Behind the Jump Rope Reels with Dizzy: Tech Recording Tips for Real Skippers (Ep. 30)

Dizzy Skips (00:00)
Hey folks, it’s Dizzy and I want to give you a little overview of the tech that I use when I’m making reels. I’m no pro by any stretch. I’m no photographer, but I have picked up some tips along the way and some tricks that I use to try and make my reels a little bit prettier. And so I thought I’d run through the tech that I use, starting with my phone, which is my camera. It is my audio player. It is my little companion. It reads me audio books while I’m driving.

if I’m not rocking out. I have the iPhone 13 mini pro and I have an Otterbox case on it which is largely broken because I drop that thing all the time. So a few notes about camera phones and I’m an iPhone guy but I happen to know that some of the same things apply on Android. You have a front-facing camera and a back-facing camera.

And oftentimes on newer phones you have multiple cameras in both places and they are of different quality. The front facing camera, the one that you would use for selfies and stuff works really well and is usually, or at least on the iPhone 13 Pro is fantastic. The back facing camera, there are a couple of different lenses there. There’s a wide view and a normal view and a bigger light sensor. And so what I found out the hard way when I started was,

I’d jump a lot at night in low light situations and when I would use my phone I would prop it up against a rock and I would use the selfie phone camera to film myself and it would end up looking like a hostage video. It was grainy and dark and you could kind of see what I was doing but there wasn’t a lot of detail and I did some research and found I should be using the back facing camera here because the light sensor is bigger the pixel density is better, you just get a better picture. And I think that the same is true on a lot of Android phones. So the frustrating thing about that, of course, is that When you are using the selfie, you can see yourself, you prop it up against a rock and you can kind of see yourself and keep yourself in frame. When you’re using the back facing camera, it’s all about setting up your shot and making sure that you stay within the shot. And I have made many mistakes in that regard.

Setting up the shot and then jumping half out of the shot or setting up the shot and forgetting to hit record. So My recommendation is always use the back facing camera because it will give you the highest resolution video or pictures. So when it makes sense, use the back facing camera.

One of the things that I found super helpful was having a tripod. My first, I don’t know, four, six months, something of jumping, was just me propping my phone up against a wall or a rock or stuffing it in a shoe or something like that just so that I could kind of see myself. And what I ended up doing was going on Amazon and buying this little tripod here.

This is actually the exact one that I bought the Sensine 62 inch phone tripod it’s 20 bucks right now on Amazon there’s a little coupon.

There are all sorts of these tripods and this one seems to work for me there are some that are better than others. For jumping outside in places where it’s windy it’s important to have a nice base and so this one has a little base that pops out like that and then you lock this little cuff down at the bottom so that it won’t go back up.

And then it’s also, as you saw maybe when you looked at the description, it is 62 inches high. So it’s got these little things that allow me to stretch it out and make it bigger. And I can get it up to a little over five feet, which is nice. I jump a lot on limestone benches and things like that. And so sometimes the extra height is nice if I want to angle down and see the top of the bench rather than shooting from the bottom.

So I really like that. One other thing I’ve noted with this is that there is a little.

spinny, the technical term is spinny thing. There’s a little spinny thing here that allows you to move this back and forth. And it only goes so far one way. It goes a little farther the other way. So sometimes when I am filming and I’m using the tripod, give me a second here. What I have found easier to do is like if I were doing selfie stuff and I wanted to see myself, I would.

Position this like that and I would put the front part of the phone facing me so I could see myself What I do more often than that is I put the phone in like this and then I turn it around so it’s facing the area that I want to film and then within you know the viewfinder here I can sort of pick out the area that I want And that works really well for me then I can sort of adjust up and down and then I just screw the spinny thing to tighten it to the point where I want it.

it and then I’ve got my tripod. One other thing to note about the tripod I mentioned stability and where I jump oftentimes there’s a lot of wind and I can’t tell you the number of times that my tripod has face planted my phone into the ground because of breeze. So I travel with lots of ropes and baloney and I have a backpack and so I just when I pop this thing on the ground.

I set a backpack on one of the ends. So if the wind is blowing this way, I’ll set the backpack over here so that I’ve got a little bit of sturdiness there. And that seems to work pretty well. So that’s my stand set up. few other comments with regard to the phone.

