Short lecture introductions

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In an effort to increase my presence in the class and personalize my lectures so they don’t seem like a textbook, I recorded short talking-head videos for each lecture in History 111. This took me one full day. My process was:

Opened iMovie and recorded each video, talking while I looked at a printout of each lecture to make sure I covered everything.

Exported as .mov with H264 video and AAC audio (high quality and YouTube’s preferred format).

Uploaded to YouTube.

I had access to captioning services through a grant at MiraCosta, so I re-exported the audio only from each .mov and sent them in to be captioned. BUT if I hadn’t had this service I would have used the captions YouTube creates (they appear in a few hours), downloaded them, edited them, then uploaded again. I didn’t put it in the video, but disabling the Machine Transcription can make sure it plays your version.

Then I used the YouTube embed code to put these in my lectures.

And here they are:

For the record, yes, I have problems seeing myself on film (much less so many photos of me in this post), but over time I’ve just gotten used to it. We once titled a workshop on making talking-head video “Get Over Yourself”, and that’s what I’ve done. 🙂