I was chatting with Adam Stacoviak over at Changelog a couple weeks back, and he mentioned that this year they've taken their podcast "video-first" via their YouTube channel.

I hadn't heard the phrase "video-first" before, but I could imagine he meant, "you record the show for video—which is more complex than recording audio alone—and then the audio is a downstream artifact from that video production." Of course, key to my personal brand is failing to demonstrate curiosity in the moment by simply asking Adam what he does, and instead going on an individual two-week-long spirit quest to invent all the wheels myself based on the possibly incorrect assumption of what he meant in the first place.

Anyway, as of v31 of Breaking Change, my podcast is now, apparently, a video-first production. I figured I'd share my notes on the initial changes to the workflow, along with links to the products I'm using.

Here's the video:

And here's the extremely simple and easy 10 step process that got me there (with affiliate links throughout):

1. Record audio and video in OBS
   • Video is recorded in 4k@60fps in 8-bit HEVC as an MKV file (because MKV files, unlike MOV, can be interrupted by a crash without losing the entire recording)
   • I use a Sony a7 mark IV over HDMI with Elgato Camlink 4K mounted via the Elgato Master Mount system and flanked on either side by Elgato Key Lights Air. I also have an Elgato Prompter in front of the lens that displays two windows, side-by-side: OBS on the left and my Things project with my show topics on the right
   • I record audio tracks from an SSL 2+ USB interface
     • Track 1 is reserved for the first XLR input, which has a bog-standard SM7b microphone plugged into it
     • Track 2 is L&R of the loopback interface for music and stingers (here's my guide on setting up SSL2+ for loopback that allowed me to avoid software like Audio Hijack)
   • Music and stingers are played manually from shortcuts on my Stream Deck XL
   • While recording, if I need a break, I only hit PAUSE/UNPAUSE instead of STOP/START to ensure only one file is created
   • When finished, leave it recording and then LEAVE THE ROOM for a minute to create some dead air I can later use to sample the room noise with iZotope's RX Spectral Denoise plugin

You'll never guess what happens next…

If you are publishing videos via the Instagram API (as I do for my feed2gram gem and for Beckygram), one of the first things you notice is that it is a lot less forgiving than their app is.

From their docs that spell this out:

The following are the specifications for Reels:

• Container: MOV or MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), no edit lists, moov atom at the front of the file.
• Audio codec: AAC, 48khz sample rate maximum, 1 or 2 channels (mono or stereo).
• Video codec: HEVC or H264, progressive scan, closed GOP, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.
• Frame rate: 23-60 FPS.
• Picture size:
• Maximum columns (horizontal pixels): 1920
• Required aspect ratio is between 0.01:1 and 10:1 but we recommend 9:16 to avoid cropping or blank space.
• Video bitrate: VBR, 25Mbps maximum
• Audio bitrate: 128kbps
• Duration: 15 mins maximum, 3 seconds minimum
• File size: 300MB maximum

If you get this wrong, you'll receive a mostly-unhelpful-but-better-than-nothing-error message that looks like this:

{
  "message": "The video file you selected is in a format that we don't support.",
  "type": "OAuthException",
  "code": 352,
  "error_subcode": 2207026,
  "is_transient": false,
  "error_user_title": "Unsupported format",
  "error_user_msg": "The video format is not supported. Please check spec for supported CodedException format",
  "fbtrace_id": "AvU9fEFKlA8Z7RLRlZ1j9w_"
}

I was sick of hobbling together the same half dozen ffprobe commands and then eyeballing the results (which are typically inscrutable if you don't know what you're looking for), so I wrote a script to test this for me.

For example, a recent clip failed to syndicate to Instagram and I wondered why that was, so I ran this little script, which I put on my PATH and named validate_video_for_instagram. It output:

Validating video: /Users/justin/Documents/podcast/clips/v30-the-startup-shell-game.mp4

✅ container
✅ audio_codec
✅ max_audio_sample_rate
✅ video_codecs
✅ color_space
✅ min_frame_rate
✅ max_frame_rate
❌ max_horizontal_pixels - Maximum columns (horizontal pixels): 1920 required; got: 2160
✅ min_aspect_ratio
✅ max_aspect_ratio
✅ max_video_bitrate_mbps
❌ max_audio_bitrate_kbps - Audio bitrate: 128kbps maximum required; got: 256.073
✅ min_duration_seconds
✅ max_duration_seconds
✅ max_size_megabytes

❌ Video had 2 error(s) preventing API upload to Instagram.
Docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-platform/instagram-graph-api/reference/ig-user/media

Is it surprising that the Instagram API won't accept 4K video? Yes. Especially since the videos weighs in at less than 100MB.

Want this for yourself?

To run this, you'll need a modern Ruby installed and ffprobe installed (on a Mac with homebrew, brew install ffprobe should do).

But wait, there's more…