How I make crude, low-quality, anti-clickbait videos
there are many videos showing you how to make high-quality, slickly edited professional-looking videos... this isn't one of them. instead, I'm going to show you how I make videos using an obsolete standard-definition Handycam, no special equipment like lenses or microphones, and the least amount of post-production editing I can get away with, using a free piece of software that most people threw out 15 years ago. I realize that for many people this style of video making would be ill-advised and wholly inappropriate so don't necessarily take this as a recommendation for you to do things my way but if you're interested in making retro aesthetic videos using genuine retro equipment for a total investment less than the cost of a one month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, then maybe you'll want to stick around . I know when you think of an old camcorder you probably think of one that looks like this and records to tape, and while I do have plenty of them, except for special occasions that's not what I actually use. instead I prefer to use tapeless camcorders. they were made by all four of the major camcorder manufacturers: Canon, JVC, Panasonic, and Sony and they record to a hard drive, internal flash memory, an SD card, or a Memory Stick.
I've recently launched a buyer's guide web page dedicated to providing detailed information on all the standard definition tapeless camcorders as well as my top picks among them, desirable features to look for, tips and tricks on using them, and some technical information. just go to amstereo.org/tapeless all these brands of camcorders were bundled with Windows software to import the video from the camcorder into your computer and perform some very rudimentary video editing, but the only one of them that I've actually found to not be awkward and clunky and frustrating to use and ultimately worthless is by Sony. it's called Picture Motion Browser and it supports all types of digital Sony Handycams: tape, DVD, hard drive, and flash memory. i'm going to use one which is widely available, affordable, has a good set of features, and is easy to use, which I think makes it great for a beginner: the Sony DCR-SX45, SX65, and SX85. the only difference between them being the SX85 has 16 gigabytes of built-in memory, this SX65 has 4 GB of built-in memory, and the SX45 requires the use of an SD card or Memory Stick. I'll take you along for the ride as I use it to record a video about this suitably retro Cassette Action Pak from 1992.
when it comes to lighting, more is better. and one thing I like about these Handycams is their built-in LED light which has a diffuser and a yellow filter on it, so you don't get that bluish hotspot in the middle of the image like you get with some LED illuminators. it does a good job of filling in the shadow cast by the camcorder, and by you if you're standing behind it, so I pretty much leave it on all the time except if it's going to cause a glare on whatever I'm recording. and as for audio I just use the camcorder's built-in stereo microphones. no separate microphone, no separate audio recorder, no overdubbing. I do it all live. "Do it live! I can... I'll write it, and we'll do it live!" but you have to keep in mind the limited resolution of the camcorder's image sensor, and of standard definition video in general, so I like to start by taking close-ups of the object from various angles. that allows the
viewer to form a mental image of it and that way when I pull back and show a wide-angle shot of the complete object it helps them to fill in any details which may become indistinct when viewed at that distance. to get that smooth zoom you just saw i used another nice feature of these Handycams, which is the ability to add a wired remote control. it plugs into the A/V-R jack on the side and the original Sony model number of this is RM-AV2. the original Sony version cost about $80 or you can get an aftermarket equivalent for around $16. it has a switch to turn on and off the camcorder, a button to take a still photo, a button to start and stop recording, and buttons to zoom in and zoom out. if you hold down them a little bit you get a nice slow zoom, and if you push harder you get a fast zoom, so it's great for doing those slow continuous zooms in and zooms out, rather than using the control up here where you have to be really careful to hold it at the same pressure otherwise it'll suddenly speed up or slow down. this gives you a controlled zoom which is much nicer, and it
has about a 6-foot cord so you can use it even if you're recording yourself in front of the camera so. here I go with recording the first scene of the video. this is not a scripted video -- I don't script any of my videos, but I do kind of plan ahead of what I think I'm going to say, and luckily this scene is pretty quick so I should be able to pull it off without too many retakes. so here we go: "
15 singles and only a $1.99 cover charge, but it's not a nightclub -- it's the Lebo Voyager Cassette Action Pak." I think that's pretty good. I knew my luck wasn't going to hold up during the second scene because it was longer and I was doing a cold read of the text on the side of the package, and I know when that happens some people like to just power through it and keep going until they get it right: "I'm sorry, but I have to tell you that your answer... not your answer, your clue was inadmissible. You cannot give Fra... France... Hello there! Keep it rolling guys, we're getting hot now!" but instead whenever I flub a line or stumble over my words or don't get my timing right, I stop the recording and start a new clip, and that way I can do pre-editing in the camera itself by deleting all the takes that didn't work out. so I just go through here and out of these six takes I delete the first five... one, two,
