Neo4j YouTube Channel — Onwards and Upwards!
When I worked on the Google Cloud Platform, we produced many developer-focused videos. While my videos have over 1M views in total, the Android Developer Relations team produced some of the best developer video content on the web.
Upon starting at Neo4j, my VP wanted to see Android-quality videos on a startup budget. I was slightly hesitant because I wanted to make sure we were able to have a high ROI on our content production and video content is notoriously hard to develop and maintain
Instead of a bunch of professional studios with full-time staff, I needed to retrofit a windowless and airflow-less conference room to start filming.
With the video studio in place, I started doing single-handed filming of a lot of content about Graph Databases and Neo4j.
The most important videos I produced starring myself were the Intro to Graph Databases Series. This series now has close to 170k total views and 828 likes.
Large Library of Videos
Through the help of many other producers, interviewees and engineers, we now have 700 videos on the channel, 1.1M views and 10k subscribers.
My colleague, Mark Needham, started the Neo4j Online Meetup in the middle of this journey. This YouTube Live stream now has 39 episodes where he has hosted himself and other developers talking about GraphQL, data science in practice, enterprise data silos, software analytics, database querying standards and even learning Chinese.
Just last week, Michael Hunger started a series of HowTo videos on the APOC Utility Library.
Additionally, we’ve had the opportunity to interview dozens of developers, including Ashley Sun of Lending Club and David Meza of NASA.
Learning the Trade
This has been an incredible learning experience. When I first started, I knew nothing about video editing or production. Nowadays, I find myself fairly competent but forever learning.
A few (big) things I realized along the way:
- Equipment matters. An old colleague still at Google convinced me of that and another shared the equipment he was using. Of course, he was using $1,500+ of sound gear for simple podcasts. Thanks to my friend David McLaughlin, I received some great guidance from Jamie Baughman. Dan Fitzpatrick also helped me tune some sound and made me realize that my hearing isn’t as good as I thought, despite perfect hearing tests!
- Sound matters. I had static in recordings for the longest time. Didn’t notice it due to bad headphones, but eventually realized it and struggled for along time to eliminate it. Turns out it was because the camera was producing (and syncing sound to) video at 29.97fps and the Blackmagic capture device was capturing at 30fps.
- Lapel mics are awesome. I kept trying to get away from lapels because they would ruffle with movement or I’d (gulp) forget to connect them before shooting a long video. I got awesome shotgun mics mounted on (statically-positioned booms). Unless you have a crew to assist, these shotguns can be difficult to position in a way that avoids background noise and room echo.
- Too many effects distract the viewers. The original videos in my Introduction to Graph Databases Series had a few animations and effects which the audience harped on. I learned to learn from YouTube comments, but not take them to heart. I suggest you do the same!
- Do Not include both green and blue in your company logo if you ever want to do a chromakey background while you’re modeling your company’s t-shirts. Otherwise, you’ll have to learn how to do track mattes in post production and track mattes are not fun.
- Buying can be cheaper than building. This was a depressing lesson to learn. I spent a while hand crafting an awesome wooden camera dolly largely because I thought it would be cheaper. It wasn’t. Wood is expensive. Amazon is cheap.
- B&H photo doesn’t accept orders on Saturday. Saturday often was my experimenting day due to it being super quiet around the office. When I found new equipment to solve problems, I’d head over to B&H’s website, but due to Shabbat, I was unable to order the gear! This led me to be more thoughtful about my solutions.
There are many other learnings on the software and equipment side that I hope to be able to share in future posts.
What’s next?
You tell us! We certainly have more videos coming as part of the Online Meetup, Intro series and APOC series. And we’ll continue to do interviews, webinars and more. Let us know if there’s anything else you’d like to see!
p.s. check out one of the latest popular videos on our channel
