The Future of Video is Here | Runway's Gen 3 Alpha, Enhancing Your Video Production, and Mastering Podcast Ads

Fire up the barbecue, and let's roll. This is digital creator with Dylan Schmidt. Today is July 4th. Maybe you're not listening on July 4th. This is not a special holiday episode. I gotta do some of those sometime. I don't know what a 4th July episode would be about for digital creators, something about freedom. Maybe there was an opportunity there as I'm thinking out loud. I hope you're doing well. Today, we got a fun episode. 3 topics we're gonna be talking about. Number 1, we're gonna be talking about video AI, specifically from Runway. Their new gen 3 alpha just launched. It's exciting stuff. Number 2, I'm gonna share with you my short form video editing workflow. It's been a while since I've shared this, and I'm really dialing things in. So I thought it would be a good idea to share that with you. And then number 3, we're gonna be talking about podcast ads. I was recently asked to go deeper on this. We'll be talking about effective ad placements. And whether you are a beginner to podcasting or an expert at podcasting, I think you'll learn something when it comes to podcast ads here. So let's dive in. Let's talk about this Runway Gen 3 Alpha new video AI thing. Now for those who don't know, Runway is a AI company, and the Gen 3 Alpha is incredible. I'll explain it to you as best as I can because this is audio only. But basically, what you do is you type in a prompt, just like you would with Chat GPT, and it spits out an video. Now the videos are usually around, like, 5 to 10 seconds, and it can take a couple minutes to generate the video. But very similar to how you would use DALL E inside of ChatJPT to write a text prompt, and then it makes an image. Or using Midjourney, same thing, same idea, except this is all it does when you're generating a video. And the examples, if you were on the Creator Club, I would call. I was just sharing this, but I was up late last night watching these examples of a Reddit thread where people were just commenting, and then a person in the thread would just respond with the comment, which was a prompt. Absolutely stunning stuff. There are still some glitches. It doesn't look, you know, perfect, but it is as close to amazing as I think we have seen. It unlocks a whole new frontier really for video. I truly believe this because it means a lot of things. Right? Like, when you can just write a text prompt and make amazing video, that unlocks everything for movie studios, for independent creators to add in b roll, to start controlling a narrative throughout different scenes. It's powerful stuff. Now the pricing when I am on their website right now, I'm looking at their pricing. The pricing for Runway Gen 3, let's break it down like the monthly costs because there's so many subscriptions out there. If you're using Runway to make videos and you're not monetizing that in any way, it would be very expensive very fast. If you're using this for, you know, ads or content that is going to make money back, it could be well worth it. But let's go over the pricing. And I'm not affiliated with Runway. I don't have a subscription as of this recording. I have just been watching closely what they're doing. So they have the basic tier, which gives you a 125 credits. You get access to gen 1 video and gen 2 video, not the latest gen 3 model, and very limited. It video editor exports in 7 20p. I think there's a watermark, from runway in there. That's free. And then the next 1 up is$15 a month, which gives you 625 credits a month, And that gives you access to Gen 3, the latest model. And so 625 credits a month that I believe breaks down to, I believe, like, around 1 credit is around 1 second. So, like, a 10 second clip would be around 10 credits, and that's$15 a month. So you could see, you know, if you're not gonna use everything it outputs, which you're not going to, then it could get expensive really fast. I'm a big fan of mid journey, and sometimes I have to, you know, put in a lot of prompts to get the images. I might go through a 100 images to get the 1 image that I finally wanna use. I could only imagine if that was a credit system, so closely like this, that could get really expensive really fast, essentially. And now they have the pro tier as well, which goes up to $35 that gives you 2, 250 credits a month. And the unlimited model, which is $95 a month, which I think for most people aren't going to use, which unlimited video generations. And if you were doing this for business purposes, that's actually not that crazy, $95 a month. Taking that all into consideration, it's somewhat pricey to play around with. But if you're using this for professional purposes, not all that insane. Now let's talk about some use cases that you might wanna use, something like Runway ML for your own content. You could use it for visual storytelling, which