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I Show You How to Make YouTube Videos on Your Phone (Video) | My Method

Are you wondering how to make YouTube videos on your phone?

I’ve got $2000 worth of camera gear, and I’ve been making videos on my Samsung A50! Really, a phone is all you need.

Here’s what I’ve learned since getting started and you can make YouTube video on your phone that looks amazing!

Here are the notes to things mentioned in the video. These are affiliate links. Thanks for supporting the work Roostervane does!

GEAR/SOFTWARE USED

VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE

Adobe Premiere (PAID)

List of Free Video Editing Software Options

Free LUTS pack

How to make YouTube videos with your phone

transcript

So this is just a really quick overview, because I know a lot of people want to make videos. One of the things we do at Roostervane is we like to do what we call teaching smart people how to grow their influence.

So this can look like a lot of different things. But one of the ways that’s becoming pretty important in the modern world is video.

Increasingly with the pandemic, companies are turning to video. Video is huge.

So the question is, how can you create a great YouTube video with what you have? And that’s what I want to show you how to do. I want to show you how to make YouTube videos on your phone.

Disclaimer: I’m not a filmmaker. There are people with way nicer videos than mine. But nevertheless, I’m just going to show you what I do and hopefully, it will be helpful.

1. Gear

So, first of all, what kind of gear do you need?

This is an important question. I’ve got a Canon 5D MKii with a 24-70mm lens. It’s a beautiful camera, a beautiful lens. In fact, it’s about $2,000 worth of camera gear. It makes fantastic videos.

But believe it or not, I am shooting this (video above) on my phone. So honestly, your phone is probably good enough to take pretty good videos if it’s a modern smartphone of some sort.

The thing that really matters the most is the lighting.

I’m sitting here in my office and what I actually do is I stick my face completely to the window. Basically, it’s one of the best things you can get without having professional lighting is just looking straight at a window.

one of the best things you can get without having professional lighting is just looking straight at a window.

So I could actually set this up a little bit differently.

I could get a little bit more of a straight-on view, which is often what people say to use for videos. But this actually looks a lot less professional because it’s really dark.

Making a YouTube video on your Phone with natural light won't work without a window.
Set up in my office for a straight-on video with natural light

So really, just by making the move to put your face in the window, you can see that it creates drastically, drastically better results.

Look at the difference natural light makes for creating a YouTube video on my phone!
Look at the difference sitting in the window makes! This is the same shot, 30 seconds apart.

And that’s just light.

It has nothing to do with any fancy equipment.

It’s really just about how the light hits your face. And that’s what’s going to make a better video.

So I mentioned that you don’t need a lot of fancy gear. That’s really true. But there are two things I use. I would recommend investing in these and you can do it for a little bit less than two hundred dollars if you were to do both of them.

1. Lav Mic

Here’s the Lav Mic I use!

I use a lav mic.

I think it’s about $30 on Amazon. It’s not very expensive. And this is for audio.

People actually say the video matters less than the audio. The audio is actually more important.

If you’re just shooting on your phone, you’re going to get a lot of background noise. It’s going to be kind of tinny.

But having a little mic like this is just a really easy way to jack up the sound quality and make your video sound a heck of a lot better.

2. Gimble

This is the Gimble I use

OK, so the other thing that I think is a really cool thing, and I’ve invested in this and I’m totally happy I did, is having some sort of a gimble.

This is like a device that holds your phone might even has like a built-In stabilizer.

This is what my gimble looks like. I’ve got it mounted on a tripod just right in front of the window. And that’s basically it. Between that and the microphone, I get great video.

I use a gimble to make YouTube videos with my phone

If you don’t want to spring for the gimble, since it’s a bit of money, just find something that you can set your phone on, preferably in the window like I showed you. Having your phone steady is going to make a big difference.

It doesn’t have to be perfect! I do some videos handheld. Experimenting is one of the best parts about this! See what works!.

2. Look at the lens!

This is something else that I struggle with often. Sometimes I’m looking at the screen on my phone, but I’m not looking at the viewer.

So I do try what I’m making videos to look at the lens, which is probably in a little bit different place from the screen. If you look into the lens, you’ll look deep into the eyes of your viewers.

3. Basic Editing

I honestly don’t think you have to do much editing. I find videos that are less edited to be a lot more interesting. So it doesn’t have to be perfectly polished.

I say “um” a lot. I can’t edit it all out.

But a couple of basic things.

I use Adobe Premiere for editing. It’s really great and it’s one of the industry-standard programs. There are a bunch of different editing programs; you can find a list of free ones here.

So however you choose to do your editing, if you want to, I find editing to be a really nice thing to do.

To keep it simple, I actually use what are called LUTS in Adobe premiere. I won’t do the big explanation of what a LUT is, but essentially you can think of it as kind of like an Instagram filter. It works the same way.

You apply it to your video and it will it a certain finish. This is the free LUTS pack I’m using here.

A simple LUTS pack in premiere makes your video look great!
Applying LUTS in Premiere Pro.

So other than LUTS, I usually play with four things:

  • Exposure
  • Contrast
  • Sharpen
  • Saturation

And it really just takes it takes practice.

The other thing is the sound. I’m still learning here. It’s something that I’m really trying to get better at, because sound is kind of a tough thing. Since I have the mic I do have really professional recording quality, but that doesn’t actually mean your sound sounds great.

So a couple of things that I try to do. I try to limit my overall mass gain to -3DB. And then mostly I just use the premade settings in Adobe premiere to set for male voice and that tends to do pretty well.

Using the male voice preset in PRemiere
Using the sound presets in Premiere (right side)

I also like to add some music too. You can drag the music track underneath and that will create a really nice kind of background sound to your video.

You can get lots of free music on YouTube in YouTube Creator Studio.

Conclusion

So those are just a few really quick technical details about how to make YouTube videos on your phone!

But honestly, it’s a lot of fun to make videos!

It’s hard at first. I’m still learning. I mean, I’ve been doing it for a few months now, but it’s still hard to sit down in front of a camera and talk. I’m sitting in a room by myself. The first few times you do it, you’re going to feel ridiculous, I think. I’m assuming most people do.

But just practice. The more you do it, the more you talk, the more you get into it, the more comfortable you get with it. And eventually you can produce something really great.

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