It promises to be a big week, and a busy week. I set myself the target of launching both the podcast of Maximo Bite Size and the YouTube Channel for Maximo Secrets.

My journey started out on Christmas Day 2021 when I signed up to the Podcasting for Beginners course, we had to pay for it then! I’ve kept a diary of my podcasting journey, now for 30 weeks and you can find everything I’ve written here – https://thediaryofadigitalnobody.com/my-podcast-journey/

When I started out, I had the notion that I ought to do a podcast about something to do with Maximo, podcasting was something new to learn. It was in the second module, I think, when I realised, I had never listened to a podcast in my life before, and so why did I think I wanted to create a podcast exactly?

It took several months before I decided which direction I would go in, and it wasn’t just one podcast but two. The Maximo Bite Size is work related, and I’ve created a personal podcast, to remind me at the end of the year what I actually have done during the year. With everything that I’m doing I do struggle to write the transcripts for this, yet if I thought about it, it will probably be this one that will give me more joy in the future. It is a podcast diary, of absolutely no interest to anyone except myself, not even my family have listened to it.

Little did I realise six months ago that I would also be turning myself into a videographer. I had produced one video previously and this gets 1/10 of the views of the equivalent post on MaximoSecrets.com, and as it took triple the amount of effort, I had thought this was a waste of time, I might as well crank out three times the number of words.

The small company I work for are keen for me to launch a YouTube channel, and so I started this learning journey at the beginning of June, and I can tell you there is a lot more to learn in making a video than there is in a podcast, well of the solo style podcasts that I do. I also expect that learning journey will continue for many more months especially as I am thinking of introducing a second style of video.

Podcasting and making videos have certainly changed my work life and with 90+ episodes of each planned it will keep me out of mischief for at least the next year, and past my 65th birthday.

So, what happened this week.

I am creating two videos in parallel, I think it will be more efficient, although my first attempt didn’t prove so because I jumbled the files around and binned one, which eventually I found in the trash and recovered. Last week I had created the slide deck for my fourth video and the fifth is also now created. I am using Apple’s Keynote for this.

Last week I had published the first three videos to YouTube but we felt we needed a trailer and at the same time I prepared the trailer for the podcast. Midweek I had the podcast trailer created and I posted it on the WordPress Courses Community and adorned my hardhat waiting for comments. I needn’t have worried because people liked it, and it was great to receive that feedback.

Having created the podcast trailer I have no idea how you get it onto Apple Podcasts as a trailer without subscribing to a monthly fee. I suspect that I need a WordPress plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting, which would require me to upgrade to the Business plan, which is quite a leap up in the monthly fee, especially for a non-business entity.

The first five podcast episodes of Maximo Bite Size are now live on Apple Podcasts. I did use the Busy City music track from TrackTribe for an intro and outro, using the envelope function in Audacity. There was a little learning with the tool this week as it was the first time I had two or more tracks, first time I had to split a track, and the first time I had to stitch one track to another, the new outro to the old recording. I now have a reference to the music track and artist embedded in the podcast narration, at least to give the attribution that is deserved, and hopefully to keep the recording rights people at bay, or at least to try and cover myself if they do bash down the door.

The YouTube Trailer was finished on Friday and is also now in place, I also posted this on to the community site for comment, but I expect comments will not occur until next week, as I posted it on a Friday evening it may have been missed altogether. This video proved a little more difficult on iMovie than the previous ones. The music track runs all the way through from start to end, it is not split at all, and the words were tailored to fit the music. I must use Picture in Picture (PiP) so that I can be offset to the right, but I also need to crop from the left the PiP otherwise it bleeds over any writing which is on the left. The cropping I can do in OBS which is where I also apply the ChromaKey filter to eliminate the green screen, and the Keynote animation is also in OBS. If you wanted to do the whole thing in iMovie, you could only do this by reducing the size of the presenter. Not being able to crop and not being able to apply both PiP and Green Screen removal really is quite a limiting feature.

