I’ve had a few comments from subscribers who are interested in knowing more about how I make my YouTube videos for Tech Overwrite, so here goes! I outline everything from the idea and research stages, up to filming and editing.
In this video I also ask a few questions for you all about the future direction of this channel, and discuss a couple of smaller channels I have recently launched:
If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.
Video Transcript And Guide
Hey everyone! Throughout this year, I’ve been upgrading the hardware in my computer so that I can make videos easier. I built a home lab NAS, and I also upgraded my workstation computer by changing the motherboard and the case, and also putting a 10-gig networking card in. Then I did a video where I basically talked through all of this and summed it up by saying I finished with my media content workflow.
I had some really awesome comments from all of you guys, which I really appreciate. One thing I’m eager to do is start doing more videos where I respond to some of those comments, and that actually ties in nicely to a question I had for all of you about the direction of this channel and things like that. I’ll come back to that.

One of the comments on the video was from Bob, who was interested in seeing a full workflow video of exactly how I make my videos: how do I come up with ideas, how do I research them and script them, and then actually, you know, film them and edit them and everything else? So, I thought it would be pretty cool to do this video for a few different reasons. Firstly, you actually asked for it, and I’m always eager to do videos based on what you want—and I’ll come back to that point in a minute. Secondly, it’d be cool to actually, if I change things in the future, look back at this video and see what, if anything, has changed. Thirdly, it ties into a question I had for all of you.
Getting Ideas
But let’s get started with ideas: how do I actually come up with ideas for YouTube videos? Well, when I first started ramping up this channel, which was around a year ago, I basically had a blog as well—the Tech Overwrite blog—which had a series of blog posts on there, mainly answering tech queries that people had. To be honest, for quite a while I’ve wanted to move more over to video content. So, what I actually started doing on this channel is, when I was coming up with ideas for videos, I was often just looking at what tech issues people had, sometimes based on the blog traffic and things like that, and I was making short videos based on that.
Some of the earlier videos on this channel are literally just answering simple questions, and those videos can work really well, of course. It’s always good to help people with tech queries and things like that. But in recent months, I’ve been eager to sort of branch out a little bit and do more videos that are interesting in nature. I don’t mean clickbaity, Mr. Beast-style videos, but just things that I think people might like more than random specific search-based videos.
Question For You
That actually brings me to the question I had for all of you, which is: what videos would you want me to make more of, and which videos do you want me to make less of, if any? Please leave me a comment and actually let me know your thoughts. Have a look through the videos I’ve produced over the last few months, and please be honest. Just let me know what videos you like and dislike and everything else.
Because in my own mind, I don’t want to just do quick search-based videos, like the ones I did at the start of the channel. Ideally, with Tech Overwrite, I do want to dive deep into topics, whether that’s to answer somebody’s tech query or to do a more weird, interesting, intriguing type video. But again, I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts.
That’s the idea phase, and obviously, those ideas can come from a range of sources, but it does depend on the type of video I’m looking to produce.
Research
Then, when it comes to actually researching a video, again, the approach to that is going to vary. If it’s a tech query-type video, I might already know the answer. For example, I’ve got a video that just came out on how to add more internal storage space into your computer. That’s something I’ve just researched naturally over the last few years and learned myself based on Reddit, watching YouTube videos, and just playing around with things as well. So, if I do a video like that, sometimes I kind of already know the answers.
Then, when it comes to scripting or bullet-pointing the video, that can be quite easy. Sometimes I might just have like seven or eight bullet points, and then I sit down in front of the camera and I just start talking. But obviously, if it’s a more detailed video, like the one I did talking about why the pros tend not to use Ethernet when it comes to high-speed networking, that was quite a detailed video. Again, I had played around with it. I’ve recently got a 10-gig switch and did quite a lot of networking upgrades in my study, so I kind of knew probably half of the answers there. For anything I didn’t know, it’s just a case of Googling it, looking on Reddit and YouTube videos, and also diving into the UniFi web console on my own computer, poking around, and just getting answers for the video.

