It was a busy week, and I’ll start with the podcast of ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’. I recorded two more episodes and published Week 5. This gives me one more recording in the bag, assuming I can still find it, which should be published quite easily next week.

I didn’t get round to recording the first two episodes of Maximo Bite Size, mainly because the workday was extended into the evening working on the first video of the same name. I do intend to record the podcast either in front of the YouTube video or at the same time, but never after. I think it will work best allowing the podcast to steam ahead of the videos as the effort to convert the already written articles into a podcast episode is relatively small, creating the video is unlikely to proceed quicker than one per week.

My first YouTube video of Maximo Bite Size is called Location Types and Location Systems. Last week I had added music and canvassed opinions from a couple of colleagues. The video had been at 720p, and I needed to do a new recording at 1080p. I couldn’t do any recording until Wednesday as I had someone in the house who was sanding the floor of the room adjacent to our kitchen which is the room we use most, and the one I use in the winter as it is the warmest room in the house.

The slide deck was developed in Apple’s Keynote and one of the main points raised by my colleagues was that the slides need animation to keep them alive. During the week this went from a few animations to thinking that nearly all slides needed animating. Trying to time some text, symbol, or diagram to appear at the right point to coincide with the narration takes a bit of fiddling and easier to listen to one scene, write down when each point is reached, then go back to the Keynote and change the transition timings. By the end of the week I was getting practised at this. This was partly due to me adjusting the number of words per minute on the autocue which meant that all the transitions were now mostly out by a second or two.

I am using iMovie, with a project for each slide rather than one project for the whole episode. I have found the use of the magnetic feature between tracks difficult to comprehend and I can’t find a way of saying do not use the magnets. Every time you move something, you are moving the track that it is attached to with the magnet, same if you delete, it deletes more than you want. I had moved something too early at the start of the timeframe and I just couldn’t nudge it a few seconds later, in the end I deleted everything and started again only to get in a pickle the second time around, hence I resorted to chopping the video into lots of smaller pieces and having several projects.

I am using OBS Studio to assemble the various images of slides or videos whether of the presenter or the Keynote animation. Effectively each slide in the Keynote is an OBS scene. The removal of the green screen in OBS works perfectly. The beginning two slides where there is one continuous piece of music had to be merged in iMovie. In the second slide the presenter appears towards the bottom left corner and there is a feature called picture in picture which does this. However, you can not also apply the green screen filter in iMovie, it is one or the other. The green screen removal is not perfect in iMovie, so I thought I would just remove it in OBS. It requires a bit of fiddling with gamma and contrast levels and the result is OK but you can just see a faint rectangle around the presenter, and if you zoom in you can see that it is not perfect, back to the drawing board on this point.

The outro also posed the same issue with picture in picture and green screen, but as the presenter appears at the beginning of that scene, I found I could overlay the two videos, the presenter, and the Keynote animation with music, in OBS and use the Chroma Key effect in OBS. This works on the outro because the presenter is at the beginning of the clip. In the intro the presenter video occurs after several seconds and as this is the top source, the source that drives the scene, I couldn’t find a way of delaying its start, so I had to resort to trying to do more in iMovie.

My gut tells me abandon this approach and fork out for some proper video editing software, and by the end of the week I was starting my research into this.

When I did another recording of me presenting in front of the green screen, I used QuickTime Player to record the video at 1080p. The laptop fan went mad and pushed up some dust along the bottom of the screen. It produced a file that was 6.87GB for a 12:21 recording, and the poor machine couldn’t manage to write fast enough because while the audio was complete all the way through, I appeared freeze-framed for about half of the recording. Anyway, the other half was good enough to see that the results of 1080p were much better than 720p especially when the size of the presenter was made smaller as part of the picture in picture effect.

The next attempt used OBS to record the video and QuickTime Player to record the audio. In OBS preferences there was a way to set 1080p and 30fps, you cannot adjust the frames per second in QuickTime Player. It made sense to split the audio from the video as I could then apply the Audacity effects to clean-up the audio and bring it up to the levels used for audio books. The issue was how to align video and audio. Clapping three times has worked and allows you to overlay both video and audio in iMovie relatively easily.

The OBS recording at 1080p and 30fps was 259.2MB which is 25 times smaller than the QuickTime Player recording which remember was only a freeze-frame for half of the recording, albeit probably at 60fps. This really is bonkers, what is Apple doing? Another illustration is that when I loaded the OBS video recording and the Audacity audio to iMovie in order to stitch the two together it grew the disk space used to 1.53GB, six times larger than the combined files. It can’t have improved the quality of the video or sound, so what is it doing?

Having convinced myself I needed to do the least possible in iMovie, I would soon run out of disk space, I sought some software that would allow me to cut the stitched together movie into pieces, one for each scene, and I tried Lossless Cut which turned out to be great and easy to use. This cuts up a video into pieces with no loss of quality in the recording. It does, what it says on the tin.

By the end of the week, I had a 1080p 30fps recording from OBS Studio with the initial comments from my colleagues incorporated. This third takes saved as an .MP4 is 11:47 minutes in duration and 67.2MB file size. Now that is a more reasonable file size. Remember at the beginning of the week, my first attempt was 6.87GB, you can imagine how pleased I was, and how determined I would be to ditch iMovie in favour of something else.

The recording was not perfect and there was a tiny amount of green screen covered up by a curtain which resulted in some scenes having what looks like a set if small lines at the bottom middle of the video. During Friday, I received some feedback, mostly from the owner of our small company who was pleased with the result, as I was, but I know next week I can improve on it still.

The objectives for week 26 are then:

• Publish an episode of The Diary of a Digital Nobody podcast, now with a focus on improving the delivery. I now need to get into a habit of publishing one a week, and I’ll soon put pressure on myself to catch up on the five missing weeks.
• Continue to refine the first video of Maximo Bite Size.
• Start the process of working out what is needed to establish a YouTube channel.
• 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.
• 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.