[MUSIC]. Well I thank you for taking the time to follow this course. And the last thing I want to do before we close the course, is tell you a little bit about the technology that I used to create these videos. So, these videos were inspired by the original paintings that Picasso did, and the films of Picasso painting on glass. So, if you go and Google Picasso painting on glass, you'll see some fantastic original film footage, where Picasso is painting on glass and a film crew was filming his entire painting. It's really a fascinating video to go and watch. This series of videos was created with a very similar type of approach. Now, you can't see it, because it's in front of me right here, but I am actually drawing on plexiglass. You can do it with a glass sheet as well, if you had a tough piece of glass. But I've just got a simple, low-cost piece of plexiglass that's between me and the camera right here. So let me just draw what my set up looks like. So, I have a large piece of plexiglass that I have built a stand for, that sits between me and the camera. Now, this is the plexiglass here, and when you see me writing, what I'm actually doing is drawing on the sheet of plexiglass. Behind me is just a standard green screen backdrop, in this case it's just a black backdrop. You can even paint a wall. Behind you black or do it with whatever you want. And then on the other side, this is where it gets a little bit interesting, I have a mirror on the back wall, and then I have the camera actually facing into the mirror, and then reflecting back and videoing what I'm drawing on the board. Now the reason for this is, if I just directly pointed the camera at the plexiglass, all you would see is me writing backwards. Everything would look backwards, because it's the right side to me, but not the right side to you. So by using the camera and filming into the mirror, I can reverse automatically the imagery that the camera's seeing. So when I'm writing, it looks like right to me, but what the camera's filming it also looks correct to the camera. So if I write a sentence out it's in the correct orientation both for me and for the camera, because of this mirror. Now the equipment I'm using, at least for this light-board setup, is pretty simple. You may have seen some more complicated, more expensive setups, I just did a low cost setup. And in fact, the very first setup that I used to film a number of the videos, as I just took a large painting that I had on the wall that was framed in plexiglass and was roughly six feet wide by four feet tall. I took the painting out of it and I just took the frame and I set it on two easels and then I began shooting the video using that plexiglass picture frame as the actual lightboard that I was using. There's no special lights on it or anything else. For the mirror, I've actually stolen my wife's mirror, which she has a full-length mirror that was in our bathroom. I just stole it and I've been using it to do these shoots. So this is nothing, nothing complex is needed. Now over time, I wanted to put the picture back on the wall, so I took that picture frame that I'd been using to do these shoots and I replaced it with a custom frame that I built at Home Depot using some lumber. So using lumber and materials from your normal hardware store, you can go and build one of these frames, which I built out of simple lumber from Home Depot for about $60. Maybe you can do it cheaper, just depends on how much lumber is where you are. The plexiglass is probably about another $40, depending on where you buy it. But this is just a simple sheet of plexiglass that the thicker you can get it the better. You may not be able to see it in the videos, but I see it when I'm writing on it. I don't have the thickest sheet of plexiglass, so when I'm writing, if you have a thinner sheet of plexiglass you'll get more vibration back and forth as you're writing across the board. And sometimes it can be seen in the videos, but I notice it when I'm writing mostly. You can get more expensive plexiglass or you could even do something like has been done in some of the more sophisticated setups where they bought architectural glass. But then you're going to get a lot more expensive setups. So you could probably get a thicker sheet of plexiglass for about the same price, make things a little easier. This is just $60 of lumber to build the stand that's holding this large piece of plexiglass up in front of me. These backdrops are really cheap on Amazon, and you can even go and just paint the wall black. You can probably get these backdrops for $10 on Amazon. Now, depending on your setup, you may want to go and use a polarizing filter on the camera. I don't actually use a polarizing filter. My trick to getting rid of reflections, is I took the back wall, and I put another black backdrop on the back wall. So this gets rid of the remaining reflections for me. If I have a black backdrop on the back wall behind me and the wall behind the mirror, I don't get any reflections. And my camera can be focused in pretty tightly on the mirror in order to see what's going on. So this is the entire setup that I'm using. Now, I also have some studio lights. I have about $300 in studio lights that I bought off Amazon. These are just cheap studio lights, nothing particularly fancy. And I have these studio lights, one is draped over me right here and above my head. I have another one that's out here, another one in the same place flanking on the opposite side, and that's pretty much it. Everything else is the same. Now the other key piece that's really important to make this work well, is the markers that I'm using. And this matters a lot. I'm just using an Expo Neon marker. And I've found that these markers are by far the most visible in the videos. Maybe there's some other types out there that are also really visible, but these work absolutely fantastically well. Your standard markers you won't be able to see at all, if you go and get your standard dry erase. But the Expo Neon Dry Erase Markers are what I'm using, and they work phenomenally well. You just need a backdrop that's black, which is back