If you're going to teach an online course and you're going to let people see you and I recommend they do, you need to have some system for recording the video. I want to give you the simplest way of doing this because I frankly don't want you wasting time for the next six months or the next six years looking for the perfect camera, or for the perfect backdrop. You don't need anything fancy. It's your expertise that people are coming to they're not coming to you for special effects graphics. If people want special effects and graphics and swishes and all that they will go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Steven Spielberg movie, or a George Lucas movie, they're not going to be going to an online course. Now that doesn't mean it can look awful or sound awful.

But the main thing is good clear audio, people really need to hear you and you need decent lighting. Beyond that, it really isn't that complicated. So I I would recommend a single camera on you, or you're just talking to people. Don't get too fancy with your first course don't try to go hire a production crew, spend $10,000 and then be regretting it six years later, because your course lost 4000 or five or seven or $9,000. Let's keep our costs low, you can always expand with the production stuff. If you've got popular courses, and you're making a lot of revenue and you can generate it.

I don't think you need anything beyond a simple webcam that you can get at a grocery store for 10 or 15 bucks, and you need a decent microphone, one of these that clips on goes into your computer, and you can get those for $10 sometimes, so we're not talking about anything wildly expensive. I do want to give you the basics of how to look your best on video when you're lecturing and how to avoid the most common problems people get into. So for starters, the backdrop you don't have to have anything fancy, like me in a great big studio. This isn't a great big studio, I just have a little TV behind me about a 40 inch TV. This is a $40 video clip behind me but you don't have to have that. You can have almost anything except for a window a window is going to be too much light, your face is going to be dark and the light from behind you is going to mess it up.

So if you are using your webcam and it's on your computer and you have a window behind you, you need to either close the blinds or move your computer and your chair around so that you don't have a window behind you. That's the first big tip. The second big tip don't use the built in microphone in your computer, go to Radio Shack go on Amazon and order a new microphone. It plugs into your microphone and then one on to your shirt or blouse or tie your jacket. The audio quality will be much, much better. The third tip the camera.

Now I do have a nice, I will try to kid you for many years I had just a cheap $60 webcam, I do have an expensive couple thousand dollar prosumer camera mounted on my wall eight feet away. But you don't have to have that. All you really need is a camera at the right height at the right eye level. The problem most people have when they're making videos and online trainings is they have the webcam on their computer screen. And if it's a laptop, it's like this, it's this low. So it's 810 even 12 inches below their eyes.

So what happens is that cameras come up your nose well I'm sorry, nobody looks good from that angle. Now let me give you a very, very good simple way of solving this problem. If you're using the webcam on your laptop, that's fine. Get a stack of books like this, put it on your desk, put your laptop on top. You just want the camera to be where your eyes are. That way, everything just looks better, you look better, it looks more professional, it looks more like what people are used to seeing when they're watching regular TV.

And it's simple. You don't have to buy anything, just find a stack of books. It could be old telephone books. But that solves the problem a great deal. The final big step that will help you is lighting. All you really need to keep in mind is more light in front of you than behind you.

Other than this little video that there's no light behind me. I have a couple of lights in front of me. And what you really want is, you know, one sort of lighting everything One on the side, you really want to get fancy one behind you. Experiment with it until you like how it looks. There's all kinds of videos on YouTube and other training sources to tell you about lighting. I want to keep this simple, you just want more light on your face than behind you.

And you don't want the lights so harsh that it looks like a horror movie. So you got to be careful about the fluorescent lights above casting shadows in your eyes. If you have to, I've done this before. Just take a couple of lamps, put them 10 feet in front of you take the lamp shades off or or aim it so that it's on your face. If you do that, you will look perfectly fine for most online trainings. Now, if some major university of Harvard comes to you and says, we're going to do this course and millions of people are going to see it and we have a budget of $2 million.

We're going to build you a set fine. But if this is you doing it on your own time On your own dime, do what I recommend here, keep it simple. webcam is fine. I mean, today High Definition webcams are so inexpensive $50 or less, I would go with that. Plug in microphone, lights in front of you the camera at your eye height, and no window behind you do that. And you've got the technology side of your studio of your virtual classroom.

So I need you to figure out how to do that right now because we're going to have to start making some videos and some of your lectures