Udemy: Create Your First Video In 24 Hours

Yesterday I set myself the challenge of creating a Udemy course in 30 days. I spent most of the morning outlining the course structure (a post on that coming soon), then spent a bit of time on the Udemy site and Facebook group chatting with course developers there and working out what equipment I would need.

Finally, I put together a timeline of what I need to get done by when. (That will come in another post too.)

I decided that the most important thing to get right at this stage was the quality of the videos themselves. I’ll explain below what I did, but here is my first video:

Please feel free to make any comments or suggestions below!

First off, I purchased Camtasia. A crucial bit of software that is easy to use, has wonderful video guides, and does everything you need for screencasting. Well worth the £60.

I spent an hour or so playing around, particularly adding text, fiddling with transitions and recording my voice.

The first thing I noticed is that my voice sounded awful. Not only did the built-in mic on my macbook air sound tinny and echoy, but I made these weird lip-smacking sounds when I speak. Yikes! I visited a few websites for tips on speaking for recording, and headed out to Maplins (a tech store here in the UK) to buy a decent mic.

I ended up with this one which I used the record the video above. The sound is fine, but a little quiet I think. After a little more research I ordered the Blue Yeti from Amazon (will post with that mic when it arrives). Twice as expensive but what’s £90 when thousands of people will be buying my course, right?!

I took about a gazillion takes to get the above video to a reasonably decent levels with minimal umming and interruptions from bobbing dock icons and email alerts (pro tip: turn off your internet connection while you’re recording!).

I’m pretty happy with it, other than the quiet sound. I notice that Camtasia defaults to a 360p resolution - I’ve now changed this to 720p. I had to verify my Google account to upload a custom thumbnail for the video, and am arranging for someone to produce some nice artwork for the opening and closing slides.

Anyway, as always, it took far longer than I was expecting, but I think with my new mic I’ll hit the ground running, and I’m planning to have the HTML part of the course live by Friday 28th March. Here’s hoping!