Easy educational video production in 2023

January 20, 2023 12:56 PM

My learning department is making a push to develop instructional video resources, and I need help in learning simple video production. The intended visual style will be similar to YouTube creators like Leila Gharani (Excel), Guy in a Cube (Power BI), or Analyst Academy (PowerPoint).

Our learning team is small and none of us have video production experience, so we are looking for the 80/20 version of production quality for the effort invested. The visual elements that we like about the example creators are the use of real people (rather than illustrations), visual focus (simple screenshares with callouts, or slides that are not overly decorative), and small transitional elements like the occasional morph that make it look more polished than just a recording of a slide deck with a superimposed headshot. We have access to tools like PowerPoint, OBS, and Adobe Premier, but we really only have knowledge of PowerPoint.

posted by philosophygeek to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Camtasia has a relatively low learning curve for a video editing tool and has some pretty advanced features for animations, transitions, callouts, captions, etc. It's primarily designed for screen recording, but you can definitely use it to mix videos of people with screen recordings, slides, etc. There's a free trial and their training resources are pretty good, especially the stuff in TechSmith Academy.
posted by neushoorn at 2:13 PM on January 20, 2023

If you’re on a Mac, Screenflow is pretty great. There are some shorter videos about it in this playlist.

I follow one guitar teacher, Scott Paul Johnson, that jumps between his iPad, monitor and “talking head” camera. I assume he has a switch to jump between sources. Great for showing information in different ways. He’s on YouTube if you want some inspiration.
posted by backwards guitar at 1:26 PM on January 21, 2023

If you have an NVIDIA video card, GeForce Experience also screencaps and records videos to your hard drive, and will save your audio as well. You can also add audio later as narration with free video editors like ShotCut. I've been doing that with my own Youtube videos, which is basically recording myself playing a game with some live commentary, but cameraless. You can always add your own face later if you must have your own face in there. :D by recording yourself narrating your own video then add your own video as a small insert overlaying the original in a corner.
posted by kschang at 8:39 PM on January 21, 2023