three, four, five, and leave just the last one where I got it right. actually, I missed one, but that's good because I've learned the hard way that sometimes two separate scenes can have the same-looking thumbnail and you might accidentally delete a good take, but in this case it was just another flubbed take, so I'll remove that one as well. and here's an example of the other kind of pre-editing I can do in the camera, and that is the ability to divide a clip. in this case everything was going fine until the very end of the scene where I discovered I was not able to tear open the plastic wrap with my bare hands, but I want to salvage the rest of the clip up to that point, so I'm going to divide the clip and then cut off the end where I screwed up. so I'll divide this clip:
"it doesn't say when it was made so I want to take a closer look at these cassette tapes they show it holding and try to figure out a year based on that. first I'm going to unwrap it..." so right about there -- it's not very precise, your ability to divide the clip, but I want to divide it approximately there so now I'm going to hit OK to divide the clip, and now at the very end here is where it all went pear-shaped so I'm going to delete that one, and now what we're left with should be up to the point I wanted: "it doesn't say when it was made so I want to take a closer look at these cassette tapes they show it holding and try to figure out a year based on that, but first I'm going to unwrap it." that's exactly what I wanted, so now I can pick up where I left off and this time use a pair of scissors. and to help cover up that edit I changed my camera angle, which is an easy trick you can do and here's where I took down some notes to allow me to rattle off a list of albums and singles and release dates without needing to memorize it. i don't think I'll be incorporating any
material from the Internet in this video, but if I need to, I do it the old-fashioned way: I print it out and aim the camera at it, and if I need to point out something I use my trusty pencil. I can also aim the camera at a computer screen if I need to, but that's difficult to do without causing Moir patterns. and in another video when I needed a transition to show the passage of a few hours of time, I simply moved the hands of a clock. and that's a wrap!
this turned out to be a pretty short and simple video. you can see the Handycam's running total of 4 minutes and 37 seconds of recording time for the first day of shooting and 3 minutes and 5 seconds for the second day, so it'll probably turn out to be around 7-1/2 minutes long, except if I decide to reshoot or add any new scenes later, which definitely does happen sometimes. now I pull out the Handycam's attached USB cable and plug it into the laptop which can also be used to recharge its battery -- when that yellow light comes on, that means it's recharging. but in this case I'll open it up and I'll tell it USB Connect. and now I'll open up Picture Motion Browser, which is the program that was supplied with the camcorder. you can find it on the Internet Archive and I'll include a link to it in the
description. and now I'll create a new folder for this project i'll call it Cassette Case and that's where I'll import the video files into. you just go up here to File and then Import Media Files and you select the camcorder and choose Next, and here I can tell it where to put those files, so I'll choose that folder I just created and import it... and there it goes, importing all the clips I recorded into the computer, and there they appear in Picture Motion Browser ready to be edited. but referring to this as a video editor is overselling it, because the only editing it can actually do is trimming and combining clips. there's no ability to add titles, transitions, photos, or music. but for me that's OK because I recorded the video with this limitation in mind,
so these are the only two features I actually need when editing it. it also lacks a timeline or a storyboard interface to help you arrange the clips when you're combining them, so I made my own storyboard with pen and paper. I wrote out the various scenes of the video in the order I intend to feature them in the final result. in this case the video was mostly recorded in chronological order, although that is not always the case, especially when I'm reviewing something like a piece of vintage audio equipment which may need repair before I can even demonstrate it. but in this case,
except for these two scenes at the end, it was pretty much recorded in chronological order. and now if you want to just play a clip that's as simple as double-clicking on it: "15 singles and only a $1.99 cover charge, but it's not a nightclub, it's the Lebo Voyager Cassette Action Pak." but now I'm going to trim it to get rid of that little bit of blank space at the beginning and end, so I clicked on the option to trim the video. I just move the pointer until I find the point right before I begin speaking... so right there is where I want to begin the clip, so now I simply press the I key to mark the In point and now it's going to trim off this beginning. and now I find the end of where I'm talking... I'll leave a little more space... I'll trim it there, and now I hit O to mark the Out point,
