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How to Present on Video and Live Streams

Presenting on video and live streams is hard. Here's how to make it easier.

How to Present on Video and Live Streams

Index

A while back, I wrote a post called, “5 Tips For Remote TV Appearances & Video Calls”. It was designed to help people improve their appearance on video calls and other remote appearances. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on that post, so I took it to another level with this stream:

Improving Your Kit

I had a few people reach out afterwards to ask for recommendations for a setup. I’ll be honest, what I have is overkill for most people (though it’s a blast to play around with). There is a ton of great stuff out there that can help you with your stream.

This isn’t perfect list but it’s an example of the steps I would take now, having walked a much rougher path myself. Here’s a progression of reasonable items to add to improve your streaming setup:

A progression of items to purchase as your stream grows. Items are details in follow text list
  1. Start with what you’ve got!
  2. $45.00 USD: Add an Aputure Amaran AL-M9 LED Video Light
  3. $200.00 USD: Upgrade your video. Try using your smartphone as a camera with an HDMI dongle or adapter. On the iPhone? The Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter ($44.99 USD) is what you’re looking for. Android will depend on the device. For both, you’ll need a HDMI to USB converter, I recommend the Elgato Cam Link 4K. Or snag a better webcam like the Logitech Brio

    With an iPhone, you can also use the app, Filmic Pro to remove all the interface elements from the camera and a lighting/USB cable to broadcast you iPhone via Ecamm Live or OBS + this plugin. Both routes produce fantastic quality at a lower cost
  4. $100.00 USD: Upgrade your microphone. Using a computer? The Blue Yeti Nano ($99.99 USD). A smartphone? The Rode VideoMicro ($59.99 USD) with the Rode SC7 cable ($15.00 USD)
  5. $45.00 USD: Add another Aputure Amaran AL-M9 LED Video Light
  6. $240.00 USD: Upgrade your microphone (again). If you feel like you’ve outgrown the desk microphone and want to get a bit more freedom, it’s time to move to a shotgun microphone. I strongly recommend the Rode VideoMic NTG ($249.00 USD). This mic connects via 3.5mm audio (headphone jack) for mobile and USB-C (you can use an USB-A adapter) for computers. It’s very versatile and has a nice warm sound
  7. $500—2,000.00 USD: Finally, it’s time to jump into a DSLR or mirrorless camera. I’m a huge fan of the Sony line-up after having been a Canon shooter for a while. The reason—besides unlimited run time and clean HDMI out? Auto-focus. The auto focus is quick, dead simple, and almost flawless. I use and would recommend the Sony A6400 ($998.00 USD). If you’ve got cash to burn, the Sony A6600 ($1799.00 USD) has some nice additional features that you’ll never use streaming but might you start shooting videos on the go
  8. $300—1,500.00 USD: As a nice topper, you can always get a better lens for your camera. For mirrorless cameras, I recommend a wide and fast prime lens. This lens won’t zoom (it’s prime a/k/a fixed) but it will generate a nice background bokeh or blur. Anything in a 16mm to 26mm will work great. I use a 16mm (and that’s the example in the stream) but previous recorded on a 20m when I was shooting Canon. Right now, I’m rocking the Sigma 16mm f/1.4 ($399.00 USD). The lens is really going to change your look, so experiment and find the vibe you like!

If you want to see this progression in action, check out this video:

Looking for a second perspective on cameras? Check out this fantastic stream from Sean Cannell at Think Media

Slides & References

Here are the slides from the stream, but the format down below is probably more useful.

Live streaming isn't a panacea. There are negatives that come along side the positives.

The alternative to live streams (for most cases) is a pre-recorded video. You're used to these (or should be). They're all over the place with varying levels of quality and success.

Videos can be scripted, edited, effects added, and a generally come out with a higher level of quality.

Live streams are a lot more casual and mistakes stay in (even in the replay), but you can interact with your audience in real time. That's huge and can't be discounted...assuming you have an audience.

Most platforms will save your live stream and make it available on-demand after the fact.

All live streams follow the same rough workflow. The subjects of your live stream (you, any guests, demos, screens, etc.) are recording using audio and video.

Those recordings are managed via studio software or a service and used to create a stream that is sent to one or more services that your audience watches.

Audience

You start your live stream with your audience. They are the most important part. Ask yourself these key questions:

Remember, every barrier you put between your audience and your content is going to reduce that audience 10x.

Is that a verifiable stat? No, but it's a solid rule of thumb. A better user/customer experience is the key to building an audience. It's not just about the content, but how they can consume it as well.

Avoid the bottom workflow. It's the most common one for larger companies and it works against their stated goals. Too many hoops for the audience to jump through.

While you might end up with the same amount of people filling in the form (so you can follow-up with them later) but the attitude of those people will differ wildly.

There's a ton of content out there. Don't get fooled into thinking that yours is so amazing that people will jump through hoops to watch it.

Keep things simple, open, and accessible.

Services

When someone is talking about streaming, most of the time they are referring to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitch.

There are other streaming platforms (like Mixer or Vimeo) but you're usually going to work with these five. Four mainly, Twitch is still primarily gaming and esports content but business and learning is growing quickly.

In addition to your audience, you may also want to consider if a streaming service your thinking of using offers features along these four attributes:

Here's the rough comparison of the top streaming platforms along these attributes.

Remember, it's not all or nothing. You stream to multiple services using a re-streaming or multistreaming service.

Check out Restream or Vimeo as starting points.

Studio

Some apps/websites act as the studio as well as the service. Mobile apps for Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are examples of this. Simply click the button and go live!

The job of the studio software/service is to pull together all of the various inputs (our subjects) and let you manage them.

The studio is where you create various scenes. You can add overlays (images on top of your video), lower thirds (the fancy name for name bars), show comments, and pretty much anything you can dream up (assuming you have the time!).

Common studio choices:

Recording

Video

When you just get started, the assumption is that a better camera is the best way to make a big impact on your stream. It's actually lighting.

Fixing your lighting and tuning it to meet your needs is the quickest way to make a big impact on your stream.

Real talk, your webcam sucks. It's there—which is good—but that's about all that it has going for it. Webcams are tuned for broad focus (but usually fail to find it) and wide angles. Not ideal for a high quality broadcast.

Your smartphone probably has a fantastic camera. The challenge here is finding the right app that will let you stream that view out. Making things harder, the rear cameras are an order of magnitude better than the selfie camera but take some gymnastics or a second person to get a well framed shot.

A DSLR or mirrorless camera is a wonderful tool to deliver a high quality stream. On this stream, I used a Sony A6400 with a Sigma 16mm f1.4 lens. It's a nice wide angle so it creates great shots when the camera is physically close to the subject.

If you're looking for a DSLR or mirrorless camera, you need it to have two main attributes: unlimited run time and clean HDMI output. Basically, you have to be able to plug it into the wall (trust me, you don't want to manage batteries during a stream) and you don't want all of the camera indicators (white balance, focus, aperture, etc.) to show on the stream.

Elgato has a handy tool to help point you in the right direction.

One thing not covered in the live stream was the requirement to get the DSLR/mirrorless output into your computer! For this you'll need an HDMI to USB converter. The key term you're looking for here is USB UVC support. This means your camera will show up like a webcam in any software that supports webcams without any additional configuration.

I like the Elgato CamLink for this. The BlackMagic Web Presenter is a higher end, more complicated choice but it opens up some cool connections down the road. I'd stick with the CamLink (and did).

With a camera setup, you know need to stage your performance!

Make sure you look into the lens directly. It's tempting to look at the screen where you "feel" your audience to be but that's distracting. Watch the stream at 48:40 to see this one in action.

If you have trouble with this, move the windows on screen that you find yourself looking at frequently closer to the camera. That's the top of the screen if you're using a webcam or one side if you're using a DSLR/mirrorless.

For the composition of your shot, make sure your background is clean and minimal. When in doubt, move it out...of the shot. Also make sure that you're in the center of the frame with a bit of room above your head and that nothing in the background is intersecting your head (like a window or bookshelf), that's seriously distracting.

As seen here in an overhead shot. Lighting should be in front of the subject. You're not showing an anonymous source, so don't have a strong light shining on the subject from behind (it blacks them out).

While light directly on the subject is fine...

You can improve that setup dramatically by positioning the light (or the subject) so that it's shining on the subject from a slight angle. This will create some difference in light on the subjects face and give it more depth.

An even better setup is if you can use a strong (key) light source about 45 degrees on one side of the subject and a weaker (fill) light source on the opposite 45 degree.

This setup gives you way more control of the depth of shadow on the subjects face and will create a very pleasing effect.

If you're going all out, add a third, smaller light behind the subject shining between them and the background.

This fill light helps the subject pop from the background. If you're using virtual background...don't.

