Strongly-held, well-founded opinions on audio/video content
I just shared a version of this privately for an A/V thinkpiece. The advice may be generally useful.
All of which follows is of course personal opinion, though I like to think it's well-informed personal opinion:
Write a script. Practice that. Edit it. Your ADHD will thank you. (I'm a fan of index cards for organisation.) Post the script as a transcript (bonus: automatic transcripts!)
Take all your disclaimers, go ahead and state them, then 1) delete them from the final product or if you must 2) append them to the end. Having to skip through a bunch of throat-clearing is ... annoying.
Audio and video tends to record 4--10x or much more material relative to output. Realise that one-take track virtually never is, and takes major preparation.
A backing music track is distracting and makes actually hearing content much harder. Lose it.
Check to see if your track ends suddenly before uploading, for the sake of your listeners.
If your system permits it, have an audio-only stream at a reasonable bitrate (64--128 bps seems to be sufficient for voice quality). I listen to most videos rather than watch them, typically via mpv, an amazeballs command-line multimedia tool (https://mpv.io/)
All that before we get to the actual content, which is why getting the structure and form right is so critical. (The ancients addressed this as "rhetoric". Yes, it's an art, yes, it takes practice.)
Finding your core premise and statement and clearly highlighting that makes for a highly cohesive statement. It doesn't have to be the first thing you say (though I favour that), but it should appear early on and clearly be the most significant bit. Keep drafting and reorganising that script until the core pops out.
Diving deep into definitions, technology, and history ... has its place, but is often overdone. When you're teaching a baby to eat, you don't go into the history of ceramics and metal forging, agriculture, and food production. You spoon the cereal from the bowl into their mouth. The rest can come later.
For problem-discussion type pieces, a rhetorical structure of "here's the problem, here's why it's the problem, here's the goal (where we want to be), here's the solution (Getting There From Here). Then back-end all the technobabble and history. Illustrations / personal examples help.
-- Consider length. There are a few breakpoints in video/audio, which put at about 30--60s (basically an advert), 1--3 minutes (very brief intro), 5--10 minutes (scratching the surface of a topic), and 20m (about as much content as a typical person can/will absorb on a topic). Most hour-long lectures are actually multiple 15--20m blocks. Over an hour/90m is the limit for a single-sitting and usually includes Q&A and intros, the meat is still 20--30m.
Content which doesn't follow these guidelines isn't without merits, but consider that there's considerable opportunity for improvement.
#UnsolicitedAdvice #AudioCreation #VideoCreation
Edits: Tyops and cleanup (2023-01-31)
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Doc Edward Morbius ⭕