and that'll trim off the end of the clip. if you want to you can hold down Ctrl and use the arrow keys to move the pointer frame-by-frame, and another keyboard shortcut you may find useful is pressing F6 to start or stop the playback. what you can do here is click this box that says Play from In to Out and that will give you a preview of what the finished result will be: "15 singles and only a $1.99 cover charge, but it's not a nightclub, it's the Lebo Voyager Cassette Action Pak" and that's perfect. then you just go over here and click on Save edited video, and you can give it a name, and since it's the first clip in the overview, which is the first scene in the video, what I like to name it is first the number of the scene, so 1, and then the name of the scene, "overview", and then the number of the clip within that scene, 01... and that's saving it, and it saves it as a separate file so it does not overwrite your original clip. so if you want to go back and retrim it you can you.
can also drag these pointers with the mouse to trim a clip, and although there is no direct way to split a clip in this program, you can do it by trimming the same clip twice with different sets of In and Out points and saving them to separate files. now I'm done trimming all of the clips and because of the numbering and naming scheme I used if I tell the program to sort the media files by file name it magically rearranges them in exactly the order I wanted. but I can still make changes if I want, for example these two clips here where I showed the Cassette Action Pak being used to hold a camera and then a CD player. well, after reviewing the footage I decided it works better the other way around, so all I have to do is click on this one and rename it from 4 to 7. it doesn't really matter which numbers you choose as long as they're in numerical order, and it's OK to leave gaps; they do not need to be consecutive. and if you need to squeeze in a new clip between two clips which
are in consecutive order, you can add a letter to the end of the number, like 5B, 5C, and so forth, then it will still rearrange them accordingly. and when I'm satisfied that all of the clips are in exactly the order I wanted I click on the first clip and then hold down Shift and click on the last clip and then click on Combine V ideos and there it goes showing the order in which the videos will be combined. and even here I can still make changes by dragging and dropping the clips, although you don't get a preview so it may be a little bit difficult to tell exactly which order you want based on this, which is why I went through all the trouble of numbering them, so that they would be pre-arranged before I got to this step. so now I just click on Combine and there it goes, combining the videos. unfortunately it doesn't let you choose a name for the combined video when you're doing it, so it just appends a "(1)" on the first clip to indicate that this is the combined video, so I will rename it here: Cassette Action Pak. and finally now all that's left to do in Picture Motion Browser is to right-click on this combined video and choose Convert to MPEG2 and save. now calling this converting is a misnomer, because this video is already in MPEG2 format;
that's what the camcorder records, and I've tested this and regardless if you choose High Quality or Standard, you get a bit-identical copy of this file that's in the Picture Motion Browser library. so don't worry, it's not going to recompress the video and lose any quality. so now all you have to do is choose where to put the file and click on Start and there it goes, saving the file that you finished editing and combining. there's the finished result and like I said the raw footage was around 7-1/2 minutes, but because I leave a few seconds of blank space at the beginning and end of each clip as I record it, just trimming off that blank space from all the clips lopped off a minute from the video and now it's around 6-1/2 minutes long. and it's 720x480 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio, 29.97 frames per second interlaced MPEG2 video at around 8-1/2 megabits, and 48 kHz, 2-channel AC3
Dolby Digital audio at 256 kilobits, exactly the same format as what the camcorder recorded. and you can just take that file and upload it directly to YouTube; that's exactly what I did for the first few years of my YouTube career. despite what some sources claim, YouTube will automatically de-interlace the video and it will look and play perfectly fine -- it will just be limited to 480p resolution at a maximum of 30 frames per second. and I'll include a link to this unlisted video if you want to watch it and compare it to what I'm going to do next to improve the quality of this video. at this point I was going to discuss the method I've been using to de-interlace and upscale standard definition video, but it is a cumbersome multi-step process and even I had trouble installing and configuring it on another machine after I got it running on this one. and following what is supposed to be a quick simple guide for newbies, I couldn't get it to work at all.
