Virtual Presentations and Recording by Allen O’Neill || Public Speaking Virtual Conference

uh let's move to our next speaker uh can you put the slide in for alan hey welcome alan okay

from a beautiful background looks like you have awesome you're sitting in the big awesome house

i like it i'm moving with you moving in with you with the piano yeah you can sit in the back and

give us some tunes right there you go um all right one of the things that we'll we'll uh talk

about in this a little bit later is um some of this green screen stuff uh so it'll be fun

awesome yeah take that's all you um i think we're good it's all you and i'm looking here watching

you right here. Okay. So do we have my, I think I've shared my screen there. Awesome. Okay. So

I'm going to just go here and be unprepared and go into my PowerPoint so I can see it here

Perfect. Okay. So first of all, what we're going to try and do is we're going to talk about how do

we get from what we're used to, which is our in-person conferences and talks, to having

a mega studio at our home base. Well, not really. We don't need that, okay

But how to get to a home base where we can broadcast, where we can record really good

quality videos, et cetera, and do it with as high quality as we can with the lowest

budget that we can. And we'll cover all sorts of different things. So just on me for a quick second, I'm primarily an engineer

And the one thing that I like to do, two things actually

One thing I like to do is learning. So I continue to learn all my life. And the second thing I like to do is share knowledge

And it's critically important. And now that we're in this lockdown situation, it's even more important that we keep sharing

our knowledge and we keep helping each other out in the community. So just because we're

locked away in our houses doesn't mean that we can't continue to share. And that's really awesome

that our community could organize this event for us. So the agenda that we're going to look at

today, we're going to talk briefly about where do we start. We're going to talk about location and

tools. We'll talk about audio. We'll talk about video, recording, and also then a little bit about

streaming. And what we can do is then we can have a good chat afterwards with questions that

folk might have. I've been doing recording for quite some time, a number of years. I do a lot of

corporate recording for clients where they require training that's very specific to their

organization that includes their technology, etc. So I've got through a lot of techniques and what

works and what doesn't work and hopefully we can share some of that today. So where do we start

The fundamentals of broadcasting or of recording are pretty much the same as in person. You've got

to know the subject that you're going to talk about and you need to know of course the reason

that you're presenting. Secondly you've got to make sure that as other speakers have said today

that you plan. It's really really critically important that you plan what you're going to

talk about so that you're not bumbling and bumbling all the way through it. It's really

good practice to write notes and to keep monitoring what you're doing and stick to the notes. So if

you have notes in front of you, like I'm actually looking at you now on the camera, but I've also

got my eyes kind of half on a screen that I have straight in front of me as well, I'm able to see

what I'm meant to be doing and what I'm meant to be talking about so that you don't go off and

deviate and say, oh, there's an idea. I'll go and talk about that thing. And then suddenly, A, you

lose time and B, you're not exactly sure what you were talking about. You lose track of your thoughts

and you're, oh, what was I talking about? And it looks really unprofessional. So it's important to

have notes and to plan about what you're going to do. The next thing is it's really important to

have an agenda so that you're not saying, oh, I'll roughly talk about that and I'll roughly talk

about the other, but that you have a couple of points that you tell people how you're going to

take their time. Because remember, time is the one thing that we cannot give back. Once we spend

this time from our time bank, we can't give it back again. And it's very important that we realize

that people come to us to learn and to allow us to share their knowledge with them. And we don't

want to abuse their time, okay, because their time can't be given back either. So it's really

important to let people know, this is what I'm going to tell you about. If you're interested

fantastic, stay with me. And if not, you know what, we meet another time, and that's awesome as well

set a time limit so that you say it's only going to take 30 minutes it's only going to take 15

minutes if I run longer I let you know etc appearance of what you're doing is important

so earlier on I was wearing a grubby t-shirt because I was doing some work around the house

and now I've got this really awesome Hawaiian shirt on and I think it looks awesome so I'm

really beautiful and handsome in this the next thing is you have to lay down the ground rules