So, that’s generally how I do the research for tech queries. If I’m doing a more interesting-based video, you don’t need to research as much. The research is almost going to be me trying something out. For example, “Can you game over a NAS?” was a recent video that I did. With that, I almost tried it out first. I put a bunch of games on my Synology NAS, on my home lab NAS, and then I just tried things out. I saw the results, and now that I’ve done that, I can almost go back to the start in some ways and actually plan out how I’m going to package the video.
So, I actually do my intro last. I do all my research, do all that, then I can sit down and film my intro, some bits in between, and then the ending of a video as well. So, in some ways, those videos go kind of backwards.
Scripting
When it comes to actually scripting things or whatever else, I’ve got an old laptop. It’s got a seventh-gen Intel CPU, and it’s got terrible battery life as well. So, basically, I need to leave it plugged in all the time, because otherwise, it just dies on me. But what I do on there, once I have the video planned out in my head, is I literally have Google Docs where I write out a script or something like that.
Then, on here, I just have free teleprompter software that literally just keeps scrolling statically. So, it wouldn’t listen to the words I was saying and stop if I paused or anything—it would just keep scrolling. What I would do is literally have the laptop there, have my camera on top of it, and then I’d literally just be reading the words and obviously talking.
That’s the scripting approach. But, as I’ve mentioned, in recent months I’m kind of moving away from that model a little bit. As a result, I don’t really feel like I need to script things as much. I actually much prefer sitting down and just talking to the camera based on having a few bullet-pointed notes instead. I feel that can work quite well, and that doesn’t need to be anything fancy. It could literally be a Notepad file with a few words in it or something like that. Or it might even be them based on a particular comment—in this case, Bob’s comment.
On here, I’ve got idea, research, script, filming, editing, and publishing. Every so often, I’m just turning around and looking at that so I can remember which part of the video I’m at. I’m at the scripting phase right now, and that’s pretty much it. So yeah, recently, I am moving away from scripting towards ad-libbing.
Filming

Then it comes to filming. I literally have a lavalier mic, which I upgraded recently to the Deity PR-2. So, I’ve got a little microphone here that clips on and goes into this recorder. That just records to an SD card, and that means I’ve got a separate audio file to my video.
In terms of recording, I’ve got a Sony A6600—literally this camera, but with a different lens. I do have two cameras because what I’ve found is, for some videos, it’s actually quite useful to maybe have one camera on me and maybe another focused on whatever I’m doing. Also, it’s nice to have a separate camera to focus on details or something like that.
Audio
The next thing then is audio. You might have noticed another mic has just appeared in front of me. Basically, I used to have a Tascam DR-10L mic, which I’ve had for quite a few years. Recently, it’s been clicking and making weird noises. Also, it isn’t the best mic.
I’ll try to switch the audio as I’m talking because both of these are recording. This Tascam is quite a noisy mic—it picks up a lot of background hiss. That’s called “self-noise,” actually. It picks up a lot of background noise, and often, when you’re trying to fix that background noise, it can make your voice sound a little bit strange. In some of my previous videos, I think the audio wasn’t the best, and I had to run the results of this through an AI voice enhancer. That leads to weirdness as well. There’s an effect called the “uncanny valley,” where a voice doesn’t always sound like it’s naturally coming out of a human body, probably because of the AI filters I was using due to the poor output from this mic.
So, essentially, I’ve switched over to this PR-2, which comes with a much better microphone. There’s also 32-bit float recording, which I won’t get too technical about. But in general, you’ve got more control over this. So, that’s the audio part of filming.
I’ve covered the cameras. The other thing is the lighting. Right now, it’s a winter’s day with not much sunlight. If I were going to rely on that, then I would be really dark. As a result, I’ve got two lights in front of me now. I’ve got an LED light panel thing—you can kind of see it there—and then I’ve got a softbox thing over there. I won’t pull it towards me because it’ll literally just fall over and hit me on the head, making me concussed or something. But I use those two lights, and actually, that’s been quite a nice upgrade because it means that when I want consistent lighting, I can get that.

