The thought I had was to record, in video form, my narration of the transcripts for each episode of Maximo Bite Size, for which forty have now been written, then splitting out the audio for the podcast and adding the video with a few slides and posting this on YouTube.

This week I created the slide deck for the first episode on Location Types and Location Systems and while I used all of the text from the podcast transcript it didn’t end up in the same order. There were at least 10% of additional words and some of the words chosen for the video were changed or the phrasing was different. This was not deliberate, it’s just what seemed to fit better with a slide. I also added more business examples.

Creating the slide deck and modified words took about the same amount of time as writing the original transcript, five hours, but this included the intro and exit slide, including the speaker notes. I was using Keynote rather than PowerPoint, a concession to the company’s main owner Danny, so there was a certain amount of learning going on, I’ve only used it a couple of times previously. The workflow that we eventually prove and refine for the first few videos will be used by others in the company.

With two different sets of words, the upshot of this is that I have no excuses left for postponing the launch of the podcast version of Maximo Bite Size which I announced would be coming on LinkedIn a week or so ago.

The green screen arrived on Thursday, a long box which I brought into the house without having to turn any corners. On Thursday evening it was placed into position in my daughter’s bedroom, I undid the clips and pulled up, dead easy. A green screen which is 2.2m wide and 2m high is big, but until I had the webcam on it, I was still uncertain whether it was high enough. It was definitely wide enough, and wider than the three-seater leather sofa, which was where I unpacked it from its box, and where I had visions of a “Friends” sketch with a backdrop of the Central Perk coffee bar.

When the family saw a few pictures, my other daughter said why don’t you turn your old study into a recording studio. That is not such a bad idea, and one which I will have to mull over for a while. The green screen doesn’t quite fit, but I could always use green screen paint. Clearing the room would take a serious amount of time, it has been collecting stuff for years, and not something I could contemplate doing until gardening for the year is through.

The projector/laptop tray which I bought from the same company was scratched and dented on one side, scratched is not the right word, severely scuffed perhaps. It was quite serviceable, and I didn’t need the missing adapter for my camera tripod. After a complaint, I got it for less than half price, I could use a pair of pliers to straighten the side and I’ve got some leftover black spray paint for metal, but no doubt I won’t bother.

On Friday afternoon the moment of truth came, and with laptop positioned on top of the camera tray the green screen showed above my head, not by much, but enough. The room, which is East facing naturally lights the backdrop. There is a North facing window and I had to draw the curtains to stop seeing the metal mechanism through the green screen. Best if it were up against a solid wall. The other issue with the green screen is that the weight of a 2m curtain isn’t positioned perfectly over the container box from which you pull the green screen up, the centre of gravity is towards the back, and I had to use a chair to stop it from falling backwards.

I found that I could position the Blue Yeti microphone on its stand in its new isolation shield, at a height and relatively close to me so that it didn’t appear in the field of view.

The first narration of the new video text using the Speakflow autocue, was not quite faultless but good enough. I used QuickTime Player to record me speaking and then I used iMovie to separate the text into several smaller videos, one for each slide. This allowed me to clean up the beginning and end, and a part in the middle where Speakflow announced that I had hit the 10 minute limit, and did I want to upgrade to the Professional version. No!

I thought I was being clever adding the video text after the podcast text, but this caused the 10 minutes to be exceeded, if I had known this I wouldn’t have bothered. I also had to wait until the podcast part was close to scrolling through before starting the video recording, there didn’t seem a way of starting the autocue script halfway through, probably another feature of the free version which can be avoided if you subscribed. It will be two separate pieces of text from now on.

The 11-minute recording was over 1GB, wow! The little I used iMovie it was OK to use. I had to Google everything to find out how to achieve what I wanted to do, especially how to save a separated part of the recording as a single file, which I found to be copy and paste into a new project file, why didn’t I think of that. So, with all my clips, one for each slide, I had now consumed 2GB of disk space.

In OBS Studio I created a scene for each slide and overlaid the first three clips into the right scene. When I played a scene, you could see my lips moving but there was no sound. I found out this is deliberate because OBS Studio is designed for live streaming and you want the sound on the final output, not to be sent through your speakers in case that created interference with any other live recording, like your voice. A setting overcame this issue.

The filter used to eliminate the green screen worked pretty well, a little green halo to the side which would be in shadow from the window, which I think would be eliminated if there was a key light, which might be the next purchase. What I need to do next is to expand the size of me speaking with the green screen eliminated so that I can examine the quality. Up to now, my image has been nothing more than the size of a thumb in the bottom right corner. The other issue to address is to rework some slides so that there is room on a slide for the narrator. Ideally this would always be bottom right, but screen shots of Maximo would appear on the right, so perhaps either bottom right or bottom left will do. The top corners look to be a strange place to add the narrator, unless I could find a way of positioning the narrator in a circle.

The four-minute video I produced late Friday needs more work before it can be used for an internal review.

• I need to work out how to capture a Keynote animation
• The opening and finishing slides require only my voice and not the video, and they also need some music.
• There was a flash in the QuickTime Player recording on one of the clips and I’ll see if I can eliminate this.
• The transitions between slides were done manually, and I’ll need to see if there is a way to automate this. Done manually, I disappear, and the slide remains for half a second, before the transition occurs and I appear again, it looks strange.

Surprisingly the 4-minute video was only 36MB. Was this because somewhere in the process each clip became a resolution of 720p when I thought it had been recorded as 1080p?

It seems there is far more to consider making a video over a podcast, and I think my journey in the video world has some way to go. What I am pleased with is that I think I can narrate the text for these sorts of videos in one or two recordings, it doesn’t look as if I am reading, and the sound is quite acceptable. This should reduce the postproduction time. The one other video I created a couple of years ago was time consuming aligning the audio to the screen capture where you can see the mouse moving and data being entered.

I think week 24 will be a significant milestone week. The work focus will be to continue with the video which I will do during part of each day. But I have nothing planned in the evenings for about a fortnight, perfect time to launch my two podcasts.

The objectives for week 24 are then:

• Produce a podcast of anything and publish it.
• Produce a video for the first episode of Maximo Bite Size so that it can be internally reviewed.
• Set up Audacity for Audio Books standards and conversion to .MP3, I understand it is possible.
• Continue to set out a workflow for producing a video via OBS Studio. I’ll do the same next week but for iMovie so that I can make a comparison.
• Determine how to get at least 1080p recordings and see whether 4k can be achieved with the webcam.
• See what difference can be made in video quality by using a digital camera with a directional microphone.
• Catch up at least one of the five missing weeks of ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’.

I am conscious that I have not written any more transcripts for Maximo Bite Size for two whole weeks, and so I must restart those. I have one more episode for Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 will be Work Management. So, this week my aim is to produce at least two more episodes and to have reached 50 by the end of June.

With everything going on I think it will be unrealistic to add more than 10 episode transcripts a month. By July I think I will also be adding 10 videos a month and perhaps by the end of August I may be a YouTuber.