Are you doing something live? Are you going to have some questions and answers? Are you going to allow folk to come in while you're actually talking and start asking questions at that time? Are you going to ask people to hold your questions till afterwards? So that's important to set those rules up front. Use a stopwatch and rehearse what you're doing. And also make sure you use a stopwatch when you're working live so that you can see how you're continuing, how your time is going, etc

etc. The next thing is to be polite and respectful of your audience. In the same way as you'd like

them to be polite and respectful to you, you've got to make sure that just because you're hidden

behind this camera and you're hidden behind the internet, it doesn't mean that you can go and just

say whatever you think. It's very important to be respectful of your audience because they're

giving their time up to learn and to get some of your knowledge. And finally, it's also important

to have your contact information somewhere on the presentation. Normally if I'm doing it

I'll either give it at the start of a slide or give it in the end slide, or alternatively

I will have it at the bottom of the slide that it's there continuously, and I usually just give

my Twitter handle or my email. I don't generally go for logos, as Magnus has said, I try to keep it

as simple as possible. Now, you will notice that I have a lot of stuff on screen here. I normally

don't, but because I bang this together quickly, it's not as slick as I would like it to be

So in any case, let's move on a bit. The next thing I want to talk about is location

If you don't get this part right, there's no point in doing it, okay? Now, it's funny that I'm saying

that because right behind me now here, I have two of my family dogs, and at any moment, if there's a

delivery outside, they might bark and go mad. So I'm violating the first rule of having a quiet room

and having everything planned and controlled. It's important that you warn the family or

roomies that you're living with that you're recording. I have a door sign that I put in

my front door and it just says, shh, Alan's recording. So people know not to knock on the

door and not to burst in and say hey wait till I tell you my news The next thing is to test and rehearse in the place that you going to do it So don go off and do your rehearsing maybe in your head

in a coffee shop or something or in your kitchen. Go to the place that you're actually going to do

your recording or do your live session and test and check things out there because that's the

place that things will go wrong and that's where you need to be. The next thing is expect failure

because when you're recording and you're trying to do all these multiple things at once, I guarantee something will go wrong. So you need to have a backup plan, whether that be thinking

that, okay, if my internet goes down, I want to be able to refer people to a pre-recording I have

If my computer dies, I have another backup one here to slot in, et cetera. And if you have a

multi-person session, there's multi-people coming into it, make sure that you test connectivity

not just with yourselves, but with those other people who are joining the conversation as well

The next thing we want to talk about in location is the environment. So do you have a big room or a small room

If you have a big room, you're going to get a lot of echo. You're going to get a lot of back noise

On the other hand, if your room is smaller, you'll generally get a better sound because

there's not as much sound echoing around the hard walls. If you have soft furnishings in the room, it helps to absorb the sound, absorb the sound

waves and to make the sound sound better and have less harshness to it. You should have good lighting

and you should have comfortable seating. You can either have your bottle of water

but you're preferable if you have it to have something like a glass of water so that you're not lifting up something that blocks the camera

And finally then in this one here, like the environment, make sure that you're comfortable

Make sure that the temperature is not too hot and not too cold. And if you prefer, like Joe

and Mahesh there to stand up. Stand up. If you haven't got one of those fancy standing desks

go to your normal desk, put a few books on top of it, and put your laptop on there, and off you go

So the next thing that we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about audio

and how bad audio can kill a session. The first thing to note is you don't need expensive

equipment, right? But you do need to take your time and prepare, and it's really critical to

remove echoes that are in the room. And we look at some ways to do that shortly. It's also

important to take note of background noise that's going on. So this could be anything from the

noise of the traffic outside to maybe somebody ringing a phone in the room next door to you

all these different things. And as sort of says there quite rightly, warn the family what you're

doing. Let them know that you need that extra piece of quiet, please, because you're sharing

with people. Make sure that your microphone is off the desk. So for example, right now