I use the mic on the phone. I’m often wearing noise canceling headsets, so I don’t often hear a lot of what’s going on around me. But I do use the mic on the phone for a few different reasons. One is to pick myself up singing or the funny things that I say or the curses. And another one is that I always jump to music and I frequently forget what I was jumping to. So…

I may go out and jump for two hours and over the course of two hours jump to, five to 14 different songs.

So having the audio, I pick up myself singing or humming or whatever, and that helps me sort things out. Also, sometimes there’s funny things that go on around me that I have no idea of. was a time last year where I was jumping at Memorial Park in the morning on like a Saturday morning, and I’m just getting my little workout in. And I can see people around, but I pull my hat down and I’m just focused on what I’m doing. And a car drove by and…

They happened to drive by while I was trying this combo and I messed it up and I laughed at myself. And later on, when I went back and I watched that video, I realized that as the car drove by, there were a bunch of girls in there screaming, go, you can do it. And it was super funny. And they happened to say that right as I was goofing up my combo. So I’m laughing and it looks like I’m laughing at them, but I had no idea. Anyway, the audio can be fun.

So I use my phone instead of like a GoPro or a DSLR or something because I’m cheap. It’s what I have. And the phone quality is so fricking good. So I don’t feel like I really need to upgrade. Once I fall into lots of money or something, maybe I’ll look at other options.

I consider my mat part of my gear, but it’s not really tech gear. And I quite honestly, I don’t always use it. I use it indoors. I use it sometimes at the park. As some of you have noted, I have trouble staying on the mat because I like to travel. jumping with a mat or without a mat or on a stone or on grass or whatever makes really no difference to the tech. It’s just about the jumping and the ease of skipping. One other thing that I have

picked up recently that I find helpful is a little power bank. And this one has a little solar recharger thing and it’s got a little opening where you’ve got a few USB outputs and then a few inputs to charge it. And so this can be helpful because I don’t know if you all have had the situation where you’re having a lot of fun, you’re making progress, you’re feeling good, and then your phone is like 10 % battery and falling quickly.

So this I keep in my backpack and sometimes when I’m just walking or if I’m in between sessions or whatever, I’ll just plug in and see if I can get a little more juice into the phone. And that’s helpful.

So let’s talk about finding the light and like the least muddy spot or the best location. I’m a big fan of pretty backgrounds. And if you’ve seen any of my reels, know, like jumping at the park with trees in the back or with the town in the back or things like that. So I’m frequently keeping my eye out for cool places to skip where I can have something pretty in the background.

And things that I pay attention to are movement, light sources, and what all is going on back there. Because some backgrounds, if there’s a lot of stuff going on and you’re jumping in front of it, it can be hard to focus on the jumping. If something is, know, if you’re up against a forest and it’s a nice green-brown sort of backdrop, then you can have a really nice.

presentation right in front, you know, jumping.

I like jumping outside and I like jumping in nature and I’m a big fan of fun backdrops. So I am always keeping my eye out for cool places to jump where there are fun things in the background. And as many of you know, I jump in Red Wing, Minnesota at this place called Memorial Park. There are actually a whole bunch of parks in town that are lovely, but Memorial Park is…

got an elevation of 800 and something feet overlooks the town. And so there’s all sorts of beautiful places to skip, whether it’s overlooking the town or trees in the background or frisbee golf course. so that’s something I just make note of cool places to skip. And one of the things that is important when finding a place to skip is the light source, like how is the lighting? And as I mentioned in the beginning, sometimes I jump at night and,

lighting can be really tricky. So I do things like jump in front of my car headlights or jump in a park underneath a lamp. But it’s important to figure out where that light is relative to the camera. So right now, as I’m sitting here talking to the computer, I’ve got a light right here shining on me. If I were to try and film myself here, that incoming light is gonna muddy the picture

And oftentimes that’s not what you want. There are plenty of videos that I’ve done where I am jumping and I’m filming into a light source and I’m doing it purposefully so that I make a silhouette of myself. So you lose the detail of me, but you see my outline jumping up against this sunny background or this sunset background. in general, the good principle is to have the light source behind you shining at you.

and then have the camera, you know, with a light source behind the camera shining at you because then you get the best detail. But you can always futz around with that and do what makes you feel happy.