Just don't.

Please.

But if you have to or if you're using a green screen (and there are a few cases where this makes sense) the fill light is what makes this all work. Even in normal scenarios this light helps create that separation between subject and background and makes the shot more cinematic.

Audio

If you only remember two things about audio, remember these:

  1. Microphones have direction
  2. Hard surfaces bounce sound creating echoes

The standard microphone in your laptop or webcam is an omnidirectional microphone. It's designed to pick up any sound near it and amplify that sound. That's why they sound so poor.

"Standard" microphones are usually referred to by the type of their primary component: dynamic, condenser, or ribbon. These microphones are usually tuned for a specific purpose using a "pattern". It's these patterns that provide the direction of the microphone.

If you're microphone is design to pick up sound from the side and you're talking in the top (Hello, Blue Mic Yeti users!), that's a problem. Understanding the construction, range, and direction of the microphone is key.

Lav microphones are omnidirectional but short range. This makes them ideal for placement on clothing. If you're walking during your stream (it happens) or interviewing someone in person, you're probably going to use a couple of lav mics.

There are lots of options for lav mics. I personally use the Rode Lav smartLav+ or the Rode Lavalier GO with the Rode Wireless GO. This is an amazingly useful combo.

Finally, we have shotgun mics. These mics are highly directional and a great way to capture audio for streams, especially in busier environments.

My go-to shotgun mic is the new Rode VideoMic NTG. It works with everything due to it's 3.5mm and USB-C outputs.

If you're wondering, yes, I use a lot of Rode gear. It's a premium line so you're going to pay a little more but it's also extremely reliable and that something I value when it comes to streaming.

Solid alternative brands here are Blue (their Raspberry—which is sadly discontinued—is still one of my all time favourites), Diety Microphones (check out their V-Mic D3 Pro), or PicoGear's PicoMic.

If you're microphone uses an XLR output (a very common interface for music gear), you're going to need a DAC or digital/audio converter. These usually have a microphone preamp to power the microphone and to increase and clean up it's signal and then send it to your computer, tablet, or smartphone.

You don't need anything too complicated here for most setups but there are a lot of possibilities.

Here are some brands to check out. You're looking for products under their "Audio Interfaces" sections (usually):

I've owned interfaces from all of these companies and there's not a huge difference in their product lines for most use cases. As you get more nuance in your audio production, there are significant differences but you can worry about those a long way down the road.

Right now, I'm waiting on an Audient Evo pre-order. The simple user interface and auto-gain functionality seems like a strong advancement for streamers. Looking forward to trying it out.

Subjects

Screens

Please don't ever share your entire desktop. It's too risky. Something may get seen that you want to keep private (think browsing history!).

On a similar note, turn off all notifications. We've all been in a meeting when that didn't happen and the results are not good for the presenter.

Whether you're sharing a web page, the terminal, or another app; zoom in!

You may be working on a stunning 32" 5K HDR display but your audience is watching this in 1080p at best. More likely it's a 720p stream (1280x720 vs 5120x2880...16x more pixels). Zoom in.

Zoom in.

A bit more...

There you go.

If you're sharing slides, as much as I hate to say this, use PowerPoint. Ugh, why? It's only because of one simple feature that Keynote on macOS lacks: presenting in a window.

By default, presentation software will take over every display connected to the machine that's presenting. If it's a one display machine, your slides are full screen. If you have two displays, you get a presenter view and the slides on the other display.

The problem here is that you access to your stream quality, audience, and any other material is hidden by the presentation.

In PowerPoint, click on the "Slide Show" ribbon section. Then, "Set Up Slide Show". Finally, select the show type, "Browsed by an individual (window)" and voila! Your slides now present (with animations) in an easily shareable window.

Another route here is to make a PDF of your slides and present using your favourite PDF viewer. They usually have the ability to present without the window chrome (buttons, menus, etc.).

Stop moving your cursor around to point to things. Definitely don't "wave" it around. That's just distracting and usually runs counter to what you're trying to do.

People

Remember to look directly into the lens. That's how you make eye contact with your audience.

Yes, we brought this up earlier but it's super important. Check out the stream at 48:40 if you don't believe me.

Also, try not to:

Engagement

The key aspect of streaming is audience engagement. That can be hard to do authentically. Esports is a great example of some authentic engagement but that doesn't necessarily translate directly to teaching or business content.

If you're streaming to multiple platforms, engagement gets harder. Make sure the audience access is worth. Maybe just posted to the additional platforms as an on-demand video noting it was live is a better play.

Here are some general tips on engagement:

Reasonably Accurate 🤖🧠 Transcript

How to Present on Video & Live Streams [FTdcULTGGms]

[00:00:00] Mark: Hey everybody, how's it going? Um, my name is Mark Nanukovic. Those of you who know me, um, if not, I'll introduce myself. Um, wait, [00:01:00] keep getting that echo. Those of you know, boom. Okay, so we're talking about streaming about stuff like that happening in the background. Um, so, uh, That was the audio from my stream actually popping up in another tab.

[00:01:13] And we're going to talk about how to avoid things like that. Um, though, obviously I may have a little ground to make up in the reputation space. Um, but my name is Mark Danikov and I am actually a forensic scientist. I focus on cyber security and privacy. Um, but part of that, uh, or part of what I feel I, you know, my goal is, is to teach people, um, those complicated topics.

[00:01:33] And as a result of a lot of that teaching, Um, I end up dealing with video streaming, um, presentations on video. I am a regular radio columnist on CBC Ottawa. Um, I'm in a lot of situations where it's just kind of me in the room, uh, presenting out blind, uh, to an audience that you hope is there and engaged, um, and maybe you get some commentary, uh, back.

[00:01:56] And speaking of that, uh, we are live here on LinkedIn. We are live [00:02:00] on YouTube. So if you have comments, I really want this to be a discussion. I've got a bunch of material to present to you. Um, but as we're going, if you have questions, that is absolutely the best time. So what you're going to see, and as part of the stream, this is part of that education, you're gonna see me talking directly into the camera, but you're also gonna see me, my eyes kind of shifting.

[00:02:17] Um, and we're going to talk about that line of sight as part of this, uh, live stream here. Um, and that's normally when I'm looking at the comments I'm looking to see here in LinkedIn, if anyone, uh, is. Um, is, is on board or is watching or is engaged. So like right now I'm firing off a comment, I'm letting everybody know that I'm there and that's a good way to kind of kick things off.

[00:02:39] Same thing on YouTube. If there's comments, we can see them pop up there because that's a big part of the So, uh, that's my, you know, basically, uh, I've dealt with this a lot, uh, on my own, I've done, uh, probably over 250 streams at this point, um, through a variety of, of avenues, whether that's on the official trend, micro channels, whether that's on my own channels, [00:03:00] um, there's a lot there and there's a lot of things that can go wrong.

[00:03:03] There's a lot of things that you can make tiny, tiny tweaks to, to make it look so much better and to have the delivery come across in a manner that really, really works. Resonates. Hi, Salim. Good to see you as well. Thanks for joining. If you have any questions, fire him in the chat just like that. So let me share out part of my screen here.

[00:03:24] And hey, Mario, thanks for jumping on board. Glad you could make it. Perfect. So, so let's walk through this cause I have, uh, some things for this conversation to help it guided. And that's another tip right off the bat. It's really hard to have a conversation with yourself. So you could actually create a live stream.

[00:03:40] That's just you talking, um, just in a lecture format. Uh, but if you want to have a conversation, it's good to have guides. Um, and the first question I really want to ask. To you, uh, is should you live stream at all? The reason why I ask this is because, uh, I think a lot of people have this dream of live streaming in their head.

[00:03:58] They have this idea, this concept of [00:04:00] saying like, Hey, I should be live all the time. Um, and maybe that's the right call. Maybe it isn't, but I think you should at least ask the question because this can be really, really tricky. Um, so should you live stream at all? That for me really comes down to evaluating the difference between delivering a straight video.

[00:04:14] Versus a live stream. And there's some subtle differences between the two. So for a video, uh, it can be way easier to script. In fact, um, when you're doing a video, I hadn't planned to show this, but why not? Um, when you're doing a video, you can use things like a teleprompter. So this is, um, the, uh, parrot, uh, padcaster, um, very, very cool little teleprompter that sits on my lens.

[00:04:37] And underneath here, there's a, Uh, my smartphone goes and it displays everything through transparent glass so that I can read a prepared script. Um, and that's good on video. If I want to, like, prepare my message, tune it out or tune it in and really dial it and have a high level polish. Um, and also I can edit that stuff after the fact.

[00:04:54] I can do several takes. I can make sure it's really good. That's with a standard. Um, video, [00:05:00] right? Then we're all kind of used to that, I think, but I don't think a lot of us experiment as much as we should in that format. So for live streams themselves, usually you have an outline. So for me, I've got a bunch of slides that are outlining what I want to talk about on the stream live today.