we're all seeing, you know, a lot of AI generated content these days. But it could enhance b roll if you need a specific element within your videos to tell something that you just, you know, can't film yourself. You could use it for virtual backgrounds, so it could give you some wild realistic looking, real moving virtual backgrounds. You could use it for concept art where you're starting to piece together this whole world that you're building. You could use it for personalized marketing videos So you can prompt the videos to also speak, and it will, like, lip sync and kind of say what you wanted to say. So the characters in the video will say exactly what you want them to say. You could use it for educational videos. So if you were teaching on say, if I was teaching on podcasting, I could, you know, use a prompt about a podcast studio and talking about different elements of sound vibrating around the walls to make a more sound treated room to help increase audio quality. Last week, we spoke about AI content creators. This new latest alpha gen 3 model from runway didn't even exist yet, but we could go in the AI content creator route to where you could use this as like a virtual influencer. And you might have seen that OpenAI has talked about Sora, which is their video AI generation tool. Very similar. Some people have said, you know, it's much better than what Runway is doing. But Sora is not released to the public as of today. So Runway is the only 1 that you really have that's, like, at a great level. I'm sure there are some others, but Runway is, like, the top that is accessible because Sora from OpenAI is not out yet. They haven't even set a date when it will be released. So if you have any type of need for AI video content, I'd highly recommend checking out Runway. Next, I wanna share with you my short form video content workflow. It's been a minute since I've spoken about this. I've made, you know, a couple short form videos here and there, but it's really hard to explain in 30 seconds and do it justice because I'm looking at my Notion short form video data table right now, and there's just shy of a 1000 videos. I have more than a 1000 videos. But since I've kept this library going, I'm at 939 videos. And I've slowly refined things over the years, which is, like, a lot of videos. It's actually hard for me to, even think about how many videos that is. Sheesh. So I have kind of 2 workflows I've kind of dialed in. They're slightly different. I'm gonna go over, like, the tools I use and just kind of like at a high level, because this isn't a back and forth conversation, I kinda have to assume what the most interesting parts are and think about what I've been asked about the most. So if I'm recording something at my desk, I like to use Ecamm Live, like, for what I'm recording right now is through Ecamm Live. Now Ecamm Live is primarily for live streaming, like the name implies, but I don't use it for live streaming. I just use it for recording to my desktop, which is kind of expensive for that use case. I'm going to look into something like OBS, but I'm really comfortable with Ecamm Live. I like that I can add LUTs to it, which stands for lookup table, which is kind of like a little filter. I just add a very light filter to the video. Helps just kind of, add a nice little cinematic effect to it. So I'm at my desk. I have everything plugged in. All I gotta do is turn on my camera, and then I open up Ecamm Live on my Mac, and my camera is connected to my Mac, which allows me to just hit record, and I can just go. The amount of time it takes for me to, you know, turn on my computer and record is well under 30 seconds. Right? I can turn on my lights, which I have connected to my Stream Deck. Everything's within arm's reach here. I don't even have to sit up to get going. And that's cool because, you know, if I have an idea for the number of steps that it might take me to get that idea out of my head onto the camera, I found previously, if it was too many steps, then I just, like, wasn't gonna do it at all. So that's why I've designed my setup in this way, and that's also why I like Ecamm just because I'm so comfortable with it. And I think having, you know, comfort and reliability in your products and tools is really important because if you don't feel comfortable and that it's gonna be captured, then you're just gonna be using extra brain energy that's not gonna help you perform at your best. So I'll record through Ecamm Live, and from there, it saves to my desktop. Now I'll use Google Drive to really store all of my files, but the editing primarily happens in Descript. So I'll drag that file to Descript, and from there, I can just start editing the video. If I hand it off to an editor, I might do a little bit of light edits and then hand off that version to him so I know that, you know, he has the takes that I want him to have versus just me