There is little to say this week as I have been on holiday strimming and mowing a path around the perimeter of our field, a completely unplanned project. This was a path 2m wide by 300m, I can mow at least 200m of this, and so it is maintainable, I keep telling myself. I checked it this evening (Tuesday) and with the recent rain and a bit of sunshine it was already looking ready for another mow.

I did publish both Week 20 and 21 of my 2022 Weekly Diary, and so I have stopped the rot. I didn’t start recording the podcast for ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ because from Thursday I wasn’t at home with my microphone, so we will need to wait for next week (hopefully).

So, with little to say I’m cheating a bit and telling you what I was up to on Monday and Tuesday of week 23, as next week’s Podcasting Journey I am sure will have much more to say.

I am working towards creating some training videos for work and I was thinking that I could use the transcripts from the podcast episodes of Maximo Bite Size and mix it with some slides superimposed with a video of me talking to the camera in one corner.

I’ve been looking into Green Screens. One that sits just behind your chair is simple to find, but my aim is to be standing up and I’m just over 6 feet tall. “So, buy a 2m green screen, simple.” But then I started to think, you can’t stand next to the green screen because you would cast shadows, your heels probably need to be 18 inches from it, at least. Then, the height of my webcam for my initial experiments was below my eye height, so looking upwards to the top of my head would mean that the green screen needed to be higher than my height, is 2m high enough?

I’ve been experimenting with a 2m garden cane balanced on top of two chairs to test horizontal width with hands animated, and same cane positioned vertically at 18 inches behind me to see whether I could still see the top of the cane. I captured a few seconds of footage of cane falling to the side as I was practising some lines, and a few choice swear words as well, long since all deleted. I hope nobody was observing me through the window.

I wasn’t quite convinced that 2m was high enough, so I started to look at frame mounted green screens and I concluded that these were too large and if you don’t have a dedicated room then the fabric curtain would probably end up being creased if you need to pack everything away, and I’m not one for wanting to get out the ironing board. So, I went back to the idea of a pull-up green screen, like a projector screen. A pull-down one would be better if you had a dedicated room, but I don’t.

Finding the right room to temporarily set up equipment was the next problem. I concluded I needed a 2m square which would give me space to walk around without knocking things over. The room would need to be quiet, with some soft furnishings to avoid echo. I eventually opted for my daughter’s bedroom who has left home and returns to Devon only occasionally because we tend to meet her up in London.

The next problem was how to raise the height of the webcam to ideally be at eye height. My tests to ascertain the size and width of the green screen had been using my laptop balanced on a thick cocktail book which lies on the footstool, which was on top of a chair, on top of the flower vase stand, an arrangement not destined to stay vertical for long, but nonetheless managed to get the webcam up to eye level. A safer bet was needed. A 7-step step ladder would work with the laptop sitting on the top platform. Then, I had the idea of a projector stand and found a tray that screws into the top of a camera tripod and that looks as if it will be sufficient.

All the people you see on YouTube seem to have expensive cameras and lighting and microphones and dedicated rooms which are probably sound proofed. But there wasn’t anything around that I could find to give you a more Heath Robinson approach to testing out whether videos might be successful, using ordinary equipment, not if you wish to stand up. Moving further away from the camera also raises the issue of microphone, and I’m thinking that a neck microphone will be needed. That will be the next problem to solve after receiving the green screen and tripod tray, which are now both on order.

Before I purchased the green screen, I had been investigating a virtual green screen which basically is a green background added to a Zoom or Webex meeting (for one person) and then processed with a filter applied in a piece of software called OBS Studio. Many YouTube’rs seem to swear this is the software they mostly use, perhaps because it is geared up for live streaming.

OBS Studio is free and on Google Trends it appears more frequently than iMovie or Camtasia which are my two other options for video editing. I’ve downloaded this and started experimenting and found it fairly easy to overlay a video of myself superimposed on a screenshot of Maximo. And that is the other thing I was experimenting with, how to capture screenshots at exactly the right aspect ratio for a 16:9 video that will retain clarity once turned into a MP4 video. Success. Piece by piece it is coming together and when I get the new equipment, I’ll see what progress I can make and work out the next problems to solve.

From last week’s objectives I have at least got going again with the Weekly Diary, so for week 23 the objectives are:

• Catch up at least one of the five missing weeks of ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’
• Produce a podcast of anything and publish it.
• Set up Audacity for Audio Books standards and conversion to .MP3, I understand it is possible.
• Create some slides for the first episode of Maximo Bite Size (video).
• Do some practise video recording so that I can experiment further with OBS Studio.
• Determine how to get at least 1080p recordings and see whether 4k can be achieved with webcam.
• Spend time with iMovie so that I can compare with OBS Studio and learn how to split out audio from video.

I’ve been saying for weeks that I’m getting close to recording my first podcast episode, and I do feel that it will happen soon. Now I’m not sure which will reach the finish line first, one of the two podcasts, or the YouTube videos. I’m not playing bridge on two evenings a week for the next six weeks, so this will give me more time to get over the line. I’m optimistic all three will launch in that time.