The issue I found was that the music goes to the end of the trailer, after I disappear, and you are left with just the Maximo Secrets logo. In OBS when the presenter track finishes, and I disappear you would be left with half a black screen. So, I had to find a way of positioning an image of the Maximo Secrets logo at the right place at the end of the iMovie track and to get that in the right position I had to add another plain blue image that would push it out to the right place in the timeline so that it comes in at exactly the right point as when the Maximo Secrets logo completes its animation. It is why I partly obscure the logo at the end before I disappear. And I could not make myself a little smaller as otherwise the logo that is partly in OBS and partly in iMovie wouldn’t line up.

I really don’t expect anyone to understand what I have just written and reading this back in a few months I probably won’t understand it either. But the point is, in my opinion, it really doesn’t take long before you find out where iMovie limitations are, as you start to do something a little bit more complex you realise you really do need something better in the video editing software department. Probably it is made this way because Apple want to push you towards buying Final Cut Pro, so they limit iMovie capability. All the way through this learning process I have found iMovie difficult to use, and I am still not a fan, and while I will persist for a few more weeks, I will eventually move to something else, something that will allow me to do everything without using half a dozen pieces of software to piece it all together and something that won’t create files that consume GB of disk space, and that doesn’t make my aged MacBook Pro sound as if it is going to finally croak it’s last breath.

Over the weekend I added some finishing touches to the YouTube Channel, one of which was to add a banner. One of the people who joined the community a few weeks ago was Keli B. and when I saw her community profile there was something about the background image which I found quite striking. I eventually tracked her down and she has agreed to allowing me to use that background on my YouTube channel banner, and I’ll eventually rework my MaximoSecrets site and will include it there as well. I am very grateful to her, and I do hope something will come from the attribution that I have given her in the YouTube Channel description.

For those who want to see I’ve included the link https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSNw7i88pAowiIimV_plLfg. The Rocket logo is that for the major new version of Maximo, called Maximo Application Suite, the colours used for the logo appear in the background, and the background itself has an astral feeling to it. It is nice to use some artwork rather than a computer-generated background or stock photo.

It will be the start of a new month next week. I’ll launch the podcast on Monday on LinkedIn and then the YouTube Channel on Tuesday, hopefully I’ll then have the fourth video completed by then. So, where do I go from here?

I must get slicker and slicker at both creating the podcast but more importantly the video where I think time savings really can be made. A little nudge up on the quality will always be welcome, and I’ll need to focus on trying to reach first the 100 subscribers which will allow me to use a custom URL for YouTube, and then the 1000 subscribers and 4000 watching hours in a year, both of which are needed to allow you to join the YouTube Partner Programme. This is the programme which allows you to set forth on receiving a slice of the YouTube advertising receipts, presumably enough to buy yourself a cup of coffee once in a while. But you must start somewhere and be realistic about your goals and expectations. 100 subscribers next week would be really nice.

I also saw on Friday a thing called YouTube Shorts, videos of around a minute and I quickly came up with an idea for this, it might be a stretch to get them in to less than one minute, but we’ll see.

I’ve embarked on a programme of around 90 podcasts and videos, for which the first 40 were written back in April and May, so I do need to get back to creating the next chapter of articles. It all must become business as usual, and no longer a special project.

The objectives for week 31 will now be:

• Launch on LinkedIn with Maximo Bite Size podcast and the YouTube Channel.
• Add the fourth and fifth videos to YouTube and add subtitles and captions for all of them.
• Investigate End Screen and Cards settings on YouTube.
• Create the podcast episodes for a further three weeks of both The Diary of a Digital Nobody and Maximo Bite Size.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone.
• Start to flesh out ideas for YouTube Shorts.
• Catch up on the recent missing transcripts for The Diary of a Digital Nobody, I think there are now four weeks missing (and five from earlier in the year)!