here and you can't see it, and these neon markers show up really well. Some of the more sophisticated setups use lighting built into the light-board to try to make this pop a little more. I didn't bother going and doing that. I just went and did an experiment and said do I really need lighting? So I took a picture frame off the wall, I put it on two easels, I setup my backdrop and I started using these Expo Neon markers and that was all I needed to create this effect that you're seeing here. So it's a pretty simple and low cost setup. Now, the real expensive part, of course, is the camera. Your computer to do the video editing for this stuff and the lighting was about $300, so it wasn't cheap. But you're going to need all of that stuff anyways, if you're going and shooting these types of videos. You're going to need camera equipment and lighting if you're going to shoot inside. So I look at this as really just the cost to go and create this light-board that I have in front of me, which is about $100 and maybe another $10 or $20 for the two backdrops and for the mirror. But it's a simple set up. Now I'll tell you a couple of other tricks that I've used to do the code reviews that you've seen. The code reviews, there's a complex way that you could do this, which is to set up another monitor that you try to look into when you're doing the code reviews. But, I started down that path, and it was just a lot of work to set it up. And it also required me to look away from the camera like I am now in order to make that work and be able to see where I was. So instead, what I developed was a simple system whereby I go and measure out on the board in front of you in a way that you can't see, a set of consistent hash marks across the plexiglass. And I use a black dry erase marker to create these hash marks. And because I'm using a black dry erase marker, you can't see these hash marks. And then what I do is, I essentially take a code segment that I want to annotate that I'm going to later combine into the videos, some code segment that's well-formatted that I've taken from an editor like Eclipse or IntelliJ. And I will write out keywords for myself that I want to remember, so that I can go and highlight sections of that code. And I'll write those out in black dry erase marker as well. And the important part of this is, the reason why I'm using this hash scheme, is that I want to get my line spacing very consistent. Because when I go and overlay the actual code segment, like you've seen in some of my videos where it's nicely formatted code from an IDE, they have very consistent line spacing, those code segments do. So I want to make sure that my underlining matches up. So I'll create these hash marks at a consistent spacing. I'll know what should be on each line, and I'll write myself little notes in black dry erase marker. And then when I want to go and underline something, I'll just go and underline the particular hash mark in my note, just like this. And I'll just go and underline segments of code. Now, I am actually reading the code, because I have little black dry erase notes for myself. So I can stare at what I'm going to be annotating and remember it. I can go and underline a particular line. And then in post-production, when I take this video, what I'll do is I'll actually go and just align the code segment, so that each of the lines of the code segment align with the hash marks in the video. Now in order to do that I'll have to shrink and play around with the positioning of the code and the scale of the code to get it just right. Now, one of the tricks is to overlay that code on top of here. I go and put all of the code in PowerPoint and I put it on a green background. I then export, and this is PowerPoint plus green, and when I mean green, I mean like a green screen background. So all of my code is on this green background in PowerPoint. And then what I do is I export that to images. That I can import into a Adobe Premiere, which is what I'm using as my editing suite. And when I import these images into a video, I actually go and apply a green-screen knockout, something like UltraKey, to remove the background and end up with just the text. And then I'll go and align the green screened imagery, that's just going to be the text, the nicely formatted text, I'll align it with my hash marks. And then magically what happens is as my video goes then when I'm underlying one of my hash marks, it then looks like I'm underlining the nicely formatted code from the IDE. So, that is the serious of tricks that I've used to make all of these videos. I hope other people find other interesting tricks to make this easier. One of the most time consuming tricks is trying to apply nicely formatted code. Doing this whole process through PowerPoint to green background to images takes a lot of work. A lot of the video I just shot with this. And the beautiful part about if you just stick to drawing on the board and using the mirror is there's almost no post-production. If you get the lighting right, you wouldn't have to do any post-production, you'd just have to edit it together and be ready to go. Whatever footage you got would be 100% ready to go. My lighting isn't perfect and maybe your lighting won't be perfect either. So, one of the things that you can do, is you can take the video that you get, and if you go online and search for crushing the blacks and Adobe Premier, this is a technique that I've used in these videos. And essentially what I do is I apply a three-way color corrector, and then I change the input levels for the black and the white, so that I can get that nice crisp black background that I want. That will really make the text pop off and the diagrams pop off the video. So, that's the last thing I do in all of my videos, because my lighting isn't perfect, and I've never been good at getting lighting perfect. Is I'll apply a three-way color corrector to be able to crush the blacks in my videos and make sure that the black background here behind me is really, really black in these videos. And then it's easy to see the diagram in front of you. All right, well, thank you so much.