[00:05:14] You don't have the ability to edit, though, because what goes out there goes out there. So you saw in the first few seconds of this stream, the background audio kicked in from a tab that I had open, ironically, to monitor the stream. Now, normally, I mute this Browser, but I'm also broadcasting from the browser.

[00:05:29] So I couldn't so things happen, right? You can't edit them out. Um, but the advantages, you know, if there's a more casual feel to live streams, at least I feel that way. Um, I think a lot of people are a lot more accepting on live streams and we get the ability to interact with the audience, right? So I see, uh, people tuning in.

[00:05:45] I see, uh, Robert, uh, from the Netherlands. Hey, Robert, how you doing? Um, I see some folks from around the world. We already said hi to Salim. Um, Mario's here, right? We've got an audience that I can interact with. So there's some advantages to being live, and that's the big, big bonus here is that [00:06:00] live element.

[00:06:00] So. The advantage, or I should say, you know, the thing that's thinking in most people's head right now is that, wait a minute, after I live stream, doesn't this go on demand afterwards? Absolutely. People can tune into this after the fact and check out your live stream and uh, have the ability to, um, let me just pull up my notes here for a second, uh, for a link to give to you guys.

[00:06:20] Um, but they have the ability to view this afterwards. Um, and that's great. But all the same stuff is still in place. Glad to hear you're doing good, Robert. Um, here's the link, uh, for today's stream, everybody. Um popping this in the linkedin comments and i'll pop it over to youtube in a second That will be live shortly after this so it's not live yet.

[00:06:39] Um, it will be in a few minutes Um, and if I can drop that into youtube, we will do that as well. So, uh That's where today's stuff is going. So you people can watch this on demand. So on that, that link that I just sent you after the stream finishes, you can go up there and check it out. Um, and that works, but all the same caveats that we saw in the last slide still apply.[00:07:00]

[00:07:00] So it'd still be more casual. There'd be issues. You can't go back and edit that video. Um, and, and that's not a bad thing, right? Um, but just be aware of that. So let's assume you do want to live stream. There's a workflow to this and it all follows the same thing. We're going to deep dive into each of these areas because I think it's really, really important.

[00:07:18] Hi Madeline. Thanks for joining in. I hope everyone who is joining in you guys are safe at home. Um, and you know, using this time to, to move things forward, to learn some new skills, hopefully like live stream. So for live streaming, you have subjects in this case right now. I'm a subject of the live stream as well as the slides that I'm showing you.

[00:07:34] Um, these subjects need to be recorded some way. They need to be then pushed through a software or a service that acts as a studio and then pushed to a service. out to an audience. So in this case, for this live stream, myself and my slides are the subjects. I'm recording them using this camera and a microphone down here off screen that we'll talk about a little bit.

[00:07:57] I'm using a studio software called StreamYard. [00:08:00] That's pushing out directly to two different services, YouTube and LinkedIn Live to you, the audience. Okay. Now there is a multitude of permutations around how you can set this up. Um, and what makes sense for you, but this is the general flow. So we're going to talk about all of these areas, but we're going to start right to left.

[00:08:18] We're going to start with the most important part of this entire process, and that's your audience. Okay, the audience is absolutely key because they're going to drive all of your decisions for those of you on the technical side of the world if you're dealing with Software development, you know, you talk to the user you figure out what they need and you worry about the user experience It's the same thing with live streaming We need to worry about the audience first because that's going to dictate a bunch of the things that we can or cannot use moving forward Okay, so for our audience, the first thing we want to kind of walk through is this checklist is the audience public.

[00:08:52] So for today's stream, I want to broadcast this out. Why? This is public information. It's going to sit on my LinkedIn page. It's going to sit on my [00:09:00] YouTube channel. Um, uh, Slash Mark NCA if you haven't already subscribed. Um, and that's going to sit over there and that's going to live for a long time. So this is public.

[00:09:08] There's nothing private in here. So I'm okay with it being public. Um, is this a repeat audience? Well, hopefully it is. Uh, but the reason why you want to ask that question is if you've made some technical decisions, like you want to stream to your audience through something like zoom after the initial technical setup of getting them to install zoom and configure it, It's easier to get to that audience again, but there's also an expectation from that audience again.

[00:09:32] So if I'm talking to you regularly here on LinkedIn, and if I decide all of a sudden to switch to another service, you may not follow me over, right? Because there's an expectation. Second thing you want to ask is what's the technical level of that audience? So are people comfortable installing software?

[00:09:47] That can be a big burden for a lot of people, right? Um, I know I was helping out a family member the other day, uh, remotely. Trying to configure some basic software, uh, you know, and it took 15, 20 minutes. If that person is trying to attend a live stream and they start, [00:10:00] you know, just two or three minutes beforehand, you could lose that audience if there's a really high technical bar to get in there, if they're not really savvy.

[00:10:06] So understanding the technical level of your audience is going to dictate where you go. Same with if they're already on that platform. Um, and then the biggest decision, and if anybody on this stream is in the marketing side of things, this is a big, big decision. Do you want to meet your audience where they are or do you want to try to draw them to your properties?

[00:10:24] So in this case, I'm meeting you where you are. You're on LinkedIn, you're on YouTube. I didn't set this stream up and say, go to my website, go to markand. ca to watch this stream. I'm trying to meet you in the moment, uh, where you are and where you're going. Um, and Zach, I saw on YouTube, absolutely a hundred percent.

[00:10:43] Great time to upscale. Hopefully this can help you guys, uh, upscale your streaming. Uh, if you have questions, as I said in the intro, ask them on LinkedIn, ask them on YouTube, um, and I will address them in the, in the flow. Um, because I think that makes a lot more sense that all this material is going to be up at that link at the end of this, [00:11:00] including the slides, including all the references to anything I mentioned, um, slides are going up immediately.

[00:11:05] Uh, the references will be up shortly. I just need to finish typing them up because there's a bunch. Um, but yeah, ask the questions here. So that's, that's around the audience. Basically, where are they? You know, what level are that? Because a lot of people know how to access a Facebook live. Very simple.

[00:11:17] They're used to interacting on Facebook, but you know, on the flip side, if you ask them to do a Webex or a zoom or go to meeting something where they have to install software, that's a much higher demand to the audience. Your content better be worth it. And you better expect a smaller audience because of those decisions.

[00:11:33] All right. General rule of thumb. Every barrier between you and your audience is going to reduce that audience by 10 X. Okay. There's no data behind that whatsoever. It's just a gut feeling. I have based on user interaction models, user experience models. Um, but I think it holds up. So if we look at that, if we go through sort of a traditional marketing method, if you're not in marketing, I apologize, bear with me, but you can understand this flow too, because you've probably dealt with it.

[00:11:58] And if you're running streams, you're [00:12:00] going to be in marketing now, because you've got to market your own streams. So signup form, email confirmation, probably install some software to finally view the content. For live streaming. And this is the reason why people absolutely love it. Uh, you can just throw it up, people view it, and if you want to ask them for something afterwards, you can have a signup form, send it.

[00:12:20] It's, it's like a direct connection, right? Like I hit one button to go live here and I'm connecting with you folks on LinkedIn. I'm connecting on YouTube. Um, and the people who don't catch this live will be able to watch it, uh, within the first, you know, 24 hours you see a massive spike, but they'll be able to watch this as long as my channels are live.

[00:12:36] So it's a really direct connection with your audience. If we apply that general drop off rule, let's say you've got 100, 000 people aware of your stream now. That doesn't happen for me. I'm not in like the e sports like ninja level or cypher pk or anything like that. I'm not a massive corporation with a big budget behind me.

[00:12:52] But let's say just for argument's sake, 100, 000 people heard about it in the corporate World. You can see that drop off to down to [00:13:00] maybe one person is actually gonna view the content all the way through again. Rough rule of thumb because there's so many barriers. If you take the same numbers, you're probably gonna have about 10, 000 people viewing it on the live streaming world because you've reduced those hurdles.

[00:13:12] You've made it a much smoother user experience to get through. Interestingly enough, you're getting the same amount of people signing up. Um, and get that information. If you're interested in marketing to capture or to follow up with that audience, the difference is the attitude of those people, the thousand people that have after 10, 000 people have watched, they're going to be a lot more positive and receptive versus a thousand people are jumping through hoops.

[00:13:31] Just something to keep in mind. Um, but let's move on to some more interesting, some of the more technical side of this stuff. And again, if you guys have questions, fire them up in the chat. Happy to address them as we go here. So those services we talked about, they're the key. Now that you know that the audience, let's say you want to present to a public audience, um, now you know what you can start to pick for services.

