After the public holiday on Monday, it was back on the treadmill producing the ninth video and publishing the podcast episode of the same title that I had previously prepared. Again, I had to use a colleagues copy of the new Maximo software as mine was being rebuilt, but by Friday it was back available again.

This week’s video was a long one, just over twenty minutes, and five sections of material. I expect very few will watch this video from beginning to end, more likely Google will direct people to the relevant part of the video, which is controlled by Timestamps and Chapters in YouTube Studio. I predict this video to be one of the bottom two in the number of likes it receives for the Asset Management playlist which hopefully by the end of September will have all fourteen videos.

There wasn’t much work time to do anything else, but I did take another look at some of the issues surrounding the use of Camtasia. I hadn’t had time last week to look at transitions between scenes, but with a menu item called Transitions I quickly had a sample working with the traditional Fade.

I found a TechSmith article (makers of Camtasia) on how to reduce the final size of video files and a few tweaks later I had a file that was less than half the size, but still more than three times the size as that produced by OBS. The changes were making the data rate 3,000 instead of 6,000, setting the Entropy to CAVLC instead of CABAC and optimizing for Download rather than Streaming.

I did another experiment to stream the new 310MB Camtasia .MP4 file through OBS and the resulting file size was reduced to 84.7MB. This was a tad smaller than the 85.2MB file size from the same experiment last week where I had started with a 710.6MB file with the 6,000 kbits/sec data rate. The conclusion was, unless I am going to go crazy on lowering the data rate to something where I might see quality issues, then I am always going to need to pass it through OBS at the end, so why bother tweaking the settings at all?

Unfortunately for the type of video I am producing so far, I have decided that I will discontinue using Camtasia for the reason that I cannot use the properties for green screen removal to remove the green tinge around my hair line which is much more evident at the front and end scenes where as the presenter I am much larger in the video. This was a great pity; how can green screen removal be inadequate. I did a search on Google and found an article analysing seven video editing software for chroma key green screen precision and Camtasia came joint last with 6/10. OK, the article was on a competitor’s website – Cyberlink the makers of PowerDirector 365 which unsurprisingly got a 10/10. But even if I treated them as highly biased, they rated two others at 9/10 and two more at 8/10. https://www.cyberlink.com/blog/the-top-video-editors/156/best-green-screen-software

So, if I have decided not to use Camtasia – where next? Well, after some research on video editing software I concluded that for £44.99 for a year’s subscription, then PowerDirector 365 was hardly going to break the bank. I now have it downloaded and I’ll have a go at reproducing next week’s video with the spare time I have at the end of the week. I found the Reviews and Recommendations page on Cyberlink’s website useful as it directed me towards several reviews. PowerDirector is not always top, but at least well placed. https://www.cyberlink.com/prog/product/product-review.jsp

The conclusion I have come to, is that the right video editor is very much dependent on the type of video you are producing, which is why starting with a free one that is easy to use is probably the right step, for non-professional video makers like myself. Well, I’ve tried that, and I am on step two of the video maker’s ladder and for one type of video I at least know what I need.

My next type of video will I think be a YouTube Short. A colleague of mine had directed me towards the YouTube channel called ‘How to Power BI’. I have learned quite a bit from reviewing Bas’s video style and presentation. Anyway, I asked him a week or so ago, what software he uses for a certain type of YouTube Short and I received a reply this morning – Camtasia. I was probably going to continue to use Camtasia for screen capture type videos, and now for YouTube Shorts Camtasia will also be my starting point. It looks as if I may be heading towards using two video-editing software packages.

I have another gripe to make about iMovie, the iMovie Library consumes a lot of disk space, when I looked it was just under 100GB. Why do I know this, I just received a message to say I was down to my last 2.5GB of 1TB. Having cleared some files and the Bin, which together restored 500GB, I set about removing some old projects from iMovie. I deleted several projects, almost anything that wasn’t the one I created this week, then checked the disk space – hardly any difference. So, onto Google to see what is using up the 100GB.

Well, most of it is a single project that I use to stitch the audio and video together, 73GB. How it has gained so much space I don’t know, I’ve only done 10 videos, so this is 7GB a time, but the files I load are a maximum of 300MB for each video – what the hell is happening in iMovie? I don’t need the project where I stitch the audio and video together, every time I use it, I delete what was there before (except perhaps it isn’t actually being deleted). After an hour of trying, it was probably crashing, I resorted to deleting the large folder from Show Package Contents on the iMovie Library.imovielibrary file and then rebooting my laptop for good measure. I now have 600GB free but the whole cleaning up process has consumed a whole football match on the radio plus Sports Report, time when I thought I might be having a go at revamping the Maximo Secrets website.