giving him a complete raw file. But sometimes I have just given a complete raw file because I found that, you know, it was close enough to what I was envisioning. But I edit, you know, a good amount of my videos that I'm posting these days from my personal account. So I'll just edit it in Descript. Sometimes I'll do the whole edit in Descript, and I don't need to export it and upload it to another program. But sometimes Descript, you know, it just doesn't add that, like, extra little touch that I want to add. So I'll do the initial edit in Descript, which is like making sure it's about as tight as it can be without adding in any effects, without adding in any images, and I'll export that video. And then I'll either edit the video in Submagic or CapCut. Submagic is great for adding fancy captions, and I can also add in b roll. You could even add in music. I use it for content clips. It's a fantastic service, but it's not always necessary for every video. And sometimes I just wanna add a little, you know, effect or animation that I can't do in the script and I can't do in sub magic, so I'll just do it in capcut. So I'll just load the video that I've exported from the script into capcut, add in some effects or whatever I need to do there, and then export it there. From there, I either upload directly to the platform or I use Metricool to schedule the post out to go later, and that is literally it. That's like my whole workflow. Now on the flip side, there is like a little bit of a different workflow that I'll do at the beginning if I don't film at my desk. I don't film at my desk, I have to add in a couple more steps, which slows down the process, but sometimes it's just nice to vary it up. And this is what I do. So I'll film the video using my Sony ZV E 1 camera with my RODE wireless pro microphone. And after I record the video, coming back to my computer, I'll drag the file to my desktop, and I'll save an audio only version. I open up Adobe Podcast Enhance. I drag the audio file into Adobe Podcast Enhance just to polish up the sound. The Rode Wireless Pro has fantastic sound quality, but it just smooths out everything. So I add around, like, 40, sometimes 50 percent of the processing through Adobe Podcast Enhance. I use the audio only file from the video file. Because I shoot in 4 k from the Sony ZV E 1, the file can be kind of big, and it just takes longer inside Adobe Podcast Enhance. So when I just do the audio file, it processes faster. Then I open up CapCut. I load in the video file. I load in the audio file. I just remove the audio from the video because it's still in the video until it gets manually removed inside CapCut by me. And I make sure it's all synced up and good to go, which, again, just takes a few seconds. Then I add in any color adjustments. So I'll add in my LUT that I like to use, same LUT that I use through Ecamm Live, and then I'll add in 1 little tool that's under the retouch section. And I just talked about this, last weekend on my TikTok because someone had shared something in the comments about how, you know, they wanna film more content, but they work overnight, and they always feel like they look tired. And as, you know, someone who's a newer dad, not a brand new dad, but I've been, you know, a newer dad and kind of, like, still catching back up into sleep and all things kind of life. I find myself that I look a little bit tired frequently too. So in CAPCA, under the retouch section, there's a a part where, like, it's kinda like FaceTune, you know, where you can, like, smooth out your face. You can make yourself look super wild and unrealistic in there. I don't do that. Under the retouch, there's a dark circles filter or effect, and I will click that and add that around, like, 30 or 40. And it just lightly takes out the darkness under my eyes. I don't know if that's due to sleep. I drink a lot of water. Who knows? But I just add that in. I just feel like it makes me look a little bit more awake. Do I need to do that? Absolutely not. Does anyone comment on it? Absolutely not. Maybe they will now. But, yeah, I just like to do that. It's out of habit almost. And so from there, once it's in Descript, the rest of the process happens. I do the initial edit. I'll export it. I'll give it to an editor, or I'll edit it myself, finishing it in Descript or finishing it in Submagic or CapCut. And that's really it. Because I've done this so many times, I know exactly where files need to go, what settings I need to click and adjust. But for the most part, there's really not that much into it because my goal is to just make the topics interesting enough that it's not the editing that makes the video better. It's what's inside the video. Like, what's the actual meat of the video? And lastly, let's talk about podcast ads. It's been a minute since I've spoken about podcast ads, and I got a fantastic email from Miranda who had asked if I had done