Of course, it does mean things are a little bit more clunky as well. When I come to film, I’ve got a camera, a lavalier mic, and then I’ve got to set up lighting and things like that as well. So, it is a little bit more clunky.
File Management
That’s the filming phase. Then, I move on to the actual editing phase. On my PR-2, I’ve got an SD card in there, but it’s actually really hard to access. So, what I tend to do instead is just use a USB to move the file onto my computer. That’s a WAV file. Then, when it comes to my Sony camera, that’s an MP4 file. I actually just do that via the SD card. I take the SD card out, and I’ve got a style USB SD card reader. I move the MP4 file onto my computer.
And then actually, because I’ve got the home lab NAS, I move those two files onto my home lab NAS, and that’s the base. I’ll show off the editing process in a minute with an OBS screen record. But I wanted to actually say, why do I have the home lab NAS? In a previous video, somebody quite correctly asked, “Is your setup a little bit overkill?”
Actually, yeah, right now, it is a little bit overkill. When I was running out of disk space, I could have just gone and gotten a 4TB NVMe drive, stuck it in my workstation computer, and everything would have been a lot easier. I wouldn’t have needed to build the home lab NAS. So, it probably would have been easier just to get a 4TB drive. Right now, my setup is a bit overkill. I mean, these files that I put on my home lab NAS are ultimately just to edit on my computer and nothing else—I don’t really need a NAS for that.
But next year, I do hope to get a laptop, which is slightly more powerful than the one I’ve got and doesn’t have a dodgy battery. Then, on that laptop, hopefully, I can start doing more video editing on it, even if it’s just chopping up the video files wherever I make mistakes and things like that. That’s why, yes, my setup is a bit overkill right now, but it is built with future-proofing in mind.
Editing

Now we come to the actual editing stage. I mentioned before that I use DaVinci Resolve. I used to use Premiere Pro, but I recently moved away from that because I find DaVinci Resolve faster, and it’s also free.
The first thing I would do is take my MP4 file and my WAV file that I mentioned—so my video and my audio—and drag that onto the timeline. The first thing you’d do is sync everything up. The reason you need to sync things up is that you can’t really rely on your camera’s own audio—it’s not very good quality. Usually, it’s better to have a separate microphone, like I mentioned.
Now, in this particular case, you can sync in two different ways. You can use timecode, or you can use waveform analysis. I won’t go into that too much, but the short answer is, I did actually try timecode out, but it didn’t work out well. So, I’m just going back to the waveform analysis version.
Effectively, if I make that clip slightly louder, DaVinci Resolve allows you to just say, “Auto-align clips based on the waveform,” and then it will do that. After 10 seconds or so, it’s done. So, it’s now done, and you can see the waveforms there—they’re pretty much the same. There are always going to be slight variations just because cameras, you know, are always going to record slightly differently. Sometimes, you need to tweak things very slightly. It’s a bit of an annoyance, to be honest. That’s why I tried out timecode, but it didn’t really work very well for me because of some bugs. I won’t go into that in this video.
But anyway, let’s say they are synced together. What I tend to do is actually group those clips together and then mute my camera’s audio. So, I’ve got this, and this is the overall view of things. If I just go back a little bit—so, that’s the project right now. It’s around 46 minutes long, which is actually fairly normal. Even though this video is only going to be like 15 to 20 minutes, it’s normal to have more than that because when you’re talking, there’s going to be stuff you cover that you just don’t need in the final cut, or you just make mistakes, and you need to cut that out.
Effectively, the first thing I would do whenever I see there’s a mistake or I’ve just taken a pause or whatever is, because you can see here in the waveform, I’m not actually talking about anything, I’d literally go along, listen to what’s being said, and make cuts. Maybe here, I made a mistake or whatever—I don’t actually know; I’m just stating as an example. So, it might be that I listen to things and think, “Right, I need to cut that out.” Then, I can just carry on as normal.
The next thing I would do is actually add background music. Obviously, you don’t need background music—it’s a bit of a debate. I quite like having some form of background music just to mix things up a little bit. Essentially, I’d find a song I like, put it on my track, and then play with the audio levels a little bit.
