How to VideoBlog on your PC

Today, as promised, I’m offering you some advice on how you can quickly and easily set up your PC as a videoblogging workstation. I hope you find it useful…

As I did yesterday, I’m posting the transcript for our friends who might find this site through the search engines. As far as I know, you can’t search video from Google just yet…

Hi, I’m Andy Bourland from Bourland.com here to tell you that videoblogging is cheaper and easier than you think.

Yesterday, we reviewed how you can quickly and easily set yourself up as a videoblogger on a Mac.

Today, we’re going to do the same, only for a PC.

Now I must confess: I’m not a PC guy. I have one, but don’t like them.

Despite the fact that they have done their best to knock off the Mac interface for years, they’re still nowhere close to being as intuitive or plug & play.

But I digress.

Like the Mac, you don’t need to get a souped up PC in order to do videoblogging.

Unless you have a pc more than say, two and a half, three years old, it can probably handle doing simple video production just fine.

I’m not knowlegeable enough to recommend a PC, but if you don’t have one, buy the MacBook Pro from Apple.

It’s less than $2000, has a built in webcam and microphone.

And from what I hear, it runs Windows XP better than any PC on the market.

OK, I’ll get off my Mac pedestal.

If you want to do your videoblog very cheaply, buy VlogIt software from Serious Magic. It’s only $49 and does everything you need:

recording
it has a built in teleprompter
it has all sorts of built in backgrounds you can use
you can edit it
you can upload it

everything from soup to nuts.

It’s all there.

The only extras you may need to buy are a green screen and a lapel mic. They are both available from the Serious Magic for fairly cheap, so you might want to check them out.

If you do have a PC, and need a web cam, get yourself a Logitech QuickCam Notebook Pro — assuming you’re using a Notebook.

It’s a great little webcam and will do the job quite nicely.

So that’s it. That’s all you need.

If you thought that videoblogging was going to be expensive, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Keep in mind though, that videoblogging is more time intensive than blogging.

You still have to write.
You need to think through what screen shots and pictures you want to include.

You need to think through what edits the videocast will need, where and why…

And then you have to execute on it.

The more you do it, the easier it gets, but your first few times — you will find it a total pain in the butt to do.

I’m just warning you.

I’m going to try to do this blog in video as often as possible from here on out, as I think this is the future of personal publishing.

In any case, I’m Andy Bourland from Bourland.com, thanking you for joining me today.

Have a great day, and I’ll see you next time!