text with the audio. When the video plays and the viewer enables the closed captioning (cc button), the text then appears on screen and is timed to match the audio.
Creating and adding closed captions to a video is relatively easy and painless–if you know how. In the following video tutorial, I walk through the steps needed to add closed captions to a video:
I recently taught a workshop on science videography at a science society conference and wanted to post a few Tweets to let society members know about it and to attract additional participants. My plan was to post daily Tweets during the week prior to the workshop. My problem was how to make my Tweets noticeable among the many other Tweets being posted by conference goers. So, instead of attaching photos to the Tweets, I decided to create a series of brief video bulletins to make my Tweets more eye-catching and to emphasize the topic of the workshop.
However, I did not want to spend a lot of time on this, as I had my hands full preparing for the workshop. After a bit of experimentation, I discovered that it was easy to take short (10 second) video clips and use the editing option in the iPhone camera app to add a bit of text describing the workshop. Then it was an easy task to compose a Tweet on my phone and attach the video bulletin, a different one each day. A bunch of people viewed the Tweets, and I attracted several additional participants for my workshop. See below for an example:
Someone who saw my Tweets asked me how I created them. So, this week I put together a tutorial to show how to quickly turn a video clip stored in an iPhone camera roll into an eye-catching bulletin to announce an upcoming event or publication. The resultant video announcement can be exported and posted on a website, on a Facebook page, on a LinkedIn profile, or in a Tweet.
Hollywood uses movie trailers to announce a new film and to attract viewers. You can use the same approach to tell others about an upcoming journal article, report, book, or research project. Students might use a trailer to share their experiences on a field trip or to make a video to accompany a conference poster. It’s a fun way to share your work with others or to tell people about your activities.
How does one go about creating a movie trailer? In iMovie (both the desktop and mobile versions), you are given the option of making a movie from scratch or using a movie trailer template. If you select the latter, the trailer editor does most of the work for you—for example, making suggestions about what types of footage and text to use. The trailer option may be helpful if you are having difficulty getting started with a video project. You may be at a loss as to how to organize your material to tell a story…..or you may not have time to plan, shoot, and edit a movie from scratch.
To help you out, I’ve created a two-part tutorial to show how to use the trailer option in iMovie (Version 10.0.8) to create a movie trailer. In this tutorial, I recreate a trailer that announces an upcoming, hypothetical paper, but you can use it for many other purposes. The tutorial walks you through the workspace and shows how to: import footage and other media, modify added video clips and photos, and convert the trailer to a movie project to allow more extensive editing.
Even if you do not plan to use a movie trailer to share your work, making a mock trailer is a great way to begin learning how to design and edit a video. And, who knows? You may end up with something great. If you already have film clips or photos of your research or other activity, the movie trailer editor will allow you to make a video in less than an hour. If you do not like the provided templates (and some are pretty cheesy), it’s possible to convert the trailer to a regular movie project that can then be edited to your liking.
Parts One and Two are embedded below (select full-screen and HD for best viewing). Direct links to the videos are here and here.
