I am spending the afternoons working out the workflow for the videos and the associated techniques. I am still using OBS Studio, but I will also compare this with iMovie and possibly also Camtasia.

The movie recording, I made last week, was 720p and I’ll record it again at 1080p. There were certainly some pieces which were not perfect, but when all clips and screenshots were put together with the Keynote animation at the beginning then I was pleased with the result.

The green screen worked well, and the sound was acceptable with no external noises. The webcam was focused on the face but one hand in front was a little out of focus and some folds in my shirt towards my back also looked a bit out of focus. I am wondering whether at 1080p it will look clearer. The only lighting was natural light from my left and this gives a nice contrast between each side of the face, my right was in a little shadow. I won’t be able to rely on this the entire year, and I will need lighting in the winter.

The original recording was over 1GB in iMovie, and there wasn’t much removed. The finished 11:43 minute .mp4 in OBS Studio was 160MB. I can’t explain the reason for the difference but if a completed iMovie with the same content requires significantly larger disk space, then I know where my vote will go.

It is Tuesday and I have already published both My Podcasting Journey and My Weekly Diary for last week and started the posts for this week. Tomorrow I’ll start to work on recording the podcasts.

By Friday I had added music to the video both at the beginning and end, and at each of the three sections in the presentation. In OBS Studio I installed the plugin for Advanced Scene Switcher, and this allowed a recording to be made from front to end with no intervention. At the end of the week, I managed to get a couple of my colleagues to look at the video and provide some feedback, and this was really useful. Music now fades in, reduces in volume as I speak, increases in volume at the end and then fades out completely timed with the end of the jazz piece. Currently I am using the free music and sound effects that come with YouTube Studio, that I understand is only royalty free on YouTube. Artlist and Epidemic Sound seem also to be popular, and this will all need checking out.

I was rained in from gardening early on Saturday and decided to focus the rest of the day on recording one or two episodes of the podcast ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’. I had already published the first episode and got some good feedback from Tanya and Donna, at least I now know that my voice is clear and easy to listen to. I managed to record and edited my fourth episode by the time I retired to bed.

Midway through Saturday I decided to abandon the autocue software called Speakflow which I remembered saying was possibly the best thing since sliced bread. I was previously using a constant speed of 1.75 and I now found this to be too fast, and I couldn’t find an acceptable speed, 0.25 was too fast, and 0 was too slow. In writing this I wonder whether they have changed it to a log scale between 0 and 10. At its maximum it is ridiculous, I doubt anyone can read that fast let alone speak at that pace, it would be miles faster than the small print audio they put at the end of a financial advert. The other setting scrolls as you speak, but this has become very jerky, and it seems you are limited to a maximum two minutes before you have to hit the start button again. This is all a pity as I was just about to subscribe, instead I’ve abandoned its use entirely.

I’ve jumped onto the Prompt+ app, but while this allowed me to make the fourth recording, for a piece of software with few functions, I’ve found several issues, and I’ll be contacting the software authors on Monday to see what is wrong. So, if anyone knows a reliable autocue or teleprompter that works on a Mac, please let me know.

I was all for re-recording the third and fourth episodes on Sunday, but I listened back to them, and while I know where the imperfections are I thought they could pass OK and better to get them out there and try and improve on future recordings, I’ve got the whole future to re-record them.

In the morning I added the recordings to the top of each post using the Audio block and gave the WordPress courses community the opportunity to provide feedback, good or bad, with my third community post entitled Your Honest Opinion.

In the second, third and fourth episodes I had used the Audacity Amplify and Limiter effects to raise the RMS level (average) and reduce the Peak levels to get them to the ranges that can be used for audiobooks. You need to download and install the ACX Check PlugIn. I have no intention of turning my podcast into an audio book, but my thought is that it must be a good benchmark to aim for. https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Analyze_Plug-ins

With four episodes of the podcast recorded I set up my website to create a URL for the RSS Feed that is used by Apple Podcasts Connect and less than 10 minutes later I got the feedback that I could publish, and I can now call myself a podcaster.

Week 24 was a significant milestone publishing one podcast to the world, but I didn’t add any more episodes to Maximo Bite Size and now I doubt I will start up again until July. It is the videos which is taking priority and at the end of week 26 we have a company meeting. But I do aim next week to start publishing the podcast for Maximo Bite Size, I have the material ready, and I know the process, I just need a couple more episodes of The Diary of a Digital Nobody under my belt to prove the autocue and the delivery of my voice.

The objectives for week 25 are then:

• Produce two more episodes of The Diary of a Digital Nobody with a focus on improving the delivery.
• Produce the first two episodes of Maximo Bite Size podcast, as I have episode specific artwork it will be interesting to see how this is pushed through to Apple Podcasts, my assumption is it will be the featured image.
• Create a page on each website which only contains the podcast episodes in the right listening order. Not sure how to do this yet.
• Finalise the video for the first episode of Maximo Bite Size using 1080p, so that it can be shown at the company meeting.
• Continue to refine the workflow for producing a video, it looks as if it will be a combination of iMovie and OBS Studio. I’ll do this by starting the second video.
• 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’.

The targets for end of July will be to:

• Record first 10 episodes of The Diary of a Digital Nobody podcast.
• Record first 10 episodes of Maximo Bite Size podcast.
• Record first four videos of Maximo Bite Size for YouTube, but they won’t yet be published.
• Complete Chapter 4 of Maximo Bite Size on Work Management, the target is to get to 55 transcripts, currently I am stuck on 40.

It’s a lot but I need to get slick at this otherwise something must give.