nonetheless, if you want to take a stab at it, there's a tutorial video I'll include a link to. it's an hour and 15 minutes long, so I suggest you brew a pot of coffee and take notes. otherwise this is one of those fields of expertise where if you don't know what you're doing, it's better to not do it at all. that's why the test footage I uploaded 15 years ago still looks great today, because instead of mangling it with some poor-quality de-interlacing and upscaling, or downscaling and compressing it to make the file smaller and faster to upload, I used lossless editing and uploaded it directly to YouTube with no re-encoding -- the same basic technique I just showed in this video. but if you are going to upscale, unfortunately
in recent years YouTube has gotten stingy and no longer gives smaller channels access to all the resolutions or the highest quality video encoding, except if you upload at resolutions higher than 1080p. so that's why I've begun upscaling my standard-definition video to 1440p. I chose 1440p because standard-definition NTSC video is 480 pixels high, and if you multiply that by three, you get 1440. or if you're using PAL video which is 576 pixels high you, can multiply that by two to get 1152, which is not really a standardized resolution, but it does work and will get you that higher quality encoding. since last Fall I've had a self-imposed anti-clickbait rule that the thumbnail of each video I upload must be a naturally occurring frame from within the video itself, and must be shot on camera, not a title card specially prepared for the purpose. obviously when I'm reviewing a product that's in its original packaging like this, that's easy, but I'm not against using a handmade prop to emphasize a point, such as these ones I made by cutting out pieces of brightly colored paperboard packaging and applying Brother P-Touch labels to them once I'm done with a video I save the finished result on my computer but I also like to save a copy of the original video clips I recorded, and this camcorder makes it easy because in addition to its built-in memory it also has an SD card slot on the bottom that supports SDXC cards, and standard definition video is pretty small so even a 32 GB card has plenty of room for storing those clips. I go to Movie Dub in the Handycam's menu, then Dub by Select, and I just click on each video I want to transfer from the built-in memory to the SD card, and then I hit OK and Yes, and now it's copying the videos from the built-in memory to the SD card. it's funny that it says "Avoid any
vibration"; I think that's a message they carried over from their hard drive and DVD camcorders, even though this one doesn't have any moving parts in its recording mechanism. and there it is -- it dubbed 21 movies, and now since they are dubbed to the SD card I can go and delete them. that video I just recorded was the only thing on the built-in memory, so I can just do Delete All. "Are you sure"? Yes, and now I have a clean slate to record on. the 4 gigabytes of built-in memory are good for just about 1 hour of recording time at the highest quality, which you should use. unlike a lot of other people I've never added a special ending to my videos to accommodate YouTube's End Screens feature.
the video usually just ends right when I stop talking, such as in this case, and if there happens to be a few seconds at the end where I can squeeze in a link to my channel and one or two of my videos without covering up too much of the video itself, then I do make use of that, but otherwise it's not really a consideration when I'm making my videos. and it seems like YouTube is considering phasing out End Screens; they recently announced that they are testing the ability for viewers to hide end screens, "giving you more control over your viewing experience" -- yeah at least for now, until they probably end up making end screens hidden for everyone.
2025-04-21 09:13