One thing I think a lot about while filming and doing design is the rule of thirds. So the rule of thirds in short is that you take your visual canvas and you divide it up into nine blocks. You have three rows and three columns and where those columns intersect with the rows, you end up with these four points, these four focus points.

And the idea is that for visual interest, if you can position what you’re trying to film at one of those intersections, one of those points, or in one of the thirds, that it can make for a better visual composition. So iPhone and Android both offer you the ability to turn on a grid on your phone to help with that. And I’m going to attempt to show you that.

So here on the iPhone, if you want to turn on the camera grid, you go down to camera, and then there’s under composition grid. And you just turn this on, and then what happens is when you turn on your camera,

there are grid lines there.

So here I’ve turned the photo grid on my phone and I don’t know how well you can see that, but it adds a little grid there. So here’s my phone, here’s the grid. And if I were to try and take a picture of something, I might try and line it

so that whatever it was that I found interesting in this case, say like my hat, is at one of those intersection points. And then I take the picture. Same thing holds with video.

A few other reasons why I think it’s fun to pay attention to the rule of thirds. is that it creates more visual interest in the image when things aren’t all just right in the center. It can give you a natural sense of balance in the frame and it can draw the viewer’s eye to important parts of the video or the image.

It works just as well for still photography as it does for video. So try to keep the sun behind your camera, try to line things up with your grid. And like I said, sometimes I break the rules because I want to have a silhouette or I want to do something different. These are all just guidelines. They’re not rules.

When you’re jumping indoors, oftentimes you have a little more flexibility over lighting. Like you can move lights around or things like that or get a ring light. I don’t have a ring light right now. I have a desk light and that’s what I’m using.

Another thing that I like to do with light is play with shadows. When jumping outside, oftentimes I’m jumping in the evenings when the sun is nearing the horizon, so shadows get long and things like that. When I’m positioning my camera, if I am say jumping on a limestone bench or whatever, I will try and position it so that

the bench is sort of centered at an intersection point and there’s some dead space over here where you can see the grass where my shadow is. And I just find that super fascinating. I love watching my shadow skip. Sometimes I think he does something different than I do and I don’t quite know how that works, but anyway.

And then one other thing I mentioned before is just avoid distracting things in the background. If there’s a rager going on in the background and you’re skipping in front, it’s gonna be harder to pay attention to you when there are drunk people falling in the pool.

When I go out and jump, usually jump for a couple hours at a time and I’m not actually jumping for two hours. I’m jumping for five minutes and then taking a break or I’m working on something and I’m jumping, swearing, laughing, singing, all that sort of stuff. So it’s not two hours of straight jumping, but over that two hours, I may listen to

the same song for a half hour, I may listen to a AI playlist and then jump one song after another. Truthfully, I can end up with somewhere between say two, three, and 15 different recordings in a day of me jumping. what I try to do,

is announce the song that I’m jumping to before I start jumping because detective work after the fact can be difficult.

So how long do I record? My individual videos are usually between, I would say, three minutes and 20 minutes. They have been longer than that. They’ve been a lot longer than that, where I’m working on one song over and over again. What I find is that recording shorter videos and stopping, even if I’m jumping to the same song over and over again, if I stop the video between jumps,

it can be helpful when going back through the video because mining a 15 minute video for the one minute that you want to show on Instagram takes a while.

I am not really a choreographer. I think some of that is that I just really haven’t tried it. My memory maybe isn’t what it used to be, but I’m just a dyed in the world freestyler. So I get out there and just jam. So I don’t have any big tricks for memorizing combos or things like that. I have a notebook that I use to note things down. And so if I were to try a combo, I would probably…

write with my little pencil and stuff and then prop it up so that I could remind myself what I was doing. But I have friends that are just combo-licious that that’s what they do. They just plan out combos, they execute them, they look really great, and that’s just not my bag right now. But at some point I’m sure I will do some planned out combos. So let’s talk about music and audio. I am

music nerd and that might be conservative. Spotify, I use the AI DJ on Spotify and I love it because it comes back and tells me stats like it came back and told me yesterday, you listened to this song 69 times last month. Or the other day it told me

in the month of April I listened to 5,119 minutes of music dude get a life what you’re doing anyway I listen to a lot of music and I like good quality music and I’ve found that certain headphones work better for jumping than others or work better in certain situations for jumping than others so I’m gonna show you my headphones

My favorite pair of headphones is my Bose QuietComfort headphones. I have probably destroyed three of these over the years. They’re great, but I just use them until they fall apart and I have to replace the ear pads. And I replaced the ear pads on this set a couple different times and it’s starting to go. So I will eventually have to replace it. But what I like about this sound quality is fantastic.