anything about podcast ads. And I'm like, I was looking through the podcast. I'm like, actually, I don't know. Real quick overview when it comes to podcast ads. There's 3 main areas for podcast ads. And if you're referencing my podcast, as a best practice for podcast ads, don't because I'm not a good example to follow when it comes to utilizing ads within your podcast. I'm not gonna go into too much detail here, but I do, you know, my content differently than most. And, you know, feel free to model me. I'm not saying, you know, you're you're an adult. You can do whatever you choose to do. But, really, when it comes to most shows, there's 3 main areas you wanna place ads or at least utilize, like, 2 of the 3 main areas. Right? You have your pre roll, your mid roll, and your post roll. Pre roll is before your episode starts. I'm sure you've heard podcasts where immediately, the first thing you hear is an ad. Mid roll is like you're talking, the person's talking, and they're like, and we're going to take a quick word from our sponsors. Something like that happens in the middle. And then post roll is right at the end, and that is before the file is almost over, before the episode is done. And that's maybe after the episode is done, you just go into the ads. Now when we're looking at, like, the effectiveness of the placement of the ads, let's just think through listener behavior for a moment. When someone is making the decision to listen to a podcast, they see the title, then they go, I wanna listen to this episode. And then they tap that episode, and then they hear ads. Right? Podcast listeners are notorious for skipping ads, especially at the beginning, because they didn't tap this episode that they wanted to hear an ad and then go do something else. They're like, I'm gonna dive into this episode. So pre roll ads are gonna be probably the most least effective when it comes to actually converting someone to take an action. Just because, again, like listener intention, their intention is to listen to the episode, not to navigate away from this thing that they wanted to do unless the ad blows them away. Like, not that they're useless or anything, but we're talking just common sense, what action someone is gonna take after they do something. Right? Now when it comes to mid roll ads, the key can often be finding the right placement within the episode of where the mid roll ad should go. If it's in the middle of, you know, a conversation and and they are waiting to get on the other side of this ad to hear the resolution of what it is that's being spoken about, there's a high probability they're just gonna be skipping through that ad to get to the resolution because there's this tension that's built up. So that's why it's a good idea when you're placing ads. Ideally, you look at the episode content within that, and you kind of think about, okay, where would an ad fit best that goes with the flow, that's not breaking up what the person's listening to so much that they're just gonna skip through it, and you're not annoying or, like, worsening the quality of your episode. And then looking at post roll ads, this means they've listened to the whole episode. There's nothing left for them to hear, and there is some type of call to action or some type of advertisement that the host reads. And that's it. Now looking at listener behavior again, all listeners will hear the pre roll ad because they listen to the episode unless they skip it. They hear that pre roll ad. And then with any piece of audio content or video content, there will be a certain number of listeners who drop off. Nobody has a 100% listen retention throughout the whole piece of content. Right? So you think about numbers wise, how many people heard the mid roll ad, and then you think by the end of the episode, how many people even made it to the end of the episode that could hear the post roll ad? So I say all this because you have to take into consideration listener retention, how many people are listening and how long are they listening for, and then what are you talking about in those ads? If you're selling your own product or service, does it make sense to mention it at the beginning of the episode, middle, or end? If you're advertising for a business and maybe this is more brand awareness, maybe it makes sense to mention it at the very beginning because it doesn't matter if someone clicks off and uses your affiliate code. It's more for brand recognition purposes. And if you really want engaged listeners to take action on something that you mentioned in the advertisement, it might make sense to mention it at the end because that's where you're gonna have the most engaged fan base. Does that make sense? As always, with any of this stuff, feel free to reach out, and I can clarify more about it. Alright. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I enjoyed recording it. I'll catch you in the next 1.