[00:13:52] You can start to make determinations as to what's applicable and what's not. The main four you're going to hear time and time again are YouTube, [00:14:00] Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It's just how it is, right? We're streaming live to two of them right now. We're streaming to LinkedIn. We're streaming to YouTube, and they're very, very common in the streaming world.

[00:14:09] You might also hear about Twitch now. Twitch is from Amazon. Um, they bought it. It was a Justin TV, then it became Twitch TV, and now it's part of Amazon. It is primarily around Eastern. Sports and gaming, but they have a lot of non gaming content on the rise. Now it is a pure streaming platform. It was built.

[00:14:27] You can very much tell it's built around e sports. A lot of major gamers is where ninja got to start before I moved over to mixer. Um, it's huge, right? So it is very core to the streaming conversations, but most of the time for learning for business. You're going to be talking about the top four here. Um, and that's okay.

[00:14:44] It's not a problem. Now there are a ton of other platforms out there. Um, things like mixer from Microsoft, uh, Vimeo has a live streaming platform. Um, there is a ton of different ones there. Uh, whatever's going to fill your need. That's the key here, but these are the most common ones that you come across.

[00:14:59] Now there's [00:15:00] four attributes that I like to do use when I'm evaluating these services. Um, is it embeddable? Can I put this on my website? So you see with that link on markand. ca, this live stream is actually there. And if I'd published this ahead of time, you could watch the live stream instead of on YouTube or LinkedIn, you can actually watch the live stream on my website.

[00:15:18] That can be really advantageous for people. And that could be something that you want. Maybe it isn't, but it's nice to know what's possible. Uh, Can you access these streaming features? So some things like YouTube streaming is gated. You have to have a thousand subscribers on your channel, no content strikes and a bunch of other criteria met before you're even allowed to live stream on YouTube.

[00:15:38] Um, same with LinkedIn live. LinkedIn live had a limited preview. Then they had, uh, I think they have general availability, but I'm not sure if it's even available for all pages yet. So is it available? Uh, and then. You control who sees the stream. So not all streams need to be public. This is a thing I often advise people in when they're dealing with Facebook.

[00:15:58] Facebook has a huge amount of privacy [00:16:00] challenges. But one thing they did really, really well is they built a permission system in so you can live stream on Facebook to nobody. You can lock it down so that nobody but you can see it. Um, more, uh, interesting to most people is that you can Facebook, uh, live, uh, to, like, two or three people.

[00:16:15] So, a very common use case, uh, I find advising families on is if you've got the grandkids and you want to stream to the grandparents, you can stream it on Facebook Live directly to only those two parents, uh, or grandparents, so that they're the only ones who can see it. Great, great functionality in the larger world for corporate.

[00:16:33] You can make sure that this is gated so that you can only people who have the access or paid for it can see it maybe a factor for your streams. And then the finally one is after we're after you stream it is available on demand, not actually the case on all platforms. So twitch is the most noticeable twitch doesn't allow or they allows on demand for a window unless you clip part of the clip.

[00:16:53] Um, so it's not always there. It's a thing. 30 day rotating window unless you pay more or reconfigure your settings, but you can't keep them [00:17:00] forever. So those are the four attributes. Um, and again, this chart is gonna be up on the site, so you don't have to scramble to write it down. But here's here's how it basically stacks up YouTube's fully embeddable, available with, um, you know, certain restrictions.

[00:17:13] Permissions. Not really. You can have it unlisted, which is kind of helpful. Um, but it's still, you have to assume that it's public and it, you know, it's on demand afterwards, of course. So you go across and you see that LinkedIn is by far the most restricted platform. Um, but ironically for corporate business, it's actually really, really engaging.

[00:17:29] Um, you tend to get a lot of people viewing on LinkedIn live, even though it's the most stubborn to deal with. Um, one of the downsides of LinkedIn live is that. that all the other platforms will feed their comments back to your software so you can have a central place to look at your comments and manage your audience at LinkedIn won't.

[00:17:45] So you always have to have LinkedIn open and looking at it in addition to something else. Uh, pain if you're doing multiple streams at the same time, which you can do. You can use a service called a re streaming service or some studio platforms support it. If you're directly doing it from your [00:18:00] studio, you need to worry about the bandwidth you have available.

[00:18:02] Do you have enough upload to create multiple streams out? It's far more effective to use a service like restream.io and or several others, like Vimeo does it where you send one stream to them and they branch it off to the various services. So like today we are streaming to LinkedIn. We are also streaming, uh, to YouTube, um, which is giving us this ability to go multiple.

[00:18:21] Right, which is very handy. You can go to where the audience absolutely is. So that brings us to our next point that brings us to the studio side of things. So studio is essentially a software or service that lets you set up your strength, right? Very, very easy, very simple. So sometimes this is actually the app or the service itself for YouTube, for Twitter, for Facebook, you know, Facebook's easy example.

[00:18:45] Same with Instagram TV, though we're not talking about I. G. That much because they're very restricted to what they'll let you stream because it's only from their app or site. Basically, you know, you take your phone, you hit the button, you say, go live and you're live. So it's the service, it's the studio, it's everything all in one, [00:19:00] um, which is, is great.

[00:19:01] Um, but it's also, you know, you're very much constrained to the default experience. You can't expand it out unless you take some additional steps. So keep that in mind. But basically what a studio does is helps you take multiple inputs. So if you have multiple cameras, multiple people, multiple screens, multiple audio inputs, whatever you want to do, um, and you create your broadcast.

[00:19:22] So the studio is the software service that brings that all together and then creates a single stream from that, right? Now there is a multitude of options when it comes to the studio from super, super simple to really insanely broadcast level complex. If it's just you doing the stream and you're just starting out, Keep it on the simple side, keep it as basic as possible because that's where you're going to see the most benefit names here.

[00:19:46] You're going to see that the biggest by far is OBS Open Broadcast Studio. It's available on Mac, Linux and Windows for free, fantastic piece of software, not the most polished U. I. On the planet. Okay, [00:20:00] so there's a lot of investment. You is the streamer need to make into understanding how it works. Because if things break on the fly, you want to be able to fix it.

[00:20:07] You want to be able to adjust. Um, but for free. Fantastic. There is another free version from stream labs, which is a gaming support company. Really? They're, uh, they have taken the open source project. They have polished it. They have created a better user interface on top of it. Um, they offer support on top of it.

[00:20:22] It's still free. They have a marketplace of services that they sell to streamers. So the ways to take donations, the widgets to show top subscribers, stuff like that, that are really interesting to the e sports world. Um, but very useful. StreamYard is a web browser based solution. It's actually what I'm using today.

[00:20:39] Normally I use Ecam, which is in the middle. It's a Mac OS software, but StreamYard is something I've been testing out because I host a show for Trend Micro called Let's Talk Cloud. In that show I invite guests on to talk, so we do an interview format. And that makes it easier for the guests. I just send them a URL.

[00:20:56] They can go to that in their browser and then they can join the stream. That's the end of their configuration [00:21:00] that has made things so much easier than trying to set up a zoom call or skype call or whatever the case may be. So stream yard loses a lot of functionality, but in that simplicity, there's something freeing about that, I find, which is nice.

[00:21:11] Wirecast expensive broadcast quality, crazy, crazy complicated, but it can do anything you could ever dream of. I do prefer E cam if you're on Mac OS, it's 100 bucks a year, I think, um, but it sort of hits that middle sweet spot, be something simple and complicated. It lets you do some really fancy stuff. So multiple camera angles, switching transitions, uh, you know, complicated screen shares, um, multiple overlays.

[00:21:35] So things like, uh, let me show you here, um, there. So that little logo that popped up all the way at the top that you can see part of the mark logo, Mark NCA, that's an overlay. Okay. So I can remove or add those into my stream. Um, and uh, Ecamm makes that really easy and XSplits the same kind of idea on Windows.

[00:21:53] So these are studio software that help you pull all that input together and then push out the stream. As the streamer, this is [00:22:00] where you're going to be spending the most amount of your time. You need to know these tools inside and out, because Everything is going to break at some point, and you need to know how to fix it on the fly, um, and to move your stream forward.

[00:22:10] So it's worth picking one of these, um, and moving, uh, and investing the time to understand it truly. I would strongly recommend starting with StreamYard. Um, if you're on Mac OS, Ecamm is definitely worth checking out. Um, or if you're going to go the OBS route, uh, Streamlabs OBS over normal OBS, just to get the idea, um, you know, to get that smoother, simpler user experience.

[00:22:31] So let's move on to recording because I think that's where a lot of people have, uh, some, some of the main questions because everything I've covered up to now is, you know, you can spend time and Google it, um, and figure it out. But when you're recording, there's a lot of tricks, a lot of tips and tricks to know.