It also has a mode that is completely noise canceling and a mode that is sort of a pass through mode where they call it aware mode where you can hear a little bit of what’s going on around you, which can be nice if you’re jumping in traffic or something like that, I suppose. So these are my go to the downside of these. They are a little bit heavier. They stick up another three quarters of an inch up above the top of your head. And I sweat like a

pig and they absorb sweat into the ear buds. And I can tell you it’s gross after a few hours to grab your headset, stick it on, and then have like little runnels of sweat. No good. But these are my go-tos. On hot days, I can only use these for so long before the sweat is too much.

They’re also expensive. I think I got these at Costco on sale at a hundred bucks off and they were still a couple hundred bucks. my next set of over the ear headphones are these Beats Solo Four. And, and I do like these quite a bit. They’re a little bit smaller. They don’t fit over my ears quite as much. they, kind of sit on top of my ears, but I like them. I got

these on a rad sale, a half off at Target. So they were 50 % off. think they were a little over a hundred bucks. I mean, I think they were 79 bucks actually. So I like them. The sound quality is not as good as the Bose, but it’s good.

My second favorite earphones to jump with are my Beats Power Beats. And so these are like little pro over the ear things. They kind of just do that and then they stick on. What I like about these is they don’t absorb sweat. The sound quality is good. I’d say it’s probably as good as the Beats solo.

Maybe not quite the base range, but a lot of that does come down to the ear tips that you use so when you get earphones whether they’re like these or air pods or whatever they come with different sized tips and For me it makes sense to try out the different sizes because I need to have a good seal in order to get the good bass Another thing I find with these is that they’ve got this little you know, they slip over the ear And so depending upon what hat I’m wearing sometimes I will kind of tuck

that

little thing under the ear so that it holds it against my head and that gives me more bass. It’s all about the bass. Anyway, I really like these. They’re not cheap. Again, it was a Costco sale. I got these on and they hold a charge really well. They recharge really well. You put them back in the case. This plugs in just like the iPhone does and I think that they can get like 50 % charge in like 30 minutes.

These are really good one for jumping. Two other pairs of headphones that I use, one AirPods Pro. And I really like the AirPods Pro. They’re easy to stick in. They do a pretty good job of staying and the sound quality is fantastic. AirPods Pro, I’d say are pretty close to Bose as far as sound quality goes.

maybe not quite the same bass range, but still very, good.

So the problem that I have with the AirPods is that when I’m sweaty, they don’t always stay in the way I want them to. And the worst case of this was once when I was walking my dog, Zuzu, we were down by the Mississippi River and I was listening to music, got into it, I’m shuffling, and I look over the edge of the river and there goes one of my earbuds right in the river.

I could have jumped in after it, but I had the dog and I was like, nope. So I ordered a replacement and then I lost my replacement at Costco. So I need to buy another replacement for those. did recently pick up one more pair of Beats headphones and it sounds like I’m a Beats guy, but I’m really impartial.

These were just, again, a really good sale at Target. And so this is the Beats Solo Flex. And the idea here is that it can kind of wrap around your neck, and then these little guys stick in, and you’ve got some controls on these little paddles here. And what I like about these is that they’re light.

They go in my ears. There’s nothing over my ears, which sometimes if you’re wearing sunglasses and you’ve got the over the ear like power beats, you’ve got a lot of stuff here and it can like give you a mad magazine ears or whatever.

I like these and then they stay in really well. Again, it comes down to the tip that you put on the earbud, how well it stays in your ear. If you have one that’s too small, it’ll fall out. And honestly, getting the right size is gonna get you better tunes, know? Like it’d get you more well-rounded sound. So I like these as well.

The one other thing I will say about in the ear rather than over the ear headphones is that what you use can be affected by the length of your rope. I like a short rope. I used to just measure it to my navel and now it’s between my navel and my belt line usually

just about an inch over my belt line. So it’s relatively short. And when you watch video of me skipping, you can see that rope just clears my head, you know? And if I get wild and my arms go out too wide, then it smacks me in the back of the head or it smacks the back of the over your headphones. And I’ve launched them off my head more times than I can count. I’ve also done the Geordie LaForge thing where you kind of put them over your eyes.

