Software and Hardware Recommendations: Recording a video for an automated webinar

Getting started with automated webinars and not sure what to use to record your videos?

Here are the video recording solutions and setup recommendations from the webinar, Creating an Automated Webinar with High Engagement, hosted by Melissa Kwan, Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar. If you missed her webinar, you can still register for it here.

Video recording software

In our experience, video recording software falls into two main categories: easy-to-use with few editing features and harder to learn with lots of editing features.

Easy-to-use with few editing features

Loom

loom.com | Free version | $8/month and up

eWebinar’s Recommendation: We think Loom is the best, easiest video recording solution out there, especially when you just want a screen recording of slides or a demo with a video of the speaker in the corner. Since Loom has very limited editing capabilities, we recommend it for simple demos and presentations only, generally ones where you don’t need a script. You can also edit your Loom videos in a different piece of software, like Camtasia. Keep in mind, the free version of Loom does not support longer, high-definition videos.

Zoom

zoom.us | Free version | $14.99/month and up

eWebinar’s Recommendation: It may seem strange to see Zoom included here as video recording software, but remember you can record any Zoom meeting or webinar. And since eWebinar integrates with Zoom, if you connect your Zoom account to eWebinar, you can directly import your Zoom cloud recordings when creating new eWebinars. Plus, Zoom is especially good for recording interview-style webinars, which are a good way to get started if you find making videos on your own challenging.

Descript

descript.com | Free version | $12/month and up

Shout Out from eWebinar: Descript is a new player on the market that lets you edit a video by deleting words from the transcript it automatically generates. It’s kind of magical. A very cool solution to check out if you’re curious.

Soapbox by Wistia

wista.com/soapbox | Free

Quicktime by Apple

apple.com/quicktime | Free (on any Mac)

Vimeo Record

vimeo.com/features/screen-recorder | Free

Harder to learn but with lots of editing features

Camtasia

techsmith.com/video-editor | Free trial | $249 (one-time)

eWebinar’s Recommendation: Camtasia is powerful recording and editing software for both video and sound that lets you do things like combine and layer video clips and swap out your background if you use a green screen. When we make our videos, we often record two separate videos and then combine them. We use an iPad Pro with a teleprompter app to record the speaker and a laptop to record the slides. (We like Google Slides, by the way. It's simple and free.) Camtasia then lets us layer the two videos. We put the speaker video on top of the slides video and crop it so that the speaker appears in a circle in the corner.

Screenflow

telestream.net/screenflow | Free trial | $129 and up (one-time)

If you find video editing too difficult to figure out, you may wnat to consider hiring a freelancer from Upwork or Fiverr to do it for you.

Virtual backgrounds and camera takeover

If you want to spice up your videos with virtual backgrounds or other visual effects, or get others involved in making the video, here are a couple pieces of software worth checking out.

mmhmm

mmhmm.app | Free during beta | $99/year or $9.99/month

manycam

manycam.com | $59/year and up

eWebinar’s hardware recommendations

People often ask us what they should use for their camera, lights, and sound when creating a video for eWebinar. We have experimented with a lot of things and the following is what works best for us. Keep in mind we tend to travel a lot, so portability is a key factor in the decisions we’ve made.

Camera

At eWebinar, we use an iPad Pro ($799 from Apple) to record our videos, so we can use a teleprompter app (PromptSmart Pro for $29.99/year or $2.99/month) and more easily look into the camera while talking. A swivel stand for the iPad ($26.99 on Amazon) completes the setup.

Sound

We keep it very simple when it comes to sound. An inexpensive clip-on mic ($13.99 on Amazon) does the trick. We used to use Airpods Pro ($249 from Apple), which worked well, but we prefer the clip-on mic because it’s easier to hear ourselves while we’re talking.

Lights

For lighting, we use a small light from Lume Cube ($79.95) that clips on to the back of a laptop. It’s travel-friendly and lets you adjust the brightness and softness of the light.

Background

A portable green screen ($89.99 from Amazon) serves as the background for our videos. It lets us record in small spaces without having to worry about finding a good place to shoot. We just swap out the background later in Camtasia.

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