Recording research videos is still a challenging task to me. You have to use an arsenal of tools to improve the quality of their recordings.

Recording the video

For that, I use the OBS studio program, setting the scene before starting the recording. For the microphone, there is a gauge that is really helpful in konwing whether the placement of the microphone is suitable for the recording.

Make sure to add the macOS Screen Capture to the scene instead of the generic Display Capture that does not work for macOS.

Editting the video

Shotcut is a video editting software that so far has proven to be enough for my recordings. I use the following features of it:

  • Splitting the recordings to cut-off any extended durations of silence.
  • Merging multiple videos into a single video, while using the fade-in and fade-out features for making the transitions more natural.
  • Applying sound filters to remove any noise caused by the microphone.
  • Using the Size, Position & Rotate video filter for controlling the position of the video. This is useful for adding a black strip at the bottom of the video, on which subtitles can be overlayed later.

Adding subtitles to your video

Youtube provides a really convenient way for automatically generating captions, and providing a way to post-edit them, in addition to the option of exporting the subtitles in the .srt format.

Afterward, I used the handbrake program to overlay the subtitles on top of the recorded video. Make sure to disable the Cropping option which automatically crops out any black boundaries of the video.