Sometimes I will purposefully use the in the ear stuff when I’m trying to go really fast and if I’m trying new tricks because when my form is not perfect, not that my form is ever perfect, but when my form is wild, when my arms are out like this, it shortens the rope. And like I said, I it’s not fun to launch those things off your head.

So while this is not technical, I did wanna say a little bit about what I do when things go wrong, because if you jump rope, things go wrong. Like you smack your shins, you smack your head, you launch your headphones. Many of you have heard my story about getting started and being overeager and jumping.

you know, for a couple hours, two days in a row with no warmup and no previous experience and getting to the point where I gave myself plantar fasciitis and couldn’t really walk for six weeks. That was no fun. It was no fun at all. And when I recovered enough that I could start jumping and dancing again, I was so happy to jump and dance that.

I would go out and I would skip and I could skip for seven seconds before I goofed up. And it was frustrating a little bit, but I was so happy to be dancing and skipping that I would laugh. And when I would mess up, I would just dance. And so that’s the attitude that I try to have now. I’m just lucky as hell to be able to jump rope. It means so much to me. It helps me so much that I want to preserve that.

when I am out and I find myself getting agitated or frustrated when I’m trying a trick or I’m trying something new or I’m just trying to flow and I’m not able to keep it up for very long. Sometimes I find myself swearing, getting agitated, feeling like, this isn’t working. And that’s not the way I want to feel when I’m jumping rope. So.

One of my solutions is I use an app called brain.fm, which is an audio app that provides audio for focus or meditation or sleep or relaxation. And the whole idea is that they’ve got a whole bunch of different audio tracks and they use binaural beats to kind of.

get both hemispheres of your brain in sync. And one of the things that they offer is meditation, both guided and non-guided meditation tracks. And so there have been many times where I’m out jumping rope and I feel myself getting frustrated and, and I’m having fun, but I’m mad in some way. You know, I’m just like ticked that I can’t get this. That’s not how I want to be. So oftentimes what I will do is stick on my headset, sit down, put on a meditative track.

I like guided meditation, so I’ll put on a guided meditation track and then meditate for like 15 minutes. And then usually that plus focusing on my breathing centers me enough that when I get up, I’m like, okay, yeah, I’m here to have fun. It’s okay, you know? And then when I mess up again, I’m laughing and I’m dancing. So I don’t know if that helps any of you, but.

I just don’t like jumping angry. like having fun. I like flowing. I like losing myself. And so when I find myself getting to the point where I’m not in that state, sometimes it’s best for me to take a quick break, take a walk, get a drink, meditate, do whatever it is, and then go back to it. And then I have more fun. So let’s talk a little bit about editing the video. There are all sorts of

video editing apps and I am really a newbie with most of them. I have edited, I would say 99%, 99.9 % of my video in the Instagram app itself. But I have also tried CapCut and then Instagram has a newer piece of software called Edits that I’ve tried a few times. And both of those work really well too. They have some cool features. I would encourage you to check them out.

When I am editing a video, basically the way I do it is I use Spotify for my music. I’m always jumping to music. So I pull up the video and hopefully I’ve labeled it or I’ve sang a line of it or I’ve said what it is at the beginning. So I know the song to go to. So I will go into my phone, turn on Spotify, turn on the song I was jumping to and then start watching the video. depending upon how serious I am or where I’m at,

I may have a little notebook and I may watch the whole video or kind of scroll through the whole video and note the points where there was jumping interest. So out of a five minute video, I am never jumping for five minutes in a row. I’m jumping for 30 seconds here. I’m jumping for a minute and half there, that sort of thing. And not all of the scenes are pretty, right? So I, I listened to the song, I scroll through the video, I find the areas of interest and then

once I am convinced that there’s enough areas of interest in that video to make a reel, then I go into the Instagram app, upload that video, and start editing. One note there is that I mentioned earlier that sometimes my videos are five minutes, sometimes they’re longer, I have had like a 20 minute video or longer of me jumping to one song that I’ve uploaded to Instagram and edited.

