When creating a video or a recording, there are a few specific things to keep in mind.
Before you start recording your video, you need to setup your space. These considerations will help create a professional and accessible video.
Quiet Space
Audio is important, your audience needs to clearly hear you. Background noise can be very distracting and make it difficult to focus on the message of your video.
Background
A busy background or bright lights behind you can also be distracting and remove focus. Bright lights behind you can also cause your camera to focus on the light source instead of you, making it difficult or impossible to clearly see you and your facial expressions.
Camera Placement
Your audience wants to see you, a lot of information can be conveyed in facial expressions. Have your camera close enough, or zoomed in enough, that you fill the screen. Have your eyes above the half-way point of the frame.
While you're recording your video, there are a few things you can do to keep your video engaging and accessible for your audience.
Eye Contact
Make eye contact with the camera when speaking as much as possible. It's a little awkward, but does help your audience focus on your message and it's easier to ready your facial expressions when you're making eye contact.
Speed
Talk slower than you think you need to. When talking with someone face-to-face, we speak slower than we do when recording audio or video. Without someone else providing feedback to the conversation, we tend to speed up our speech. Be aware and slow yourself down. You want all of your students to be able to follow what you're saying, have time to pause the video to look at something, or have time to read the captions of your speech.
Visuals
Keep any visuals simple and acceptable contrast. Avoid slides with lots of text to read or small font.
Contrast Checker through AccessibilityChecker.org
Audio
You already found a quiet space to record, but while you're recording keep track of any interruptions and re-do or restate the sentence you were in the middle of when the interruption occurred. For example, while mid-sentence your phone chimes about a new email. You can start over and edit that part out later, or if you're making a short-form video just acknowledge that was your phone and start the sentence over.
More Audio
When your video is finished, you will be uploading it to Panopto which will automatically create closed captions. Closed captions are exact text of the dialog in your video. Closed captions do not convey meaning.
An example, in a movie a comedian tells a joke and no one laughs, the camera stairs at the comedian and the sounds of crickets play. The audio conveys the meaning that it is so quiet you can hear crickets, and this may be the actual joke. Closed captions wouldn't include the cricket sound, so viewing the video with captions only wouldn't have the same effect. This is the difference between closed captions and audio descriptors. Another example is music, the tone of music is often used to convey a feeling in a scene or mirror what emotion the audience is intended to experience.
Audio descriptors describe the sound and the meaning that sound conveys. Audio descriptors are not automated in any video platforms. If you wont be able to manually add audio descriptors, keep it simple and skip any audio or sounds that would require them.
Recording
You can record with Panopto right from within Blackboard or MyCampus. You can record and share the video with this single platform. If you prefer recording with a different software like Camtasia or OBS, or recording a quick video using your cell phone, still use Panopto for sharing your finished video.
Sharing Permissions
Panopto works off of permissions. Do not record videos intended for a single person to a shared folder like a course folder from Blackboard. Everyone in the course has access to that folder and all of the videos within it. You have two options for sharing permissions with individualized videos:
The first option means the video is viewable to anyone within the college, but they will need you to provide the link or embed the video to watch. The second option means the viewer needs to be logged into Panopto and Blackboard as that particular student.
Go through all of your options for sharing videos using our Panopto guide