The second objective for this week was to start the WordPress SEO course. Well, I whizzed through it, and now have gone back to the beginning to make a few notes about what I need to do for my website.

• I need to think about Maximo Keywords that users will search for and test these in Google to see the results. Use language that aligns with the intention of what people are searching for.
• Can I get some backlinks from other websites, particularly at IBM or other sites likely to be used by the Maximo community?
• Determine the top 10 pages/posts and work out what can be done to strengthen their ranking.
• Keywords are broad search terms. Long-tail keywords are search phrases.
• Use Google to search your keywords to see what related searches are found. Use Google to search a phrase to see what alternate phrases are used – these could be good to include as your post title or as headings.
• Use the title as heading 1 and other headings as H2 and H3, try and include a key phrase as a H2 heading.
• Is there a way of including a table of contents at the top of a post? Some of my articles are long and this would give navigation.
• Give image files descriptive names, a few words.
• Images should be <1MB and of type .jpg. Clarity is important. Is the default screen capture tool on a Mac as good as it can be? Some Maximo screens have a vertical scroll bar, there might be some tools that allow a scrolling screenshot – see Best Mac Screenshot Apps
• Add image Alt Text. Google will crawl this text and it’s needed for the visually impaired.
• Add image Captions that appear below the image. I’ve done a trial and it looks as if it can contain more than a simple title, a link also perhaps.

• Videos need a thumbnail, descriptive file names, descriptions and captions and a transcript should be provided. Embed a video on a post page, don’t embed it multiple times on different pages.
• Search engines consider how long visitors stay on your site. Add links to other relevant articles.
• You want to garner your visitors to like, create comments and share to social media.
• The first paragraph under a heading is important, it should include a keyword or long-tail keyword phrase.
• You should have a Site Title and a Site Description (I don’t have one)
• Each Post and Page should have a Title and Description (Excerpt). I rarely have an excerpt.
• Yoast or Magazine3 plugins can help to provide structured data that search engines use.
• Internal Links are good – but make sure you use the Anchor Text.
• Consistently publish quality content, once a week minimum.

The next target is to revamp my Maximo Secrets website, but I do have to decide what I want it to provide. So, I have had a close look at the website and made a list of some things I would like to change.

• The Home page shows blog posts, I no longer have just a blog but a podcast and YouTube channel, so a static home page would work best.
• A blog posts page should show blogs and not podcast and YouTube transcripts. I need a page that can exclude categories.
• The right-hand panel that shows widgets is on every page for Desktop and in footer area for tablet and phone, but I don’t really do much with widgets. Perhaps if I did use widgets they would work best always being shown in the footer. But then I need to think what a post would look like if it were full width on a desktop.
• Posts would be better full width as I have a lot of screenshots which are landscape rather than portrait and these would work better being larger.
• Many of my posts are part of a sequence of posts on a topic. They would be better grouped, and the grouping made prominent on a home page.
• The two menus need more work. I made a start, but I need to think what I want the lower menu to do.
• I have too many categories, and I have never used tags, so I need to rethink what I want these to do.
• Something has gone wrong with the YouTube Channel and Maximo Bite Size pages they are now only showing the featured image for the first post, although the excerpts for each are shown.
• There are many more blocks than when I first started out. I should review which blocks would make sense to my posts, for example Table of Contents, and Related Posts would probably work well, as my posts tend to be long.

I did look at Widgets and apart from those you can add with blocks not many widgets are of much interest, perhaps Blog Stats, Navigation Menu, and Top Posts and Pages. I’m thinking a consistent Footer might be a good idea, and I should really think what I would like the footer to achieve.

The other decision I made this week was that I am so far behind in my weekly diary on The Diary of a Digital Nobody, with little chance of catching up that I will give up for this year and perhaps have another go next year. The site contains the Podcast Journey posts, so the site is being used.

I’m going to start with revamping the Maximo Secrets website this evening and so I’ll publish this podcast journey a little early. The objectives for week 36 will be:

• Publish the tenth podcast episode and video using normal workflow
• Have a go at reproducing the 10th video user PowerDirector 365.
• Take the next step in revamping the Maximo Secrets website starting with why the pages are not showing their featured images, a call to WordPress Support looks likely.
• Create End Screens for the YouTube videos.
• Do some test recordings with the new Lavalier microphone.