On Monday when I started work the YouTube channel had broken the 500 subscribers before three weeks from its launch. Four days later it had only reached 511 subscribers, with only one subscriber added on Wednesday, we’ll do well to add 20 new subscribers this week. The subscriber count has fallen off a cliff, should I be expecting to add just 100 subscribers a month going forward, is that an optimistic target? More worrying was the number of watch hours which will be lucky to exceed 10 this week and I need 4000 in a year. No need to panic, but we’ll see what happens over the next few weeks and then plan what we can do to boost the numbers.

I started the week by editing the next three podcast videos that I had recorded last Friday. I won’t have to worry about the podcast side of things for the next few weeks. I always thought that the podcasts wouldn’t be a success on the podcast platforms, but the Maximo Secrets website stats have seen a boost to the numbers. When someone plays a podcast episode it is recorded as a file download and for the month of August there has been 2750 downloads so far. This has boosted the general views and visitor numbers, it looks likely that August will break both monthly records, and the trajectory for yearly views is now over 300K although I doubt whether I will quite make it in the 2022 calendar year.

Midweek I had the latest video created except I didn’t have access to the new Maximo release to take the screenshots. Maximo has gone through a major iteration and the YouTube channel will only show screenshots from this release, not the old one, which has an end of life in 2025. This was my fear, that for whatever reason a stable system may not always be available. Fortunately, someone else in our little company has a parallel project and had a system running and so I ended up publishing the eighth video on Friday instead of Thursday as I had planned. I am trying to work back to releasing these on a Tuesday lunchtime which should generate better statistics.

When I got to the point where I couldn’t finish off the video, it was 90% done, I should have started the next video, the ninth, especially as this will be a long one and there is a public holiday in the UK on Monday, so it looks like a Friday release date again next week.

For some weeks I have come close to abandoning the use of iMovie. So, on Thursday I tried to produce the latest video using iMovie. It was possible, but it is not an efficient process. The main reason for this is that removal of the green screen and setting a Picture in Picture (PiP), the presenter in the bottom right corner of the slide, cannot be achieved at the same time. It is a two-step process where you need to eliminate the green screen, export a video, and then re-import to apply the PiP. In a normal length video, I would need to do this six times, with one or two more times for a longer video.

The second issue I found was that in each scene the Keynote animation must be the same length of time as the video for the PiP showing the presenter. If this is not the case, iMovie starts to play the next video segment before the presenter has finished talking. You cannot extend the length of a video clip in iMovie, even if this would result in a static image. The workaround would be to download an image of the slide as it appears when all the animations have played out, as you can change the duration of a slide. There might be a way of padding the duration between two clips in iMovie, but I didn’t bother attempting to see whether this was possible.

The main issue is that the 13-minute video is 1.79GB when exported to .MP4 from iMovie compared with 92.5MB when produced by OBS Studio, this is 19 times bigger. The final size of the video really matters, especially if it can be achieved with no loss of quality. What if I wanted to do a 4K video? I know there is video compression software, like Handbrake which Richard uses, but surely it would be better to compress from a small file size rather than a large one. One massive issue I have with large files is that I am still on very slow bandwidth broadband <5MBPS, I can’t upload 1GB files without disabling my laptop for two hours, if I had wanted to use the iMovie file, I’m talking about the loss of half a day’s work, or close to.

Having written an internal note on – Why iMovie cannot be used for creating videos – I started the process of creating the same video using Camtasia. I had once used Camtasia three years ago, so it was like starting again, learning from scratch. I found the process of using Camtasia so much easier than iMovie.

I did manage the whole editing process in Camtasia and will try adding in the recording as well in the next few weeks. There are a couple of issues to work through. The green screen removal seems to leave a green tinge to my hair line, there are some settings to play with, hopefully it can be overcome without having to resort to OBS which seems to handle this better. The other issue is scene transitions could be less abrupt, but then I haven’t tried to find an answer to this yet. I was eager to export to .MP4 and see the resulting file size which was 710.6MB, 2.5 times smaller than iMovie but seven times larger than OBS Studio.

Camtasia does have several settings that may be able to produce a smaller sized file. But at the end of the day Friday, I tried playing Camtasia’s .MP4 file in OBS while recording it in OBS. The result was a video of 85.2MB, a little smaller than the original one produced by OBS and with only one second difference in duration, and no loss of quality. My expectation is that if I did the same with iMovie it would also produce a much-reduced file size. What I can’t understand is a) how does it do this b) why can’t Camtasia or iMovie achieve the same, or perhaps there is a trick which would allow them to. OBS Studio is streaming software, so it makes sense to be able to stream video to the internet without moving around gigantic files, but surely these other products would have worked out that large files should be avoided.

I didn’t make any more progress on the Maximo Secrets website over the weekend, and I seem to have abandoned all updates on The Diary of a Digital Nobody except for the weekly updates to My Podcasting Journey.

Now that I know that the yearly Watch Hours for the YouTube channel might be a target which is hard to hit, I have decided it is important that I learn something about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and I ought to also improve the website to make things easier to find to boost the usefulness of the site which I think goes hand-in-hand with improving your rankings. I’ve decided that I will embark on the WordPress SEO and Blogging courses, in that order, and see where this takes me.

With that in mind my objectives for week 35 are:

• Publish the ninth podcast episode and video at the same time.
• Start the WordPress SEO course.
• Continue with the next step on revamping the Maximo Secrets website.
• Continue to see whether I can eliminate the two remaining issues with creating a Camtasia video.
• Create End Screens for the YouTube videos.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone, the box still hasn’t been opened.
• Do something on The Diary of a Digital Nobody. Anything at all will do.