only to really use, you know, 30 seconds of it or a minute and half of it. So one thing that I found helpful is if I am pre-watching the video that I’m going to add to Instagram, I can edit that video on the phone before I upload it to Instagram. So for example, last night I went out and I jumped and I jumped for like five and a half minutes to the song. And the first 35 seconds of it were me just putting the song on and

to, you know, the camera and walking around and getting ready and then doing side swings or whatever. But the interesting part started happening at second 45 or something like that. And then at the end of the video, usually there’s a portion where I’m done jumping and I get down off the bench and I’m walking around or whatever before I shut off the camera. So there’s some dead space on either side. So I tend to on the iPhone, take those spaces out.

before I upload Instagram, so I’m uploading a shorter video which is quicker for Instagram to process. I don’t know if you’ve had it happen where you upload a video to Instagram and you just sit there for like five minutes while it’s uploading. So I just try to keep the amount of data I’m uploading as small as possible to start with.

As far as syncing my tracks to music, Instagram has some built-in algorithms that do a good job of this. In general, I am very impressed with once I upload a track and I add music to it, how closely they sync. but it’s not always perfect.

Once I start watching the video, then I’ll split the video at points of interest. that, you know, few seconds of me just doing side swings and dance around like a fool that doesn’t need to be in the video. I’ll split right after that and then watch the, you know, whatever it is, 20 seconds after that, where I pull off some combo and then I goof up and hit myself in the head. Then I split it again. And then the next segment, I will use the adjust tool.

Or if you’re on CapCut or on the edits, I believe it’s called slip, where you sort of slip the video or you kind of move the video on the timeline to the point where something interesting starts happening again. And so I will do that multiple times until I have all of the interesting things sort of in a row with all of the dead space cut out. And then I go through and rewatch it and look at it critically for where are the really interesting parts, you know?

Over the course of a five minute video, I’ve edited out the first and last minute and I ended up with three minutes and then between all of my edits, I end up with a minute and a half or two minutes of video that is comprised of four different segments. I will watch those and evaluate each segment. Sometimes, you know, they’re not all the same quality or I’m not doing something interesting in each one. so I will take out segments. I will delete them. I will shorten them.

If I’m trying to sync to music, have a couple tips for you. One is don’t use headphones while you are listening to the music that you’re trying to sync on your phone. Because, well, I say don’t use headphones, don’t use Bluetooth headphones. Because Bluetooth has a standard delay of between 150 and 300 milliseconds, I think, in transmission.

So I’ve had it happen where I’ve got my headphones on, I’ve edited a whole video, everything’s looking good, it’s synced perfectly. I publish it to Instagram, take the headphones off and watch it and everything is off just a little bit. It just doesn’t feel like it’s banging, you know, it’s just a little bit off. So while I’m editing to music, I do not use headphones so that I can just make sure there’s no lag there between the Bluetooth signal.

And in my videos, I tend not to use transitions or lot of effects. If I use effects, every once in a while, I will use a filter. And most often I’m using a filter when I’m jumping in low light situations. There are a few different filters on Instagram that brighten things up a little bit. And so I’ve done that, but outside of that, I don’t add lot of effects or transitions. That’s just me.

So let’s talk a little bit about writing captions because I get comments about my captions

All right, so here’s a little behind the scenes magic and confessional. Some people have commented about my writing and how my descriptions are great and things like that. And I really love writing and I love making people laugh. But I also have uploaded like 700 videos to Instagram and writing 700 descriptions to the extent that I do would take a long time. So what I decided a long time ago was to kind of make a template for my descriptions that shows how I like my descriptions.

So I’ve got some opening. I usually say what rope or music I was listening to, the location, that sort of thing. And then I’ve got some hashtags. And so I made a template of what my standard description looks like, and I tend to use that over and over again. Sometimes I’ll just pull up the template and change out things. But I will confess that I am a web developer by day. I have a web development agency

and we use AI a lot for search engine optimization and writing and all sorts of automation. I do use AI as well for my description sometimes. I have a ChatGPT AI bot that I have created for jump rope and it knows my language and my name and what I like. And it’s a lot of fun to talk to. So when I create a reel, I will take my

template text and I have pre-made prompts that I’ve created that are in notes that I feed into ChatGPT in order to get a few different real descriptions back and then I have a little conversation back and forth until I get it where I want it and then usually I’ll take it and then I’ll take it out and I’ll edit it and I’ll add whatever little dizzy magic I think needs to be added before I post it so that’s my

secret reel description confessional.