[00:22:45] And we're going to start with video. Okay. Um, you may have noticed my video looks pretty Pretty solid, right? Um, I probably should have framed this a little bit better, but I'll leave that for the example. So, uh, video, something to remember here is that light is going to [00:23:00] make a bigger impact by far, like a mountain, mountain of difference compared to your camera.

[00:23:06] Okay, light over camera. If I had, if you gave me a hundred bucks and said you could spend this on one thing, I would spend it on light for visuals at least. Um, that is going to make a massive, massive impact to the quality of your feet. Obviously you want a better camera too, but light's going to be a bigger player than you think.

[00:23:23] So, uh, for cameras, you've got your webcam. It's there. Okay. It works. It works almost by default, no matter what. Um, that's all I can say. That's good about it. It's there better than nothing. Okay. Right. It'll get the job done. Uh, you've also got your smartphone, your smartphone. Uh, the good news here is the front camera is definitely better than, uh, your webcam for sure.

[00:23:51] Um, the back cameras are excellent and there are ways to use your back cameras as, uh, streaming cameras. The challenge there is that you don't have the way to monitor it, right? So you need [00:24:00] to make sure that you can check the stream some other way or have somebody frame this up for you. Um, but you can even use your smartphone with your desktop.

[00:24:06] You can set it up as a camera. Um, as an input feed that way, and you'll get really, really great quality. The cameras on this modern smartphones are ridiculously good. Okay. Especially in stable conditions. Uh, and even if you're walking around, um, but they're, they're great choice. So you don't have to go out and buy a camera.

[00:24:22] You've probably already got a great quality camera sitting in your pocket. Uh, and the last option is a DSLR or mirrorless and actual actual camera downsides here, they're expensive. upside. Lots and lots of options. So right now I'm using a 16 mm wide F 2. 0 lens, which is really, really nice. Like it looks crystal clear.

[00:24:42] You can see the background. This is actually a physical background, by the way. Um, it is blurred out because the quality of the lens. Um, I also have other options, right? I can add other lenses as I need to go, and you can see they're actually the focus. There we go. So focus changes nicely. Now I'm blurred out, and [00:25:00] that's all optical.

[00:25:01] That's not software messing around so that the quality of this is going to be much, much higher. Obviously, there's a commensurate investment, um, and there's a bunch of criteria around getting a camera that would stream because none of these DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are actually designed to run continuously.

[00:25:17] Like a video camera. They normally have 30 minute limits on them because of some really interesting copyright restrictions. Um, but they're not, not designed to run constantly for an hour or two hours. So you can have some overheating issues. You have power challenges. Um, I will add a bunch of that stuff in the links because there's a great camera checker from Elgato.

[00:25:34] Um, they make a bunch of streaming software or streaming hardware to support. Um, they are the makers of the stream deck, which is a cool little button thing that you can hit to get, um, Quicker access to various streaming features. Um, they also have a list of cameras, uh, DSLRs and mirrorless that support streaming with unlimited power.

[00:25:54] So when you can, you can plug them into an AC adapter and a clean HDMI out. So right now you're seeing a clean [00:26:00] feed. It's just me in the background where on my camera monitor, I have all the normal little gadgets and graphs. On the camera, showing me the onboard audio, showing me the focus. It's showing me a whole bunch of stuff, but none of that gets pushed out to the stream.

[00:26:12] That's called clean HDMI. It's absolutely critical for streaming, so that'll be in the references. Uh, but if you know, if you go that route, you're going to make a significant investment. You're going to be jumping up here. Uh, you know, you're talking several hundred dollars, if not a thousand to 2, 000 to get a streaming setup for a DSLR.

[00:26:30] Uh, that's a high enough quality to justify jumping up that high. So here's an example. Uh, this is a shot from me. It's sitting right here like I am right now I took this just before the stream started, uh from my iMac webcam. It's a 2019 iMac webcam It could barely get focus on me and i'm three feet from the camera.

[00:26:48] It looks horrible contrast that's the same setup same lighting and everything from my Actual dslr i've got a sony a6400 um night and day difference right like [00:27:00] You want to look better on stream. Here you go. So this is the best I could get out of the webcam because of the lighting. And now that should have actually grabbed focus on me.

[00:27:07] It was struggling, even though this is ridiculously well lit room. And that is with a DSLR. You probably want to go that route if you're streaming on a regular basis. Okay. So here's some practical tips. Now this works whether you're streaming or just appearing on a stream or appearing on a video call.

[00:27:26] This is the most critical thing I can tell you whatsoever. And that is. The lens should be at eye level. Okay. The biggest mistake, and we all see it on zoom calls. We all see it on WebEx as we see it on FaceTime is that people have their laptop screen pivoted like this and their faces here. So you get this giant chin effect because the camera, I can't even do it on this camera.

[00:27:51] That's how bad it ends up getting is that your camera is trying to look at you like this. Right? That's the big chin effect. It's not [00:28:00] flattering to anybody ever, ever. So if you're on a laptop and you're using the laptop's webcam, which is, if it's what you've got, that's fine. Grab a stack of books. Get a stack of books, put them underneath the laptop, push the laptop screen up to 90 degrees, and then have it right at eye level.

[00:28:18] Okay? Right at eye level, looking at you there, or even slightly above looking down. Okay? This is a very flattering, uh, Angle, maybe not for me, but it's a flattering angle looking downward to the subject that makes a big, big difference. Second thing that you can do, and again, this applies across anytime you're appearing on a camera, concern yourself with something called framing and composition.

[00:28:40] So right now I've made a couple simple mistakes. Let's say on purpose so that I can teach you. You can see in my background and again, this is actually a physical background. This is in my home studio. Um, thanks for joining Raph. I appreciate it. You got any questions you let me know. Um, so this is actually a physical [00:29:00] background, but you see I have the light switch in frame right now and I didn't need to.

[00:29:04] That's a bad thing on my part. That's a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. So what I should have done was actually adjust the camera slightly. so that now it's off camera. See how much better that looks, right? That looks way better with just a slight adjustment in my camera. The other things you want to look for is you want to make sure that your background's not busy.

[00:29:24] Okay. Not busy, not crazy. Now this is all acoustic foam. It doesn't do much acoustically, ironically, but it looks kind of cool. It gives me a little bit of future vibe. It gives me a studio vibe. Um, for a lot of the tech teaching that I do, a lot of the security coaching that I do, This vibe suits the message, right?

[00:29:40] Um, but you want simple. And again, the best thing you can do for any of these calls is just take stuff outta the background, right? Just remove it, move it off camera so that it's not seen. Um, big thing you want to z is, uh, do as well, is you wanna frame yourself, um, so that you are, uh, in the middle of the shot.

[00:29:58] You're not a newscaster. [00:30:00] Okay, if I'm doing a news broadcast, this is a great frame because right here is where you're going to put up some graphics, right? You're going to put the over the shoulder graphic right here. If you're doing that, this is a great way to frame yourself up. Most of the time you're not.

[00:30:12] So you want to be dead center and you want a little bit, I could probably use a little bit more, um, headroom, right? Breathing room here. You don't need to see as much of my chest here. You could have a little bit more on top to give an even more accurate framing. Um, but half the time I find it's a posture issue for me.

[00:30:28] I'll, I'll be nice and I'll, I'll try to think I sit like this. Really? I slouch. So when I slouch, I'm framed well. Okay. Um, other key, key thing is be aware of what's behind your head. So a lot of the time what you're going to see is somebody will have like a line intersecting them in the background. It's like a bookshelf or there's a window or something that's super distracting to most people.

[00:30:52] Again, just, you know, tilt the camera, move the camera, do something to get that intersection out of your head. Now here, what I've done in this setup [00:31:00] is I'll get this weird kind of funky parallax. So when I go all the way back to force the camera to focus on this, you can see it more, but when I'm up close for the blur, Then it gets me the intended impact.

[00:31:10] I want, um, but you can see on frame. I've got the, uh, in the slides, you can see the little window example, make sure it's not slicing your head. That's absolutely critical. Um, you know, but the really simple things you can do to, to, to cut things up, to make it look better. Next thing is light. So if you have one source of light, that's okay.

[00:31:28] You can't control it necessarily. And this is looking, the slide is looking down. It's an overhead shot. Um, if it's directly at your face, that's okay. Uh, what would be better is if you could move it slightly to the side. The reason why you want to slightly bias your, your, uh, lighting is if you see my face right now, this side is more exposed is what a better lit than here, but that gives me some contrast, right?

[00:31:49] That gives me a little bit of depth in my face. If I change that, See, now that's pretty even lighting. So I've got studio light set up so I can do this kind of thing, but see, the difference [00:32:00] was pretty even lighting. Now my face loses some of that drama, some of that depth, and I get way more reflection on my glasses.

