The week started with the delivery of the next YouTube video at just over 25 minutes and the realisation that I wasn’t going to complete the second video, nor even record it this week. It is the monster that I referred to last week, I have little doubt it will be the longest so far, my guess is it will be close to 40 minutes.

I wasn’t that happy with this week’s video, it was acceptable but a few too many mistakes, a few pauses, wrong words, phrasing issues, and I did retake about 6 or 7 minutes. I thought the green screen removal still left a tinge of green at the edges.

Tadas, my colleague, starts his education programme this week. He will watch each video, probably a couple of times, once to get an impression and the second time at a much slower pace using the transcript to dive deep into the Maximo product. He’ll take each sentence, or part of, and see whether he can verify what I am saying by entering records. I’ll soon learn whether someone who is new to the software can learn from my material which describes what Maximo can do, but doesn’t show you how to use it, that would be a different type of video, a second series that would take me two years to develop. I hope I will learn something from him watching and feeding back to me. Tadas will document his questions and I can use this, if there is something not understood, then it is an area where I have a gap.

The Neewer RGB660 Pro LED Video Light Kit arrived, all nicely packaged and with UK electric plugs. Installation was straightforward although my first attempt didn’t fit the lights to the stands correctly. One U-shaped arm is bent in the middle, but it doesn’t catch when moving the light to the right position, and it is only a cosmetic issue. A quick turn on of one of the lights lit up the back panel and output a glow from the LED display which wasn’t enough to light up the green screen. There isn’t much of an instruction document, and I was in a hurry, so I left it that I would find a user manual, and study how to use the lights later in the week. Evidently, there is an iPhone app to download.

The new iPhone arrived at the start of the period when Apple said that it would arrive. The following day I had everything moved across with the new Sim working and my old phone number transferred. The iOS version needed updating, which I guess is normal. Now I really must learn more about how to use it, especially the camera/video as that is really the main purpose behind the purchase. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to up the quality of the videos to 4K.

Since moving to the wide screen display on my website, I’ve noticed that the slides in the video transcripts are not as clear as they are when you play the KeyNote presentation full screen, although the physical difference between one and the other is very little. Currently I am using KeyNote’s Export to Image function and saving as a .JPEG file. I’ve compared that to taking a regular screenshot and the regular screenshot is much better, and only a little larger as a file size. I think I will be looking to replace the slides for each of the eighteen videos that I’ve created so far. I was going to go through and add Captions and Alternative Text on the first set of fourteen, so I can do this at the same time. It will only be a slight change to my workflow, and so it should not take any more time to get clearer images.

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is investigate taking scrolling images. In several application screens in Maximo, you would vertically scroll. You can’t really piece together two screenshots as the second would always show on a second page of a document, but you can take an image which is vertically 1.5x or more that of a normal landscape screen print. I know that TechSmith Snagit allows you to do scrolling screen prints and I’ve started to look at what other features it has. In the New Year I do aim to start the process of reworking all my previous posts and taking new screen prints is a major part of that exercise, I ought to be doing the best I can to make sure that the screen prints are as clear as they could be on my website. I’ve no doubt I will download the free version of Snagit when I know I have time to trial it.

A couple of weeks ago I prepared a new page template, and I spent time trying to use it, and I soon realised I had a problem. I put a question out to the community for feedback and Verity stepped in with some points.

My understanding of a template was wrong. I thought I could adjust an existing page with a new template and the template blocks would be copied into the page, then you could later adjust the template, and this would update all the pages that used it. The second part was true, but the first part is not, the template blocks are not copied.

As I was trying to fathom out what was going wrong, I completed the Create Your Site course, the last couple of sections was discussing templates. This did help and the analogy given for a template was a picture frame where the post or page contents is the picture. You can adjust what the picture frame looks like but if it contains any content then this is static content that will exist wherever the template is used. It is unlikely that you would do this, and all your content (the picture) will be contained in the Post or Page where the template is applied. The template requires a Post Content block to add the frame to the picture.

What this meant for me was that the Query Loop block and its columns and other blocks had to exist in each page, so that the category and tag (taxonomy) could be adjusted for each page. It had to be removed from the new template, which meant that this template had hardly any differences with the regular page template. But I still think it best to apply the new template to the existing pages in case in the future I want to change what the frame looks like.

There were nine blocks associated with the Query Loop block and I could use a Reusable block and then when it was applied to a page convert it to a regular set of blocks before adjusting the taxonomy. This would at least save me time, but I could get to the same point just as easily and quickly by just copying a page. I will try out the Reusable blocks method so that I get to understand what this does. Unfortunately, I won’t have time to try any of this as I am away this weekend.

Before I left for my weekend on Saturday morning, I did download the Neewer app to my new iPhone and got the two lights linked by Bluetooth, so that I could use it to adjust the light intensity. There are several settings and I do need to learn what they do, but at least I now know that the lights can reach 100% intensity and I should be using them the next time I record a video. The lights do create some shadow on the green screen but not much as they are probably only about 20 degrees away from where the camera will be and not the suggested 45 degrees, and my heels are not that far from the green screen. If I were closer to the camera and further away from the green screen, then the shadow would be more noticeable. I’ll have to see how it turns out when I do the next recording and try to eliminate the green screen with the Chroma Key filter.

Whatever spare moments I had during the weekend was learning about the camera and video on the new iPhone. While I have had an iPhone since 2010 with the iPhone 4, I have hardly taken a photo with any of the three models I’ve had, and I am determined to change that. For me, it is learning to use the camera from scratch and not just what is new.

What is new is impressive, and I found the settings and made some adjustments, for example, all videos will now be 4K. I have no doubt I will be a novice user for a while, but I will be attempting to use it to branch out with other types of videos and the next purchase must be a light to illuminate me when I am at the laptop, demonstrating the Maximo product. My vision is a head and shoulders portrait video that will be contained in a circle and positioned in the bottom right of the Maximo screen. That is the goal anyway.

My objectives for Week 46 will be:

• Publish the long YouTube video, using the new Neewer lights. This will still place me a week behind, but I’ve concluded that I can’t keep beating myself up about this, I just mustn’t get further behind.
• Rework the Categories and Tags for all the YouTube videos and Bite Size podcast posts, using a new template and using a Reusable block. This should allow me to merge the three categories I’ve got for Asset Management to one.
• Rework the Categories and Tags across the remaining posts and pages and create a new page to display the results of one tag, for example Linear Assets (10 posts). I will eventually have 20-30 new pages each with a single tag, and these will be linked into a static home page, so I’ll need to create a suitable featured image and write an excerpt. I want to make it easy to find the groups of posts that I have written over the years, as they are currently getting buried.
• Write a set of quiz questions and answers, for the first YouTube video, subject – Location Types and Location Systems. I’m aiming to produce a quiz each week for Tadas, but it won’t be published. i.e., this is starting the process of building content for a new area of Maximo Secrets, learning material for which subscription fees will eventually be charged – adding a Learning Management System to the website.
• Install the Sensei plugin for Learning Management.
• Start using the Lavalier microphone and Power Director 365 video editor.