I need to learn everything about making computer videos with sound, there is very little of interest on the Internet, a lot is about screen capture and very little includes sound. Could anyone suggest any material of interest, free or for sale, in print or electronic?

What I would like to learn:
How to make quality short videos (3-5 minutes) with sound, (facial of one speaker only - sitting at PC).
What software for linux - willing to purchase if free software does not exists or is of poor quality.

How videos would behave on visitor's PC in general - any obvious gotcha?

The format is as follows:
Any video needs to have reusable header, main video, reusable footer where same headers and footers need to be prepended/appended to different main videos. How to merge seamlessly.
Need to learn how to ensure there is consistency of presentation between different videos (distance to webcam and position) consistency of recorded volume, possibly other necessary parameters.
How to present face of speaker (make-up etc) - will avoid editing as much as possible.
Does not need to be "full-screen" as long as facial expressions are visible.
Visitors must be able (encouraged) to download the lot for offline viewing - how to pre-estimate size of files.

Thank you for your help.

What webcam, may limit this?

I need to purchase (quality) webcam and microphone and need to learn about that too.

Cheese works well for me. I found a few others (to try once) searching the package manager also found Video4Linux. Tho you may need "real time priority" enabled by your filing system or partition?

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Is this for live broadcasting? OBS

Otherwise ffmpeg / avconv can capture video and audio which allows you to convert it to deliverable formats later with edits. Otherwise you need some gear. Setting up audio levels, framing, lighting, and the rest takes a lot of hardware, and familiarity. If you don't need live you can simply use dedicated hardware like a smart phone and a korg MR-1 for audio. And mix, convert, and edit in post.

If most of what you want to capture is already on your computer screen, you can use an HDMI splitter and an HDMI capture device like the magewell one on another computer to capture what you already have on your screen. This will help keep resource starvation of the machine your capturing from interfering with the capture. Plus open up other options. There's a lot of gear involved otherwise and it's quite the rabbit hole.

About $3K into the rabbit hole for me (at least in terms of gear I still have) to have my one person one trip middle of a corn field abilities. Something that should be doable with a $30 webcam and $200 computer these days, but ...not... quite. As in you can't have your gear be failing when it's 100F+ outside and you're in direct sunlight. Or be taking ten plus minutes to boot and launch before you push record. Or only being able to record on the fairest of days.

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See Slackermedia. The site is oriented towards using Slackware, but the information about various media creation and editing programs and methodologies is cross-platform.

You might want to jump right to the "Applications"section in the Handbook.

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There is, of course, "an Internet-full of material" on video editing ... using any operating system. Macintoshes ship with a video-editing tool that can do a lot of things, and professional-grade software like Final Cut Pro are routinely used in shows and movies. Linux has similar tools.

In each case, you will "capture" material, catalog it, then edit it to produce any number of deliverable shows by taking slices from the various so-called "clips" and stitching them together with transitions. The audio track is generally laid-in separately.

The finished film is then "exported" to an appropriate movie-file format with an appropriate amount of compression, given your intended purpose.

You have just touched-upon an enterprise that many people have made into their careers, and a fascinating career it is . . .

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