So, I’ve muted my A1 track, which is my camera’s onboard audio called the scratch audio, and my A2 is the natural one. What I tend to do is set that around volume 20 as a boost. Obviously, I listen to things and tweak them. Sometimes, I might tweak things more, up to like +2 on the volume mixer. When it comes to the background music track, I’ll lower that down to like -32 or -34 dB, something like that.
That would be a rough cut, and then I’d add in the actual soundtrack to things. The next thing is to make the video more interesting by adding B-roll onto the screen. I’ve got my video—I’ve got my starting point there, where I say, “Hey everyone,” and I start off.
And literally as I’m talking, obviously, if I mention my home lab NAS, I’ll add a clip on the screen of my home lab NAS. Let’s just mute that. I’ll add a home lab NAS clip on there. Then, if I’m talking about something else, I’ll show some other B-roll on the screen, as you can see there.
Publishing
When it’s all finished, I’d go over to the actual export. There are loads of different export options. I export it onto my computer, and it’ll end up as a .MOV file. Then, I just upload it to YouTube, and that’s pretty standard. In YouTube, you just fill in the title, description, and things like that, and then I’m ready to hit publish.
What I actually do with that is, I upload it to YouTube, fill in the title and description, and add the thumbnail and all of that stuff. But I don’t then hit publish. What I tend to do is schedule videos in advance. I don’t go too far in advance, but I like to have two or three videos in the queue, just in case, you know, one of my kids is ill, or I’m ill, or something like that.
I don’t really like the pressure of having to think, “I have to get a video out this week. I have to film it on Monday, edit it Tuesday and Wednesday, so I can publish it Thursday or Friday.” I don’t really want to do that.
That actually brings me to the channel update part of this title, because there are two things I kind of wanted to cover. Firstly, at one point, I was making videos every week on this channel. Then, I sped it up to every four or five days, sometimes even publishing a video every three days or something. That can work, but I kind of feel like I want to take more time and create more detailed videos. As a result, I kind of feel like I want to slow the pace slightly and maybe do one video a week again.
Please let me know your thoughts on that. This is quite an open video, so any thoughts, please just let me know.
The second update, though, is that I mentioned at the start of this video, when it comes to the idea phase, that at the start of this channel, I used to do lots of shorter videos answering quick tech queries—things which, you know, you don’t want to make a 10-minute video out of. I’ve kind of stopped those videos because I want to dive deeper.
Channel Update #1
But I think there is still a place for those shorter videos. So, I’ve actually launched a channel called Shorter Tech, which I’ve linked to in the description. If I can put a link up here somewhere, I’ll do that as well. On that channel, it literally is me, you know, whenever I’ve got a tech query that pops up in my head or maybe I’ve had a comment on Tech Overwrite that asks me a question, and I know it’ll only take a couple of minutes to cover, I’ll do a quick video and put that on Shorter Tech.
Channel Update #2
I’m also quite interested in cameras, audio, lighting, and things like that. So, I recently set up another channel called Tech Overwrite Studio—because I couldn’t think of a better name, to be honest. It’s only got one video on there right now. To be honest, I’m not going to stress about publishing videos on a schedule or anything like that. But if you’re interested in maybe learning more about the content creation side of things, like camera equipment and all of that stuff, please do subscribe to that channel too. At some point, I’ll probably publish another video—maybe even this year. I don’t know.
That kind of wraps up this video. I want to do more videos like this, where I’m just, you know, sitting down, talking to the camera, answering people’s comments, and also reflecting on them as well. I feel that that’s really important. I do really value all of your comments, and I like chatting to all of you.
I’d also be eager to hear your thoughts on everything I’ve discussed in this video, particularly about what sort of videos you want me to make, and, you know, maybe slowing down and only producing one video a week on Tech Overwrite, and everything else. So please do leave me a comment. Any feedback—good or bad, or whatever—is really welcome.
And thank you for watching this video, and thank you for all of your support so far. I really appreciate it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what videos we all create in 2025.
So, thank you for watching. Bye!
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