Kristian Freeman

I’ve produced a lot of videos over the last decade. Between my personal YouTube channel and the Cloudflare Developers channel, I’ve recorded probably over a hundred hours of content, and spent many more than that editing videos.

My current setup is the best iteration I’ve found for producing technical videos. It makes it pretty easy to make high-quality recordings, without too much trouble or too much time.

Hardware

This setup is legit, but expensive. It took me years to get all of this together - there’s no reason to buy all of at once. It looks great. The FX30 can act as a webcam over USB-C, so it looks awesome in meetings, too.

Software

My primary app is Screen Studio. It has changed how I record and edit videos substantially. It has transition and callout features built-in, which makes most videos look immediately better, by default. If you leave this post with one takeaway, it’s that you should just use Screen Studio for most videos.

That being said, sometimes you have to record full “talking head”-style clips. In a long video, you might want to introduce a concept before you jump into a screencast. Screen Studio doesn’t support editing non-screencast content, like a talking head clip (yet - I think it’s coming), so you need to edit with something else, too.

I use DaVinci Resolve for this. It’s free, and it works like a standard linear video editor - like Premiere or Final Cut. I’ll cut together the screencast from Screen Studio with the talking head clips in Resolve. I can usually get a pretty good edit in roughly 1x the length of the clip.

Audio/Flow

I also edit my audio in Resolve. My audio editing process is basically:

  1. Low-pass filter (100-200Hz) to remove any desk thumping, low-end noise, etc.
  2. Fairly aggressive compression to give it that “professional” sound. The best way to do this is to compress to what sounds good, and then roll it back 10-20%. Less is more.
  3. Between the mic audio and any music, the final level for my videos usually sits around -6dB. Usually, I’ll use a limiter or boost the gain in the compressor to hit that level.

Good audio is significantly more important than good video. You can have a very mediocre looking screencast, but if it sounds good, the video can still be a hit. Bad audio, on the other hand, is a show stopper. Devs making video content should invest first in the mic, and get comfortable with mixing audio - the camera can come much further down the line.

Flow

The last thing I do in my videos is cut silence. I use Recut for this. It’s awesome, and it doesn’t cost too much ($129). The amount of time it saves is immense. You can basically edit everything together in Resolve, without having to care too much about timing, and then rely on Recut to glue everything together. This also means that you can take any awkward pauses you need, if you’re trying to figure out what to say. No audio = Recut cuts it out. Easy.

The only thing you should know is that Recut is, obviously, not great with music in videos. In that case, you’ll need to do a “flow draft” (removing silence, getting the feel right) before importing to Resolve. Either way is fine, but YMMV depending on your video style.

Conclusion

I’ve tried a lot of approaches to editing video. I’ve used OBS and recorded straight to my computer. I’ve used actual hardware muxers like the Blackmagic Atem Mini. I’ve had a ton of cameras, microphones, and editing tools. I’m really happy with the setup I have now, and I would put my content up against anyone in the industry for quality. I also love the way my videos look and sound. But most importantly, they aren’t too much trouble to put together, thanks to helpful software that does a lot of the work for me.

I’ll be very curious to see how AI evolves this process. Much of what I do in editing and mixing is very friendly to automation. My process is not too complicated. I haven’t seen any tools that feel like they’re ready for production video, but in a few years, I suspect I could just dump all of these files into an app and get a reasonable approximation of what I do manually, in just a few minutes. That will be awesome.