[00:32:08] If I kill that light, now I get back to this different, it's in shading. I've got more light on this side of my face and less here, which gives me a little bit of depth. It's a little more cinematic look. Very, very simple thing to do. Um, so you can do that with one light by adjusting it. Ideally, you've got multiple lights.

[00:32:26] So that's what I've got here for my setup. I have a massive florida ceiling window, which is giving me my key light. I actually have an enhanced with a diffuser to make that softer. Um, and then when you saw what I put on that other light, that was my fill light. that I don't actually need today, but that was overpowered.

[00:32:43] So that fill light should really be lower to make it look a little bit more of that contrast. And you're going to have to adjust based on the conditions, especially if you're using natural light, um, as things change throughout the day. That's the one challenge of natural light is nature controls that you don't.[00:33:00]

[00:33:00] So you need to adjust that, but one strong light to four about 45 degrees away from your face on this angle and a weaker light on the other matching angle will give you a really nice depth. Now I could probably use a little less light here. And let's see what that looks like mess around. So if I remove that, I don't get as much contrast that I'm back to more even lighting, which I don't think is nearly as dramatic, right?

[00:33:23] So maybe I just changed the color of that light. So that's a key thing with lighting. And then in an ideal setup, you also have a light behind you, um, sort of at this angle coming this way to illuminate the back of your head. Now, if you break my number one rule, You are absolutely 100 percent gonna need this light.

[00:33:44] My number one rule is very simple. Please, please, for the love of anything you worship, do not use virtual backgrounds. Just don't. Just don't. [00:34:00] I can end the stream right there and be happy. If, like, one person came away from this going, I'm not gonna use a virtual background anymore. So the reason why I say virtual backgrounds are bad, I would much rather you be behind a solid wall with a little bit of light applied to make it look more interesting because virtual backgrounds are a their CPU intensive.

[00:34:20] But the basically the computer is trying to figure out the difference between you and the background. So what I've got right now here in optics where my background is blurrier than me, uh, is, uh, what the virtual backgrounds are trying to achieve. Now, the problem with that is most of the time, and you'll see it a lot with what's left of my hair.

[00:34:38] Um, and, uh, with people who have, um, different, uh, clothing on is that the computer can't cut it out properly, especially if they're moving a lot. Okay. Right? Another pro tip. Don't move. Um, they're when they're moving a lot. The computer can't keep up. Well, what you can do to help that is actually add that hair light.

[00:34:56] Adding a light between you and the background [00:35:00] provides a stronger edge, right? It's a stronger edge that gives you a good perspective. Pop between you in the background, which makes it easier for the computer to cut the background out and replace it with something else. It's the exact same theory. When you're using a green screen, if you've ever seen a low budget movie, they tend to not be able to, um, properly separate the person from the green screen.

[00:35:20] You'll see little edges of green all the way around because there's no light between the subject and the background. Um, and I'm glad you guys are agreeing. Robert Mario. Thank you. Glad you're staying with me. I was waiting for people to drop off the stream after I said no virtual backgrounds, and I'm glad you guys are still with us.

[00:35:35] But that's the difference. You need light to help you separate from your background so that the computer can calculate it. And if you do want to use a virtual background, please just make it a simple. Um, one wall, solid color or maybe a very subtle gradient from behind your head out to give it a little bit of texture because there are, you know, the one acceptable use case on the virtual background thing is basically you can't change your physical surroundings, [00:36:00] so you want to create some privacy there.

[00:36:02] And in those cases, make sure you've got that light. Uh, between you in the background and make sure you don't move so that once it's calculated, it's the minimal effort for the computer, but that's the key here. And again, these slides are all going to be up on my site so you can refer back to them because you don't need crazy complicated lights.

[00:36:16] You can do this with very simple, um, uh, house lights. Another great, great thing. Is the light on your phone, your light on your phone works as a pretty good light. And when you position it properly, so you can see the drama it adds there. I would never light myself this way, but I was doing a Halloween broadcast maybe.

[00:36:34] Um, but if you were, uh, don't have a flexible light source handy when in a pinch, you can do this. Um, obviously you can buy a bunch of lights, um, when I can, uh, I can add the links up there for you too. Uh, of course, Raf being Raf on the, on the comments has me as his better virtual background. Which I will officially add is yet another exemption to my no virtual background rules.

[00:36:53] If it's me, you're good to go, baby. And that's just quality live streaming. I think that's what that is. So that's lighting. [00:37:00] Let's talk audio for a second because I don't know if the microphone's picking it up. I assume it is, but another pro tip. Yeah, there you go. Don't put ice in your drink. I love really cold drinks.

[00:37:12] Um, and if you put a ice in them, the microphone is probably going to pick that up. So no ice in your drinks cause it'll ding off there. Um, but audio is another thing that's really, really easy to clean up quickly. Key things here. Microphones have direction. Yeah, they have direction. Um, and hard surfaces bounce sound.

[00:37:30] So you heard me earlier say that this acoustic foam doesn't do too much. Um, it helps. It's a little pyramids and it helps bounce the sound a little bit. Um, I have a simpler example. This one I can actually show you. Uh, this one does pretty well. This is a portable acoustic shield. Most of the time, if I'm doing a radio broadcast, I have this behind the microphone.

[00:37:50] So I'm speaking into it so that it will actually dissipate the sound so that it doesn't echo back. I also have some custom sound panels that I put up [00:38:00] on the opposing wall because unfortunately, as much as I love my home studio, uh, it's hardwood floor, uh, I'd say 30 percent of the wall surfaces are glass.

[00:38:10] The rest are just plain. There's not much on them. Um, and, uh, it's rather echoey, right? So I've done things to dampen that sound, to reduce that bounce. So three major types of microphones you're going to see just standard mics. These come in different capsules inside. They have different warmth, but on the left, you see just microphones.

[00:38:30] Um, they're most common, but then you're going to see things like a lavalier mic. So this is a lav mic. And this is what I can see if we get focused on that. It's really small. So it's gonna be hard. And that's why I put a picture up there. But lav mics are normally attached on clothing. Um, very, very subtle.

[00:38:46] They are, uh, they're not long throw Mike, so they won't pick up stuff from across the room, but they are semi directional. So they'll go up in a cone basically from where they're presented. But these can be. These are very, very useful. They're used a lot of time in interviews because they're very subtle.[00:39:00]

[00:39:00] The most common you're going to see for streaming and the ones that I recommend a lot of the time are actually shotgun mics. So this is a shotgun mic. It is a long tube. It is a longer version of the one that you're seeing on screen right now. Um, you can see that for for reference. Um, that is a full, uh, like high end shotgun mic.

[00:39:18] Um, this is a smaller shotgun mic. You can see this is a dead cat. There's a wind screen on top of it. But if I take the wind screen off underneath, you will see that is a tiny little shotgun mic. It's designed to sit on top of a camera or on a smartphone on a cold shoe mount. And it is a directional microphone.

[00:39:36] So that's why shotgun mics are really, really good. I'm actually using the one you see on screen right now for this stream. It is pointed down and up towards me so that it is only getting my voice so that people around or out on the street, you shouldn't pick up that noise. That's why they're very, very good for, uh, streams for videos.

[00:39:54] A lot of the time for, um, TV shows, when you're recording a TV show, [00:40:00] what you're going to see is the, uh, you won't see it, but you'll see it after the fact, sometimes in the making of is that shotgun mics are actually right out of frame. So the shotgun mic would be hanging up in front of me. Pointed down towards my head and about there.

[00:40:11] So you wouldn't be able to see it, but you'd be able to hear, right? Because my voice is getting broadcast out and getting caught into the microphone. Um, these are very, very handy. The challenge you have with omnidirectional mics, so mics that go everywhere, um, is that they are going to pick up the sound everywhere.

[00:40:27] Um, so I'm quarantined here with my family. They're around, they're still doing their stuff. And because I'm using a directional mic, it is far less likely that you're going to hear Them off camera, right? Now, if I was using a standard directional mic, um, you are an omnidirectional mic. You might hear them.

[00:40:43] Now. I also have a mic mic. This is a pod mic from road. I really like road for the mics, though. There's a bunch of great brands that I'll put in the references. This one is also directional. The important thing. Um, and you see this all the time with a yeti from blue, um, is to understand how this microphone captures sound this [00:41:00] particular microphone you speak directly into.

[00:41:02] Right. You should be about a hang 10 away from it. And you speak directly into the microphone for the Yeti. For those of you that have the Yeti, you speak into it this way. The amount of times I see people speaking into the top of a Yeti, it blows my mind. That's not how the Yeti works. The Yeti, you speak into a parallel, you speak directly into the thing.