For the super nerdy of you, I really like data. so I use this tool called notion for note taking, and managing projects and stuff like the jump rope podcast. And, one of the things that you can do in Notion is set up a database. And so I’ve actually nerded out and set up some automation so that when I do write a reel description and whether I do it with AI help.

not, I copy whatever it is on my iPhone to the clipboard. And then I have a little Siri shortcut that I call “Reel Descriptions” I just type the word reel descriptions and it pulls up my little shortcut within Siri and I hit that and then it creates a new row in a database in Notion and adds my entire description to that row. So I actually have a database of all of the descriptions that I’ve posted for the last few months.

and it’s fun to go look back at. And when I am sometimes jumping to the same song, I can go find my previous description, pull it up, and remix it in some way.

So let’s talk a little bit about file size. I mentioned before that I tend to resize my videos before I upload them to Instagram and start doing my editing there.

So one of the catches with Instagram is it will only allow you to have 90 seconds of audio on a reel or actually that’s not true. It will only allow you to have 90 seconds of actual music on the video, right? So if you’re using their tool to add music to your video, you can only have 90 seconds. So if you’re like me and you upload a video of five minutes, you end up with three minutes of the video upfront because that’s what Instagram gives you.

And then there’s two minutes that are, you know, uploaded, but not showing at that moment. And then it will add, then when I add my track that I’m listening to, like Looking Back by Lord Huron, I add that and then it’s going to put three minutes of that track underneath that three minutes of video that it’s showing. But it will not allow me to save that video until the audio is down to only 90 seconds or less, because you can’t use more than 90 seconds of premium.

you know, songs on Instagram reels. So one little trick there is I will upload my, you know, five minute video. I’ll get my three minutes there. And if I don’t have time to edit everything right then, then you can just shorten the audio, just like you can adjust the length of video. You can click on the audio and shorten it so that it’s 90 seconds, keeping the main video to be three minutes long and then save it as draft. And then you can go back later and then

do your editing of the video and pick things out. But that’s one way you can get it into Instagram, get it as a draft, get it paired with the song that you like, and then go back later to do your editing.

With the Instagram app you can tell it to upload at the highest video quality possible. And I would recommend that. Within Instagram, if you go to Settings and then scroll down to, you probably can’t see this, but if you go to settings and then media quality, there is a little selection there in the middle, which is upload video at the highest quality. turn that on. I think that that will give you the best result there.

So someone asked me a few months ago, how important was it for me to add hashtags to the posts? And the truth is, I’m no Instagram expert, and I couldn’t tell you exactly how much adding hashtags benefits me.

But I did do a little lookup and found that 36 % of Instagram users utilize Instagram much like a search engine where they go up and actually search things in the search box. And when you’re doing that, having hashtags can help surface things in search. So if someone’s searching for jump rope and you’ve tagged your post as jump rope, you’re more likely to show up in that search result.

those hashtags can function as navigational aids as well. So when someone sees a hashtag on my post and they click on that hashtag, it’s going to query Instagram for all the other posts that use that hashtag so people can browse by hashtag. And I also read that posts that feature at least one hashtag experience a 12.6 % increase in engagement compared to those without.

And if you use 11 or more hashtags, you can lead to an 80 % interaction rate, which is a significant jump. So, sounds like hashtags are important. I have a batch that I use. I try not to go crazy with them.

So, tag dude.

So the last thing here is really a bonus round. It’s just things I’ve learned while doing this for over a year and recording an obsessive number of videos. So one thing which sounds super basic is charge your battery before you go out. Oftentimes I’m going out after work, so I try to remember by an hour or so before I go to plug my phone in so I’ve got a full charge.

