Heather had great feedback and future videos will be less than 3 minutes!

You are right about length. It wasn’t until I was halfway through that I realized I was rambling. Hence why the dialogue in the send half is shorter. Future videos will be around 2-3 minutes long.

And the Mac is the best for video but, I’m a PC guy. I’m not sure I want to make the switch!

I use WMM too. I’m not sure I can teach you anything new, but by all means; send me your questions.

Btw: It’s not always grey days in Oslo, Norway. I had a globetrotter from Singapore visiting this week and it was a nice and sunny weather – just check my last post! 😆

Really professional if that’s the first one – don’t they take so long to edit & get up? Like your style as a travel presenter – it’s so much better when people talk to camera, makes it more personal. I always fluff my lines and have to do several takes. Hope you don’t mind a few suggestions as I’ve been experimenting too, and you can find quite a few posts that I wrote about the things I learned from my first few attempts – you can see my video articles here. There’s one about tips on doing short videos and also about optimising your Youtube channel.
– Agree with other commenters about music – you can get it free at http://www.musicalley.com/
– Make sure you add your blog address at beginning, end and possibly middle and possibly mention in the spoken intro & close
– You need to keep the video short – around 3 mins is good if possible, you can cover the same content, just tighten up the editing and keep the spoken bits shorter & snappy. No-one has the patience on the internet for long videos. The length is one of the first things I glance at when I press play.
– Use a small clip-on mic to get better sound when you’re talking to camera, to get over the wind and background noise – they’re really cheap
– Ref Windows Moviemaker – it that is the free one that comes on the laptop, I quickly found it was very basic – it doesn’t have enough channels so you can’t overlay cutaway shots which is rather limiting. I bought The entry level Sony Vegas, which is fine but not exactly a pleasure to use. I’d find a friend who does a lot of video and buy whatever they have so they can teach you. The gold standard is Final Cut Pro (massively expensive) and anyone seriously into video is on Apple Mac so better start saving up – I’ve heard that i-movie that comes on Macs is fine too.

Looking forward to seeing loads more in the future

Wow, Heather has some great tips!

Kudos for putting yourself in front of the camera too.

The silences definitely need to be avoided – it’d almost be better to keep the ambient sound of tourist chatter, but music would be ideal. I know that can be hard because you have limited options due to copyrighting.

Definitely want to keep the videos shorter as Heather suggests. The length is always the first thing I look at / think about when considering whether to watch a video or listen to a podcast…and to be honest, I actually stopped halfway through to leave you my feedback. 🙂

To improve I suggest music over the quiet bits, a mic to eliminate background noise and maybe a tripod so the camera doesn’t move when it’s just you presenting and to assist scanning horizontally.