I have a microphone here. And as you can see, it's on a boom stand. So it's not actually sitting

on the desk. If I had the microphone sitting on the desk, there's quite a likelihood that as I'm

moving around and even the small body movements that I have, you're going to hear this type of

noise. Okay. So that's microphone movement noise that you don't want. And if you have a mic off

your desk, it's more likely that you get a better distraction-free sound. The next thing is to use

a pop filter. This part here is a pop filter. And what it does is it removes the... So when you

listen to somebody on a microphone, they're going testing, testing, one, two, three. And you hear

them using this this is called sibilance and is called pop so when you have one of these things

here it's just a little small mesh screen that you sit on top of your microphone it helps to reduce

those what are called plosive sounds because they're explosive right so it helps remove those

and takes them down you don't have to have something fancy like i have here what you can do

is instead you can get some a piece of very light cloth like hessian or some mesh and you can get

some tights or something, just stretch that over and it does just as good. But the important thing

is to not get right on top of your mic and do all of that plosive thing. That's important. Okay

The next thing is speak clearly and slowly. Now, I know that that's difficult at times when

we're, you know, dealing with people with different accents and from different places

and maybe they're speaking in a second language, etc. And that makes it all more important

because not only are the people who are speaking have got to be clear

but the people who are listening maybe in a second language, they've got to be able to understand what you're saying

So it's important to talk slowly and to respect those as part of your audience

and help them to understand you. And if possible, use auto-captioning. You can use this from

you can get this from YouTube. You can also get it in PowerPoint

You can lock it in. I haven't done it today, unfortunately, because I haven't had it set up in this new machine

But the next time we'll do one, I'll perhaps give a demo on that because it's kind of cool. So the next thing then, let's go back to my slide here, is some tips and tricks

So in relation to microphones and equipment and that kind of stuff, the first thing is do not use the inbuilt PC microphone

That's an absolute no-no. When they're making a computer or a laptop, the microphone that they put in there is generally one of the cheapest that they can possibly get

In the same way as the camera is usually one of the cheapest that they can possibly get

And although I'm coming to you now on a reasonable Logitech camera, or webcam rather, it would be far better if I had my proper camera set up

Again, I'm moving room so I don't have that. But just to show you, if I stretch out of sign here, normally I would actually be coming through, and I'll get this into the frame, I would be coming through a proper DSLR and it would be coming through with a high frame rate and it would be much sharper with proper lighting, etc

But we'll go into that in a few minutes. The next thing is surround yourself with soft material because that helps to dampen echo

And we'll see that shortly as well. Keep a consistent distance from the microphone

Don't move around. If I'm back here and I'm moving around and I'm talking

you're going to get the volume of your sound is going to go up

and it's going to go down, and then it's going to get too loud in people's ears

So try not to move around. And in general, in relation to a microphone

you do what then Dave does, okay? So Dave does this here from the rock thing

But what I use this for is this is the distance that I keep away from a microphone

So it's one hand span like this. And this is how I do it. Look, I go to the microphone and I say

that's generally as far as I should be. So if I'm here, that's about the right sound

And this particular microphone that I'm using actually needs to have me a little bit closer

to get that more bassy sound. So that's why I'm a little bit closer

So the next thing is M, M, M, M. Practice. practice not saying M M M and E E E It actually very difficult I the world worst for this but if you listen to some folk they generally don say it at all I was listening to I said it again M And when you concentrate it in your head it really really really wrecks your brain I was listening to I was listening to Mahesh

I was listening to Magnus. I was listening to Joe, to Monica. And I didn't hear a lot of this going on

So maybe it's a quantum of my background or something that every couple of seconds I say

M-E-E-E-E, but try and get out of this habit because it's not great. The next thing is try and

keep your voice volume consistent. Don't go up and don't go down. Try and keep it consistent

Monica talked about this as well, and it's even more important when you're actually recording

something rather than when you're on the live stage. The next thing we're going to look at here

then is we're going to look at audio equipment. Now, I said earlier on you don't need very expensive

of equipment. In fact, you can get away with what you have, but do not, do not use your PC equipment

because I guarantee you, you will not get great sound. If you want to have a good audio, one of

the best ways to do it on the cheap is to use what you have. So get your standard phone, be it an

