YouTube is a social media platform where you can create and upload video content to watch. Some people have entire careers on YouTube, and the feeling that people are watching what you’ve made encourages a lot of people to try their hand at it. So how do you get started?
hardware
While it’s easy to start shooting video even on your laptop, if you’re planning on doing a lot of content, you’ll need a decent computer. What you need depends on your situation. For example, if you’re creating gaming content, you’ll probably need a much better computer than if you’re creating other types of content.
The first thing to consider is the size of your hard drive. If you record a lot of footage, especially at higher resolutions and frame rates, it will take up a lot of space. You will probably want 500 GB, at least to start with. How much space you need depends on how much footage you save and how often you record it, so if you delete all the old footage you have before the next video starts, you can avoid wasted space.
Second, your total system power. Editing footage is CPU intensive and editing software will be much slower at lower settings. While this is possible on almost any hardware, you will find it easier to edit on a better computer. RAM is also a factor, because if you don’t have enough, your computer will be forced to read from the hard drive, which is orders of magnitude slower and can still fall behind your entire system.
Receive Frames
Whether you’re recording gameplay or from a camera (or both sides), you’ll need footage for your video. One of the best recording tools for PC is OBS Studio, which can record (and stream) just about anything connected to your PC. It also has some great built-in compositing tools for camera alignment and streaming overlays. If you are using a webcam as a camera, you must use OBS to record from it. If you have a real camera and not a webcam, it’s probably best to use whatever built-in tools the device has.
Even if you’re doing simple storytelling over images or other videos and don’t need to record your own material, you still need to get everything in one place before editing.
If you want to animate videos, Pencil2D is a simple free 2D animation tool, while Blender is a much more sophisticated 3D animation tool. If you want paid tools, there’s Adobe Animate and Cinema 4D. Keep in mind that animation takes a lot longer than normal recording, but if done right it can turn out well.
RELATED: How to stream games on YouTube
