I did publish Week 6 of ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ podcast using up the one recording I had in the bag. I failed again to start the Maximo Bite Size podcast. This really must be launched next week, and I will be laser focused on recording two of each podcast.

The Location Types and Location Systems video has consumed work time and a little of a couple of evenings. The result is something which everyone is pleased with. I have been writing up the workflow, summary level, but I’ll add the detailed steps as I go through the process for the second and third videos.

Yes, by the time I got to documenting the workflow and thinking about how I might start to produce videos more quickly, I concluded that if I am organised, I can produce two videos in a little less time than if I was creating the two videos serially. So, this is the target for week 27, finish two more videos ready for YouTube in one week by producing them with each workflow step in parallel, and document the detail of the workflow to a level where another person could produce a video using that workflow.

There were still a few challenges to overcome with the video. The main one was in the opening title page where, as a presenter, I appear after the first slide, while the music continues in the background. In iMovie you can only have either the picture in picture (PiP) effect or green screen effect but not both at the same time, and if you go for PiP in iMovie and eliminate the green screen in OBS then you can still see a faint line where the green screen is being removed, the line associated with the PiP. This was overcome by using PiP in iMovie, saving the video, importing back into iMovie, and then applying the green screen removal in iMovie, i.e., a two-step process. It worked, clunky I know, but it worked.

I did have a moment during the week where I had my credit card out to buy Final Cut Pro, only to think that I needed to first let the owner of the company I work for know that I was giving up with iMovie. The issue was all to do with the magnetic pieces that stick tracks together in iMovie, I was finding it difficult to cut or delete anything without also deleting the tracks that were attached via the magnets. I had the same issue last week and resorted to deleting everything and starting again. I was again at that point. When I did get on a call with Danny, he just said use command-X (cut) and what he was demonstrating, it worked, and when I tried it on my project, it worked, and I would swear that I had been trying this, using the menu options, to no avail over two weeks. Now it was working, and I can’t think what is different or why it appears to now be working, and I am just dying for it to go wrong again so that I can figure it out.

Next week I intend to pound iMovie with use, either for me to get to like it, or hate it, I don’t want to be in this middle ground of thinking I am wasting my time with a product, but I must justify why I don’t think I should be using it. With one of the two new videos I do intend to produce it only using iMovie if that is possible.

I have done the research into video editing and concluded that Final Cut Pro would be a good bet. We are very much an Apple company, so this is more likely to get approval than going with anything else. There were others, but the videos that we would be creating are I believe relatively basic.

The comments which I received from others, Danny mainly, were incorporated and the Keynote presentation is now packed with animations and a few images to illustrate what I am saying.

While we are pleased with the result, and it is unlikely I will record the video again. There was one disappointment and that is my choice of shirt, which is checked. This is perfectly OK when I am larger in the video, but when it is reduced to PiP there is a small strobing effect when I am superimposed on a white background, not so when it is a dark blue background. Unfortunately, the six shirts I bought recently are all checked, and I am hoping that the others which are darker, will not suffer with the same problem.

There are two other things that I think I will work on to see whether an improvement can be made. The voice recording, I am pretty sure could be better. It is acceptable, but the microphone is too far away. I am thinking that I will need a Lavalier microphone, an unobtrusive microphone to be attached to my shirt. The other thing I ought to try out is whether a camera will give me a better image than my webcam, not that I have a complaint with this. Now that I am recording the voice separately, I might be able to use my Sony Cyber-shot RX100 VI compact camera for the video side which should mean that there is no laptop fan noise. If this works well then that might be a better route to achieving 4K, because 4K on my laptop might just cause a meltdown.

Towards the end of the week, I started to look at what is needed to launch on YouTube, and I have at least created my account in YouTube Studio. The Snappa website has some useful blogs which I am working my way through. Snappa is like Canva for producing artwork of various kinds, and I have been using Canva to date, this is free, but they show you all the images and templates you could have, if you subscribed. https://snappa.com/

I’ve started to create my YouTube Profile Picture and Banner, and I’ve created a Description. What I am in search of is a suitable background when the banner is displayed on YouTube on a TV. I’ve got an idea for the banner which is to hide some images that only appear if you watch YouTube on a TV. These are historical images of Maximo logos or documentation banners that I collected for another project and have never used. They won’t mean anything to anyone who is not involved in Maximo, and it would make the banner look cluttered, but only on the TV, not on a PC or Phone. It will be a secret revealed on a TV, and this goes with the territory of the branding I have – Maximo Secrets.

I’ve discovered the outro will need to be changed for YouTube so that you can navigate to the next video or the latest video, or link back to the Maximo Secrets website. I think also, the intro might need to be adjusted, currently everything starts with a plain blue background for one second, before the Maximo Secrets logo appears in animation, a plain blue image might not look so good on YouTube.

We still need to work on the font used for the Maximo Secrets logo, Danny has suggested Stencil which would require me to have a Adobe license for Photoshop or another product. I am also thinking, what if there were 100 videos, how is this organised on YouTube and should we be using colour to distinguish one set of videos from another, there will certainly be several sets of videos.

I am making progress to becoming a videographer, and when I look at what products like Final Cut Pro can achieve, I know that I will only be scratching the surface. But you must start somewhere, create a baseline, and move on from there. Don’t expect to find me on TikTok, remember I am digitally anonymous, and I aim to remain so.

The objectives for week 27 are:

• Record two more episodes of The Diary of a Digital Nobody podcast and publish one of these. Focus on improving the delivery.
• Publish the first two episodes of the Maximo Bite Size podcast.
• Record and edit in parallel the 2nd and 3rd videos for Maximo Bite Size, refine the workflow details.
• Get to grips with iMovie by trying to create the 3rd video entirely in iMovie without the use of OBS. I will also create the video in OBS as I wish to compare the file size of the finished video using both methods.
• Continue to learn the steps needed to publish videos on YouTube, including creating a banner.
• Research Lavalier microphones and how to transfer the recording to a laptop.
• See what difference can be made in video quality by using a digital camera with a directional microphone.