Android phone or an iPhone, and get yourself a lavalier mic. And a lavalier mic is one of those

things that pins into your collar. And what you do is because it's up here close to you, it gets

a good sound. The sound is close to your mouth, and it discards anything that's far back here away

from you. Whereas when you use a PC mic, it's going to capture everything all the way around

You use a lavadier mic, it's going straight into the phone, and you're going to get a much sharper

much better sound. Now, of course, it does mean that you need to link them back together again

at the end, your audio and your video, but that's not a big deal. We can have a look at that as well

But this is the cheapest way to get away with audio equipment. The next one is investing a little bit of money

So what you see here will probably cost about $150, $180 or so

And if you do what I do and try and get the stuff always secondhand, you can really get bargains all over the place

So the first thing here is a very standard Audio Technica AT2020

Blue sets, absolutely giant. They work very well as well, also because they generally have good audio cancelling on them

So an AT2020 is a good starter microphone. And the idea is you take this microphone, you put it into what's called an audio interface

And the audio interface then gets plugged into your computer. And then, of course, as I said there on the right hand side, you'll see that we have the boom stand and a mic filter

And we'll make this available, this information available afterwards on the website

Perhaps we'll do an article around it. Next thing then is going up the scale a little bit again

And here we're showing what's a Rode NT1A microphone, which an awful lot of podcasters and screen quarters use

I used to use the device there in the center for a while, which is a Scarlett USB device, which is fantastic value and gives a really, really, really good quality sound

And then finally, again, you have your boom mic to keep everything going. The next level up then is getting into a couple of hundred dollars

and you would have the likes of the Shure SM7B mic. We have, again, the Scarlett USB interface

But then you have an interesting thing. We have what's called a Cloudlifter preamp

This is a preamplifier because some microphones have a very low pickup volume

So you actually have to talk loudly to get them to pick you up or they're not actually taking in the good deep bass sounds of your voice

And it can sound very, very light, like a child. So if you get a cloud lifter, it helps to lift up your voice and makes it much more robust and sound better

So you can also sound like a radio presenter. Okay, so we're going to talk now about some improvements that you can do in your home to help you get a good quality of sound

You do not need to put thousands of dollars into getting all of this soundproof equipment here

is stuff that you can do easily, cheaply yourself at home. In fact, you don't have to buy anything to get a good sound

And we look at some of the ways to do it now. This, believe it or not, is some of the best ways to get good sound

First of all, you can get yourself, for example, on the left-hand side there, you can make a stand around your desk

and you can put up some plastic tubing and then cover it in blankets. Just simply using blankets or towels like this

will dramatically improve the sound of your voice. because what it does is it removes all the echo that's going around the room and takes away all

of those reflections and that very harsh sound and makes it much more compact and compressed

which is an easier thing to hear on the ears for people who are listening. You can also use any kind

of thick, soft object. So you can see the gentleman there on the right hand side has actually made a

recording booth from a couple of mattresses. So I suppose he probably told his wife and his kids to

get away for the day so he could take the beds and make a camper van outside of inside in the house

and so he could do some awesome recording. And then finally there's the standard ways of doing

it. I actually use this type of setup at times. It's not quite a blanket over my head but I have

a small wooden frame made that just goes up around me like so and then I have a blanket that gets

thrown over it because I work in a very very big large room and sometimes I can get quite a lot of

of echo and harsh sounds. So by doing this when I want consistently high quality audio

nobody ever knows that I'm sitting there with my head under a blanket like some weirdo, okay

But it gives me the most awesome sound. It sounds like I'm in a really professional recording booth

A lot of people as well actually lock themselves into their closet because again, inside the closet

you've got all sorts of different clothes and materials that will soften the sound and make

it sound much better. So that's a good place to do it as well. So the next thing then is to talk

about video. Good video is not difficult to do. We don't need expensive equipment, but you do need

some time to prepare the stuff, and you need to get the lighting right if you're using a camera