Nothing sucks worse and I’ve had it happen so many times where I pull up to the park and I’m like, yeah, I’m going to go out and jump. 11 % battery. That’s not going to last me that long. So having an external battery pack can help save you in those situations, but charging before you go can be a lifesaver. And I don’t know about you, but when I got my iPhone 13, I did not throw away my old phone. did not trade it in. So I actually have two other iPhones that I travel with as backup for

video or storage. So if you have a backup that can be good. Another tip is triple check your camera angle, especially when you’re using that front-facing camera and you’ve got it in a tripod and you can’t see while you’re jumping what’s being filmed. You want to triple check that you know you’re filming the right segment. One of the things that I do when I set things up

is I’ll look at the margins. So when I’m pointing my camera I’ll say over on the left I can go as far as this tree before I’m out of frame and on the right I can go as far as two feet on this side of this bench before I’m out of frame. And I just try to remember that while I’m jumping so I don’t jump out of frame because I’ve done that. I’ve finished up a video and been like that was awesome I just had so much fun and then looked at the video and like 90 % of it is out of frame.

no fun. Another thing, double check your recording. Like there’s no use having everything in frame if it’s not recording and I’ve done that more times than I can count as well. It sucks so bad especially when you’re so proud of the thing that you just pulled off. You’re like, yes, I can’t believe I finally got that footwork.

Anyway, so sometimes a quick test run can really help. And by that I mean, you know, set up position your phone so that it’s pointing at what you want it to point at. Get your earphones in, do a test recording, you know, record for 30 seconds, go jump, go back and watch it and make sure that it’s capturing what you want to capture. I have also set up the phone, made sure that my focal

field was perfect and everything gone and jumped and then come back and realized I was headless. Like I had myself horizontally in the field but vertically my head was out of the field. sometimes a quick test can really show you those shortcomings quickly.

So I already mentioned don’t use Bluetooth when syncing music to video on the Instagram app or on other apps because there is a delay in the Bluetooth signal going from your device to your headset and in your ears. And that delay can be, like I said, 150 to 300 milliseconds. So it’s not long, it’s not a full second, but it’s enough that if you’re trying to jump on the beat, it can cause problems.

Glasses cleaner like I I get from Costco these little glasses wipes, you know for cleaning your glasses and they can be really helpful for cleaning your phone screen cleaning your phone lens and and other stuff your hands even I’ve used them and then iCloud Drive sync so on my iPhone I Last summer I was recording so much that

almost daily I would run out of space on my phone. And so one of the things I invested in was just upgrading my iCloud account so that I can sync my pictures and video from my phone up to iCloud. And it does that while things are plugged in. And that really helps. I have, I think I upgraded to the six terabyte or two terabyte or something like that plan with iCloud. So I have a whole bunch of stuff stored there.

And it’s just important to remember to plug in your phone and allow it to sync to get that old stuff up there so that you don’t always end up with that situation where you’ve run out of space.

So in closing, I’d like to just give a few recommendations or a few little thoughts. One is we do this for fun. It’s not for technical perfection or anything like that. So I put out a lot of stuff that is not great, but it makes me happy. I’m learning. I go back and I watch my videos. I enjoy listening to music. So this is all fun for me. And I think it’s important not to get too worried about the tech.

to the point where it interferes with my fun. So I think it’s cool to just sort of iterate and improve a little bit over time. That works for me. And don’t stress about the production quality. Just go have fun and jump. My process has changed over time, as I’ve said throughout this video. And a few things that have changed most are, one, I graduated from propping my phone up against a rock.

sticking it in a shoe to using a tripod and that’s helpful for me. I don’t always do that. Sometimes I travel with the tripod and I still prop up the phone because I want a lower angle or because I’m lazy or something like that. But that changed for me. I did get a sturdy backpack at some point from Costco and I have it over here and one of the things it did is

held its shape pretty well and it has a handle on the top so I could actually prop my phone on the top of the backpack up against the handle and use that as a stand and that worked quite well too. And then I graduated to the tripod which is even better because it gives you more control over the positioning of the camera and wind doesn’t throw it off as much.

I encourage you to experiment, iterate, tell me what works for you. Like I said, I’m no pro here. I’ve got tons of room to improve. So I would like any tips that you all have that can help me improve as well. I’d like to thank you all for jumping behind the scenes with me. I hope this helps someone out. I hope it helps you make your next masterpiece. And more than anything, I hope you have a lot of fun.

Please DM me if you create any reels and use any tips or if you have any tips for me that can help make my stuff better. I would really appreciate it. Next episode should be another interview episode. So thank you for putting up with this one. Again, most important part of this whole thing is to have fun. So get out there, skip and have a ball. Thanks for joining.

See you next time.