[00:41:21] Um, and every microphone has a direction like that. Once you get used to different mic designs, you won't have to ask, but the easiest way to do is to ask if you're working with a team, how the, what the directionality on the mics are. Um, if not, then just do a little research on your own. But for your live streaming, I strongly recommend shotgun mics or lav mic if you're not able to get a clean sound or if you think you're going to walk a lot.

[00:41:45] So that's the downside of the shotgun mics. If I was going to do a presentation on my whiteboard, so I was going to teach a class like live and do a physical whiteboard, I wouldn't want a shotgun mic because most of the time, I'm going to be facing away and you're not going to hear me nearly as clear.[00:42:00]

[00:42:00] Now what I said there was I'd be facing away and you're not going to hear me nearly as clearly. If I had a lav mic on my shirt, when I turn that turns with me. So it's not going to be near, I'm not going to drop off nearly as much. So if you're a mover, if you're going to be turning away from the camera a lot and you shouldn't, unless you're giving them another subject like the whiteboard, a lav might be a better, um, you're going to be wired up with a lav, but you can get a little things like these transmitters.

[00:42:28] This is a wireless system that lets me take that lab as a wireless lab. So this would attach to my belt and other attached to my computer. And I'd be able to walk around and still have really clear audio. Key thing to be aware of as well, uh, different styles of microphone. So this big long shotgun is a XLR.

[00:42:47] I think you can see that, uh, that is. There you go. Three prong XLR standard for the last few decades to connect audio equipment. Um, this needs to connect into a DAC or a digital [00:43:00] audio converter. So I have a box down, uh, on my desk that converts, uh, the XLR cables, gives me a bunch of preamps, some cool stuff to play with the sound.

[00:43:09] Then it converts it into an audio signal for my computer as opposed to, uh, this is the road NTG USB. which goes directly. And this is a digital audio converter. So I prefer simple. I try to go digital audio converter when I can, but I've got enough microphones to justify a digital audio converter, a DAC box, um, a whole multitude of things there.

[00:43:31] But just to be aware, um, sometimes you may also end up with, uh, this is just a straight, um, standard T R R S audio cable. Um, you're going to see that on your phone a lot of the time. Um, I want to see if I can rack focus on this. So this is from the lab. Mike, there we go. So you see there's two little bands there.

[00:43:49] That is a standard T. R. S. Connection. T. R. R. S. Has a third band. That's what our cell phones use for the audio controls and stuff. Be [00:44:00] very careful when you're using these microphones to know your extra are in the T. R. R. S. You may need a converter to help it actually work as an as a microphone. Otherwise it's going in on the wrong cable and it thinks it's a headphone again.

[00:44:12] I'll put in the references. Don't sweat it too much Um, and if you guys have questions as we're going through this you let me know I know i'm just kind of streaming on here. Um, but that was part of the point But again comments linkedin live on youtube happy to answer anything you got subjects. Let's talk about that.

[00:44:29] Um, you know, we're getting near the end here. Thank you for bearing with me for this long. Hopefully this has been useful. Hopefully you guys have learned something from this. Um, subjects are where most of you come into play. So the mechanics and logistics of streaming. We've covered a lot of that. Now we've added some tips in there and I'll put some more up in those references as I think of them.

[00:44:47] But subjects, let's start with the easy one screens. Please, for the love of everything, do not share your entire desktop and turn off notifications. Really simple, really straightforward. [00:45:00] Don't share it all. Don't turn on, turn off your notifications. The reason being, you never know what you forgot to cover up and you never know what's coming in on your notifications.

[00:45:09] I have been in meetings. I'm sure you guys have all been in meetings when somebody who's presenting share their entire desktop forgot to turn off notifications and somebody is back channeling them during the meeting through Messenger and you see what they're saying. Can't believe blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:45:23] And it's up there on the screen for everybody to see where you see their meeting invites. You see their email come in as a security and a privacy guy. Please just don't share your entire screen. The only time you ever should be sharing your entire screen is if you create an entirely new account that is only for presenting and you use that as an isolated Set up and you want to show, you know, Hey, this is how you click here.

[00:45:45] This is how you go there. Blah, blah, blah. No matter what turn off notifications, unless you need to show that actual notification, all of these pieces of studio software allow you to share an individual app, but I'm sorry, Robert, if you learned that one, the hard way, um, it is a tough lesson and [00:46:00] normally it's a lesson you learn once, um, So, uh, when you're sharing a screen zoom in like zoom in man, uh, make your fonts bigger, uh, Make it, uh, you know visible for people because you gotta remember most of the time we are, uh, lucky enough to have monster, uh monster, um displays.

[00:46:21] Uh, and, uh, that's great. But when you're streaming them out, it gets crunched really, really bad. And I'm glad Rafa, you got something out of this. I will absolutely follow up with you later, buddy. Um, and I'm glad you're adding stuff, uh, up on your, uh, Amazon cart. Hopefully it's been useful for the rest of you.

[00:46:35] I'm going to add that list of things, possibilities, Gear I've tested gear I know about to that reference link on Mark NCA so you can check it out. Um, and yes, it can absolutely be embarrassing. I know when I share out an app, especially a web browser and go, Oh my God, what did I surf? Right, because out of context, things can look really, really bad.

[00:46:52] But as you're sharing that as zoom in, So make sure that it's large. You know, I mentioned we have big screen. So I'm presenting off an iMac. It's got a five K [00:47:00] display. It's great. I love it. But when I'm sharing it with you, you guys can't see the screen, the font size that I have. So zoom in, especially if you're making slides, make them bigger, brighter, more interactive.

[00:47:09] Um, and on that note for slides, share PowerPoint in a window. That's what I'm doing now. That's why you see the little chrome up top. Um, if I was presenting in something other than StreamYard, You would be able to see, uh, that would be gone, um, or export them to a PDF. Reason being, even if you have multiple displays, because Keynote and PowerPoint are very greedy, as soon as you start to present, they take over the entire display.

[00:47:29] You lose your audience view. You lose your streaming view. If something goes wrong, you have no idea. Not a good thing. So in PowerPoint, if you go to the settings for the, if you go to slideshow on the ribbon, there is a setup slideshow button. You can click on that. The second option from the top lets you present in a window.

[00:47:47] You still get all your animations. Um, you still get everything. It's very, very useful. Robert, thanks for joining. I appreciate you taking the time. I hate PowerPoint with a passion, and yet I still use it to present on [00:48:00] stream because of this mode you're seeing right now. Very, very useful. If you don't want to use PowerPoint, you can go to a PDF viewer and do the same thing.

[00:48:06] Way more useful because you want to be able to see what's going on on your stream. Also stop moving your cursor. Your cursor is not a pointy thing to point at people and show them what's going on. It is distracting. It is annoying. It's not accomplishing the goal that you want. So stop moving your cursor, keep it steady.

[00:48:27] And that goes for people too. Don't move around a lot. You should not need to move that much. Um, but people, it's tricky. It's challenging to talk. So I've been talking to you guys for 49 minutes. Directly into a camera. I'm used to it, but it's really disorienting for most people. Um, it is difficult for people to understand how to, um, how to do this.

[00:48:46] Uh, you know, and, and there's a few tricks here. I'm gonna walk through this. And if you have questions, you'll let me know. Um, the biggest one is. Look into the lens. That's that's how you make eye contact with your audience. You'll [00:49:00] see for that one. I didn't, I was actually looking at you the stream on, on my PC, on my iMac.

[00:49:05] And that's sort of a normal problem for people to, you know, even in a video call is that they'll look at the display of the people. On screen instead of into the lens. The lens is directly how you make eye contact with your audience. So when I'm right now looking directly into the lens, it takes a little doing because even now I want to look at the monitor above the lens.

[00:49:26] But you look directly in the lens. This is how you make eye contact. This is how you make an impact. You don't need to creepy stare like this all the time, but you do need to look at the lens. Now, if you're coding and teaching people to code and have this sort of off angle camera that can work sometimes, as long as you remember to look back into the camera.

[00:49:43] And this is probably the biggest issue with, uh, streaming off a DSLR or doing video work off an actual camera is that it's not as conveniently located as that webcam, just in the top of your display. But even if you're using your webcam, look up at the webcam, not at what's on the screen. Easy tip to help you here.

[00:49:59] Just Take [00:50:00] the video or the window that you're looking at on your PC and shove it to the top, as close to the camera as you possibly can. And just because that will help you look up and make that eye contact, looking into the lens, it makes a massive, massive difference. A couple of key tips here as well.

[00:50:15] Try not to fidget. Don't be doing this. Don't be doing this all the time, uh, don't be like, you know, clicking on a pen, or working with something with your hands, all that stuff is very distracting, right? Um, second of all, be open and honest. So, right back to the start of the stream, when, uh, the audio of the stream was kicking in another window.