Of course, if we're doing video that just has screen recording, we don't need the camera

but do consider upgrading from a webcam if you're going to do this stuff more full-time or if you're

going to do it in any way professionally, where folk maybe are starting to pay you for doing your

stuff or if you want to go on YouTube and you need to get good content, number one, it's about audio

Number two, it's about video. Unfortunately, the content comes last because if you have an engaging

presence on some kind of quick story to tell, people will actually stand there and watch you. It's the way it works. So some tricks and tricks in relation to video. First of all, as I said

in relation to the microphone, I don't want you to use the inbuilt PC camera. They're usually

awful. They're the cheapest things that manufacturers can get. A phone camera is far

better than a webcam. So in the same way as we used our microphone earlier on, what you do is

you use your, or sorry, in the same way as we used a phone earlier on to record as a microphone

we can use the camera on your phone, which is usually far better than a webcam with all these

4K resolution and everything else to record a fantastic picture. And then of course you can

move it around, you can talk to folk and everything else, and it's good. Now the camera position is

really important and we talk about that a little bit later And again one of the other things we got to make sure that we do is we don have backlight And what backlight means is that you have a window behind you that shining light from behind because it means that in the front you going to be all dark and difficult to see

And if you look difficult to see, it's bad quality and people get disengaged and they don't want to listen to you

And it's not great for the production. So the next thing then we look at is the camera angle

The camera angle is critical. Now, I'm not doing what I should be doing, which is looking directly at the camera itself

You can see me now. I can't properly see myself on screen because I'm trying to look up here as well as look down here

But you get the idea, OK, by looking straight into the cameras, the best possible position

If you look at this lady here, what she's doing is she's using her standard camera in the laptop

And by looking down, it means that when the camera is looking up at her, first of all, it casts very bad shadows underneath her face

Her hair is acting as a curtain, as a barrier, and it's making her face very dark

And it's not very flattering, let's say, to have a camera come up at you like this, especially when you're fat and gray-haired like Santa Claus like me, because then they get to see all your double chins, right

Now, the reason I have a beard is to hide all my double chins, but that's a different story

Okay, so camera angle is critical. Make sure that you don't have your camera pointing up at you like this, and equally don't have it pointing downwards at a bad angle

So we look at some other ways if we can improve that now. So if you look at the girl here, we have a camera that's down emulating what a laptop would look like

And then we have a camera on top that looks straight at the eye. Now, I have an XPS laptop and I was talking to a chap about it earlier on

And those of you who know about different laptops and technology know that the Dell XPS laptop had a camera that was actually right down at the bottom of the screen of the laptop in the last edition

The new edition, they've moved to the top, but in the last edition, it was in the bottom. And this meant that it was constantly pointing up like this, but at an extreme, extreme angle

so that it actually became known as the nose cam, right? So you don't want your camera pointing up your nose and showing people what you have up your nose

It's not a good picture image to have. So make sure that you have your camera angle as tight as you can, looking straight at your eyes as much as possible

The next thing is camera height. okay it's important not necessarily to have your be looking at the camera and the camera is

kind of down there okay get my hands here into the shot so you don't want the camera angle to

be down there you want the camera to be up level with your eyes so if you look at this guy here

his laptop is down so he can't help that it's going to point up so he's just propped a few

books underneath the thing and that gets it up and more level with the eye so again it's much

more natural to be looking straight in like that at the camera and if you ever look at an interview

you on TV, you'll see people look straight at the camera. They always say, look at the hands

don't look at the cameraman. So I'm looking straight at the lens and therefore I'm looking

straight into your eyes. Okay. So in the next one, then we're going to look at framing the shot

So framing the shot is also important. When you look at me here, I'm showing just my shoulders

and my head and it fills the frame nicely. So if you're too far back, it's distracting

number one. And number two, your sound will be bad because you're going to be all the way back here

