The week was dominated by working on the videos. But first, some progress on the two podcasts.

I did record two more episodes of The Diary of a Digital Nobody and published one of them and edited the other which I will publish next week.

Having set myself the objective of publishing the first two podcast episodes of Maximo Bite Size, I actually recorded and edited three episodes, but I haven’t yet published them. I am wondering whether I need to first create a trailer and whether I should have some music for the intro/outro.

Incidentally all five podcast episodes were recorded and edited in four hours, I was pleased with that. I was also pleased with recording each episode in one take. I did have a few stumbles but they were near to the beginning of a paragraph and so I could restart before the autocue had scrolled too far.

I wrote the intro and outro late, just before recording and had not read the text aloud previously. A mistake, as I discovered I have trouble asking my mouth and tongue to say the words “… welcoming you back…”, I either hesitate, or seem to add an extra syllable or two to the phrase. Part of my hesitation in not publishing the three recordings is whether I should change the outro on them. I am using Audacity for audio editing, and to date I have not had to join two tracks, I presume it is possible.

I didn’t complete the writing of Week 26 for The Diary of a Digital Nobody; this is a bit alarming as I made this mistake around week 15 and I now have a set of five missing weeks which will take a lot of effort to complete. I didn’t add any more transcripts to Maximo Bite Size, which still stands at the 40 mark, I am relaxed by this, but I won’t want to allow that to continue for long.

On the Maximo Bite Size videos, I did create the Keynote slide decks and speaker notes for the 2nd and 3rd episodes, I did these two episodes in parallel. I have added additional animations to point to fields on a screenshot timed with the narration. I’ve found that for a single slide the more elements that have an animation then the amount of effort to align this to the voice is not linear, it seems to take much longer the more animation elements there are.

I did the recording for both episodes one after the other. The first attempt was disappointing because while the webcam was turned on the OBS scene that was set-up to perform the recording, was showing a black screen through the source instead of me imposed on a green screen. I hadn’t realised this until after I had cleaned up the separate audio recordings and was about to stitch the first together with the video.

For the second attempt at the recordings, I had two goes at episode three and then found difficulty aligning the audio and video at the point when I clap three times. That’s not quite true, I could align them but when I checked three minutes further into the recording the voice was not aligned with the video. I had stitched together the first voice recording with the second video, or vice versa, anyway, not the correct pair of audio and video tracks. The lesson learnt here was make sure you name the files accurately, actually better to place them in separate directories, before starting the next recording.

By the end of the week, I had one additional video that was 90% complete and a second recording of one slide which I felt needed to be reworked. I have the recording for the other episode but this needs to be assembled in OBS. I don’t think there are any parts that need to be re-recorded but until I have found the files and stitched them together and then cut them at each slide using Lossless Cut, I won’t know for certain. Next week I am on holiday, so, not such a good idea thinking that I would do the second and third episodes in parallel, especially as I failed to get either completed.

I struggled again with iMovie. This time it was not realising that an audio track must be attached to a video track, or rather once it is attached you cannot unattach unless you have a replacement video track to hook the audio track to. iMovie doesn’t allow you to cut or delete a video track that has the magnetic attachment to an audio track, not without also deleting the audio track that has the volume profile nicely laid out to reduce the volume when there is speech and increase the volume afterwards. Once again, my boss found the simple answer, he is used to using Apple’s Garage Band and so the techniques will be similar.

I continued with the YouTube set up, but I have not finalised the banner. When I return from holiday, I will push the first three videos up onto YouTube so that I can see what is needed particularly with the intro and outro and capturing the captions. We won’t announce anything until we are ready to publish one per week, which probably means having three more videos ready to go.

I did some research on the Lavalier microphone and will opt for a Rode, but I am a little undecided on which one. I did make the decision to convert an old study into a studio and I’ll start the process of clearing out the room the next time there is rain at the weekend. I haven’t abandoned the thought of obtaining FinalCut Pro, I will do this when I kit out the studio as I will probably opt for a Mac Mini or iMac. My MacBook Pro is now four years old and a little underpowered for video work at high resolutions, but it will have another two or three years of life for normal work, although there are a few keys where the light is now shining through where the character used to be defined, I am slowly wearing out the keyboard and slowly revealing some of the characters in my password.

I doubt whether I will make much progress next week as I am on holiday, with a week of gardening in front of me, and no doubt, with the heat we are expecting I won’t be in the right mind to do much in the way of podcast or video work. The best I can hope for is to catch up on some of the missing diary transcripts.

The objectives for week 28 are:

• Catch up on the recent missing transcripts for The Diary of a Digital Nobody.
• Purchase a Lavalier microphone.
• Keep searching for the background to the YouTube banner.
• Try and finish the second Maximo Bite Size video.
• Don’t get sunburnt.