[00:50:34] Can't cover that up. Can't walk that back. Just acknowledge. Just go. Oops. Here was a problem. Uh, okay. I'm going to ignore, you know, I'm going to just fix that. Bear with me for two seconds. Um, and then slow down, right? Slow down and breathe. Understand your pacing. You can get really nervous. Um, and push through.

[00:50:49] That's a big sign. You know, that's a big symptom of people getting nervous as they get faster. Um, but more likely because there's no interaction because there's no feedback, you just tend to race through. Okay. So [00:51:00] when you're in an audience, and I give a lot of presentations to folks all around the world, or at least I used to travel around and give presentations when you're in the room with somebody, you can read that room.

[00:51:10] You can see how your delivery is working. You can see if it's registering with people. You can understand their body language. Even when I do my radio column, and I'm in studio versus remote. If I'm in studio talking to the host. Um, Robin and I are having a conversation and just like any other conversation, we read off of each other.

[00:51:27] So you can, you can know when to jump in, you know, when to pause, you can make these dramatic, uh, sort of impacts because there's that, uh, I can't even say that word. So I'm going to acknowledge, be honest and open that I cannot say, see, I can't even say it. I'm not going to be able to say that. I'm just going to move on, but there's a reciprocal, I can say that one.

[00:51:47] Um, back and forth. There's a body language. There's a lot of subtext. You don't have that when you're streaming alone. So right now I'm talking and I get some comments on LinkedIn and I'm getting comments on YouTube. So I get some interaction, but it's not timely because the stream [00:52:00] is three or four seconds behind anyway.

[00:52:02] So I'm not having that conversation, which means a lot of the time you're going to speed up. So, you know, just caution yourself, slow down, breathe, maybe get a timer on screen so that you can see how you're going for pacing. Um, and like I said, repeatedly, when something breaks, just acknowledge it. move on and hopefully have a backup in place.

[00:52:20] So if you can have Two cameras. If you can have multiple mics, things like that. So a lot of the time, and this happened to me live on a stream three weeks ago, my camera, I'd been using all morning and actually overheated, which is the first time it's ever happened since I had this camera. And I was genuinely shocked.

[00:52:36] But I was in the middle of an interview. I was interviewing forced Brazil from a cloud guru. Fantastic friend, thankfully, and great, great guy. So he's totally fine. But I'm interviewing and my camera just dies, just goes completely black. And I'm like, what can I do? I'm in the middle of the stream. I can't reboot the stream software.

[00:52:53] I can't, you know, I try to the cameras got to shut down and cool down. So I just switched over to my webcam. Not ideal, but [00:53:00] you know, it is better than nothing. So I adjusted and went on and I just acknowledged that. Yep, my camera just overheated. I'm just gonna switch over here. And same thing happens. So in a pinch, you know, things are gonna break.

[00:53:09] Uh, it's life, right? It's live. And that's the challenge here. But if you're honest and open about it and acknowledge it, the audience is pretty good about it. So last area I want to cover here. And I know you guys have been super patient. You've been sticking with me the whole time. I very, very much appreciate it is engagement.

[00:53:24] Um, and I've done an okay job today. Not a fantastic job. It really depends. And it's, it's an art. It's something that you need to practice. Um, some platforms make it really hard. So LinkedIn makes it hard to monitor LinkedIn. Um, if using StreamYard or Ecamm or OBS, you can actually pull in all of your comments from Facebook, from YouTube, from Twitter.

[00:53:44] From Twitch into the software and either display them on the screen or at least have just one place to look at them. If you're splitting streams with LinkedIn and other platforms, I recommend hopefully having a team behind you that can use something like a shared Google Doc that updates in real [00:54:00] time where they can stream all the comments to you so you can respond.

[00:54:02] Um, but it's nice to call out viewers and say hello to them. You know, because this is a, this is more of a conversational tone, um, and you'll hopefully get more engagement that way, you know, saying hi and thanking you, Robert, for being here, thanking Raph for being here, thanking you all for being here, um, is part of that, uh, regular reminders that people can participate.

[00:54:20] It can be hard for people to ask a question and they don't feel comfortable about it. They're not sure. Um, you know, reminding them it's okay, reminding them that there are no bad questions and even having some seed questions, just saying, you know, as I was writing out this content, I thought of a few things that I hadn't covered that may be really interesting to you.

[00:54:36] So, you know, here, here's a potential question, this and go and also accepting the fact that, you know, people don't necessarily, um, like. To, to comment directly on the stream. Maybe they want to think about it more. So, so being honest and open and letting people know. Um, so for me here, if I, uh, just readjust my view and I give you this one, you can hit me up, uh, at Mark NCA I'm on, on Twitter, uh, on LinkedIn here on [00:55:00] GitHub, on YouTube, everywhere I go on social at Mark NCA is me.

[00:55:03] Um, and I'm happy to chat about this stuff where you can email me. Me at Mark and dot CA. I'm happy to talk about this stuff afterwards as well. And then just ask for input, right? Ask for input, ask for sharing. Like, Hey, if you guys want to see more material like this, let me know if you want to see different stuff, let me know.

[00:55:19] I'm happy to cover whatever. Um, and any chance you guys get to share this content that shows me that it's valuable. Um, and asking for that in a polite way, I don't think is, is necessarily wrong. Don't be overbearing about it. Um, some fun examples if you watch, um, and if you want some good, Uh, enjoyment, uh, on YouTube during quarantine, check out how ridiculous a team of lads from Perth, Australia, their basic premise is they drop stuff off a really high tower, uh, 45 meters high onto trampolines, uh, onto a trampoline that Mark Romer, another one of my favorite YouTubers built for them.

[00:55:49] Um, and they have all these hilarious ways to ask you to subscribe and click the bell so that you're notified because that's their business. They're, they're driven for ad revenue and for subscriptions. So it's not bad to ask for share. [00:56:00] It's also proof for you as a streamer that your content's working, but more importantly, any sort of input and feedback you can get, um, is, is a very, very positive thing.

[00:56:08] That's something you should be looking for because the idea of live streaming is really that engagement is that back and forth. So for me, that's everything I got today. Um, I think that covered all the main points and there's a lot of stuff to this. There's a lot of fun things. Um, you know, the biggest thing for streaming I think is just start.

[00:56:25] If you go on my YouTube channel, so youtube. com slash mark NCA. Um, if you look at some of my early stuff, uh, under the mornings, uh, with mark playlist, it's. Horrible. The contents like reasonable, like the conversations reasonable, but the, uh, the technical quality around it is bad. Um, so, you know, the easy thing I asked when people asked me, like, Hey, how do I get in streaming?

[00:56:45] And you know, how have you gotten to the point where you've got a good, you know, reasonable setup? I said, well, practice. It's practice. It's 100 percent practice. Same with talking into a camera like this. It is all Practice, you have to keep working at it to get better at it. It is a bizarre thing in the abstract for me to be sitting [00:57:00] here with people in the house yet I'm talking directly into a camera and even ignoring what's going on just out of, you know, on the side of my vision where all of you are going on and periodically I look to see the comments.

[00:57:10] It's bizarre thing. You need to get used to it. Same with riffing and going live like this. It's a skill for a lot of people. It's not something that comes to most people naturally. You have to practice it. That's why having an outline, um, you know, today, it's great. I printed up all my slides. A lot of the time I just have a bullet list of what I want to talk about and some reference points to bring in as you get better at that.

[00:57:31] As you practice more, you will have the ability to bring in things like overlays so that you can show a lot of the time on my mornings with Mark. I'm talking about security and privacy issues. I'll show web pages and say, Hey, I was reading this article and show the page because that's a little more interesting than looking at my ugly mug for seven or eight minutes straight.

[00:57:47] All these things. I think it's a blast. I think it's a ton of fun. Um, uh, hopefully here was some great technical tips, um, just to help you get some of the, um, basics down. I'm going to drop this link, which is what I'm doing over the, over [00:58:00] my shoulder here and looking away from the camera. You can tell it's one of the reasons I like this angle, to be honest, is that you can tell explicitly when I'm doing something.

[00:58:07] Um, So here's today's link. That's today's like, it's going to be there. Um, that'll be live shortly. I've got a nice little automated CI CD pipeline that pushes things out. Um, and I'll include a bunch of links for microphones, cameras, streaming services, all the slides will be up. So you get the references for lighting.

[00:58:23] I'll include some links to lights and I'll just keep adding there. Um, hopefully this was useful to you. Uh, if it was, let me know here in the comments on LinkedIn on YouTube, uh, as always on social at, uh, Mark N C a, uh, or by email me at Mark and dot CA. I appreciate you taking the time. I hope you guys have a fantastic rest of your day.

[00:58:42] We'll talk to you soon.

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