So not only does it look bad, it sounds bad. And then, of course, if you bring yourself in

far too close, it looks even worse, but it can sound even better. Okay, so that's my rock star

voice. We'll hear more of that from Dave later on, I'm sure. Okay, the next stage we're going to look

at then is the key takeaways for video. Number one, do not have a cluttered background. Tidy up

your space, okay? If you can't tidy up your space, we'll look at using a green screen. I would not

like to show you what's behind me right now in my workshop. It's appalling. If my better half saw

this, she would kill me. Number two, what we want to do is we want to have some, ensure that we don't

have too much space above our head. So if I'm down like this, it doesn't look as good as if I'm up

here. And make sure that you have good eye contact. Okay, I'm reading a lot from my screen, I'm trying

to watch what I'm doing, so I don't have excellent eye contact, but it's important to keep coming back

to the camera all the time and still look. If we have poor lighting or the upward angle and no eye

contact, we can see what the result is there in the middle. It doesn't look great. And then the good

result, although we have a still not a great background, is the one on the right-hand side

We've got good lighting, good framing, and we've got good eye contact. Okay, so the next thing I'm

going to talk about is green screen. So green screen, if we look at it, on the left-hand side

we can see the lady is there, and she's talking away, and she's at her desk, and behind her is the

busy office. Everybody's working away, and it's quite distracting. Whereas on the right-hand side

she has a static picture behind her. It's not distracting, and it's easy for us to focus on

the presenter, on the presenter's content, and not on the distracting background, saying, oh

they're very nice beams on the ceiling. I wonder, where is that? That's kind of a rustic thing. Is

out in the country. So that type of thing. The next thing then in the green screen thing is we

can look at ways to get green screen. So here's two particular ways, for example. We can use a

product called, now you're hearing one of my golden rules there, don't have distractions in

the room. I don't know if you can hear that, but one of my dogs is whining to get out. So I'm going

to leave it on the screen for five seconds while I let him out. One, two, come on, puppies, out you go

Out you go. Out you go. Three, four, five, and I'm back in. Okay, so puppies are good distractions

Now, the next thing is we're looking here at ways that we can use a green screen if we don't

actually have a proper green screen. So the first one is a piece of software called Chromacam

So if you go and bingle that up, by the way, I'm going off script here, the thing that's called bingling, I'm not sure if anybody is aware of that, it's a mixture of going to Google something and going to Bing something because you're never quite sure which is going to give you the best result

So you bingle something. So if you go and bingle yourself, Chromacam, you'll be able to find this piece of software

It comes out and first of all, there's a free version. I think it puts a logo across the bottom

And the other version is reasonably cheap. It's only 20 or 30 bucks

But it gives you a good, sharp bit of AI that removes the background behind you

So you can see there, for example, in the back of me, I'm actually using the standard green screen

And it's nice and sharp. OK, there's no fuzz. If I took away my green screen, it wouldn't be

When we look at what Chromacom is doing there, it's giving that nice background

Secondly, if you look at the likes of Skype or Teams, you can get an auto blur of the background

So folk can be doing whatever they want in the background, but it's not going to be as distracting

Now, the next level up is when you actually get a real green screen

So there's a few ways of doing this. The first way is you can get yourself a little thing that clips onto the back of your desk

and it just goes around like this, just around the portion of your head that's going to get

by the camera and that will give you a good green screen effect and the other thing you can do is

what i do is i have this pull-up sheet behind me so as you can see there you can see the the

lighting is good in the face and they've got a a nice chair and then the green screen at the back

allows them to get rid of all of that clutter in the background they can put any image that

they want to project there. Finally, then, I'm going to show you this one, which is a pull-up

green screen. And this is exactly what I use. So I found that having all sorts of bars and everything

else behind me was just taking too long to set up and take down every time. So these things are

actually exactly the same as a, you know, when you go to a show, you go to a conference, and you have

those pull-up stands, you know, saying, come and buy my product. That's exactly what this is

except rather than having a logo on it, it's just pure green. Okay, just pure green, and it acts as

the perfect backdrop. When I want to do it, it takes me four seconds to go to the wall, pull it

out of the shelf, zip it up, and I'm done, ready to go. When I'm finished, I zip it down, boom, we're

done. Awesome. Okay, so now what we're going to do is we're going to talk about recording videos

and screens and the software that we want to use to get that stuff going. My main tool, my go-to tool all the time is Camtasia

Camtasia is easy to learn. It's reasonably cheap and it does a fantastic job

It has its glitches and everything else, but it's very, very simple to use. So if you looking to do some quality recording I would strongly recommend that you have a look at Camtasia If you start getting into more video editing rather than screencasting you then need to raise up and look at something a little bit better than Camtasia perhaps

And one of the ones that I use for heavy video editing is Premiere Pro. It's not easy to learn. There's a lot in it

But it's very, very powerful, so it's well worth looking at if you're considering getting into a lot of video-heavy stuff

The next thing, then, is audio. and there's two things that I use to record audio. First of all, it's important that I don't record

my audio and my video generally at the same time, or if I do, they're recorded on separate devices

So I record my video straight through a streaming device into my PC, and then my audio I record

through a separate device which goes onto a drive, and then I bring the two back together again

And the reason is, is that I haven't yet found one piece of software that's awesome for both video and for audio together

So I have to use two different things to get the best of both worlds and bring them all back together again

Audacity is an absolutely awesome tool and it's free and we love free

Narveen Shami, you should be ashamed to be using a Macintosh. This is C-sharp corner, C-sharp

It comes from Windows, I think. You should be ashamed of yourself

I used to have a Macintosh and I got rid of it because I think they're awful things. But if you do want to use your Macintosh, I believe that there's a number of built-in

ones already that you can use. The Camtasia for Macintosh isn fantastic but what I have done before on the Macintosh that I used to have until I saw the light and got rid of it and got a proper Linux box instead is I actually ran my Cantasia inside a virtual machine of Windows on the Macintosh

itself. So Audacity is free. It's the one to go with. And if not, if you want something higher end

again, it's the one that I use for my audio because it gives me more effects and everything

else is audio audition. It's paid for, but it's extremely powerful. And it allows me to do things

like if I have sibilance there going through, or I have discovering any pops coming through my sound

maybe even I heard the dog barking in the background, the birds, if I've left the window

open, something like that. I can go and I can use some filters in audition to remove automatically

that background noise. I went silent for a reason and that is is that sometimes what you want to do

and you find it in a lot of professional audio is that they don't allow any little background

sound to creep in at all. They want it to be completely silent and you can do this as well

in this software. You can say when the sound drops below a certain level, we'll then cut it out and

make it silent. OK, so that's another one you can do. We'll call those questions, and maybe Simon and I told them

at the end, and we can answer those for you. OK, the next thing then is streaming

So what I use for streaming is OBS Studio, especially when I have to do multiple folk coming together And OBS Studio is open broadcast studio and it free software It absolutely awesome

It can be temperamental sometimes, but it's quite amazing that something this powerful

is free. You can go in and you can hook multiple people into it

You get multiple scenes. It acts and operates in the same way as a professional video and audio desk would do in a TV studio

And it's for free. It's for nothing. And we like that, right? And like, you know, those guys are giving back in their way in the same way as we as a community give back to each other by sharing our knowledge, etc., etc

So well worth looking at OBS Studio. The other good thing to know about OBS Studio is that you can automatically link out and stream live to Twitch, to YouTube, etc., multiple different channels, Facebook, and it handles it with ease

There's no problems at all with it. We're actually, at the moment, we have been doing, like many folk, the Azure Global Bootcamp

And we've been doing that for yesterday. We're doing it today. And we have some live sessions on tomorrow

And all of that, I'm managing using three virtual machines, all running OBS Studio up on Azure

and if you have time tomorrow, you'll be able to see it on Azure Global Group 2020

there in the main link. And that is it. We've come to the end

and that's probably the most knowledge that I can impart in 30 minutes