The monster of a YouTube video which was 40 minutes long took a whole week to produce. This was the first time with the Neewer lights, and I learnt a few things.

The lights reflect in my glasses, nothing much I can do about this as I am not about to go near contact lenses or have eye surgery. I did forget to unpack the diffusers and my hope is that these will reduce the effect. When I am waving my hands around you can see hand shadows on my shirt, the diffusers might help here as well. I’ll know the answers to both points next week.

I did have a moment of panic as I started to eliminate the green screen with the Chromakey filter in OBS, I was getting pixelation around the area below my left hand, the area with the darkest shadow caused by the key light on the opposite side. This may have been caused with a momentary increase in daylight, but I couldn’t be sure. Next time I might close the curtains. In OBS I could increase the Similarity setting, and this had a positive effect. Next time I will have to make some adjustments to see if I can illuminate the shadows a tad.

There didn’t seem to be a problem with shadows cast onto the green screen, they were eliminated. However, over the next few weeks we will be entering the period with the least amount of light so anything might happen, which is one reason for trying to find the right solutions with curtains pulled now. I really don’t want to buy more lights to illuminate the green screen as I really don’t have the room and when I am finally in my studio, I can fix lights to the walls. Incidentally, I’ve made no progress in starting to clear the junk room which is destined to be renamed – a studio.

During the week I received an email from the team at Descript that they had launched their new video editing tools, infused with AI, one of which can use text to speech to mimic your actual voice. It does look like an impressive set of features, and I added a comment to the weekly feedback blog to see whether Richard Midson had been testing the new features as I know he is a fan of Descript.

My thoughts here is that as I work towards building a Learning Management System the types of videos will be quite different to what they are today, they will use screen recording and I will appear in a corner of the screen, head, and shoulders, one of the reasons I have acquired a new iPhone for its video capabilities. It looks like the Descript system is built around scenes and a storyboard which is the approach I have used for the only video of this form that I’ve done. If you can edit and adjust the scripts as you build the video and do this from one tool, then this could be quite efficient. The Learning Management System will be next year’s project.

I am in the middle of revamping my website in preparation for this, I am on a new FSE based theme which is now full width. Currently I am reworking the Categories and Tags, I was only using Categories and I had created multiples, for example Asset Management YouTube and Asset Management Bite Site (the podcast). Now I just have Asset Management and two tags YouTube and Bite Size.

The key was to move to a Query Loop Block where I can adjust the Category and Tag. I have now reworked the five pages and their posts for the YouTube videos and Bite Size podcasts. The posts are the transcripts and slides and the embedded link to the YouTube video, or the link for the Seriously Simple Podcasting player. I have used a new page template so that I can adjust the look of these pages in the future. I have also used a Reusable Block to make it a quick process to change the pages to use the Query Loop Block and its descendent blocks.

The next step is to create a set of pages for each group of posts that I have written over the last few years. Each page will be based on a tag, the associated posts will have the same tag. Each page will become something that I can show on a static home page, so I’ll need to think about an excerpt and featured image that will not look out of place if they are all seen together. I’ll need some inspiration for how I handle the featured images, back to Canva perhaps. Initially I will have 15-20 of these tags, but over time this will grow. I don’t think a Maximo screenshot will work as the featured image although it is the simple choice.

Anyway, in preparation for this I completed the task of going back through the old posts and adding one of 15 new tags. In the main Posts page, I used the Classic View and after selecting a set of posts I found the Edit option under Bulk Actions, I could then set the tag and use the Update button to make the change to the selected set of posts. It did occur to me that it would be useful for someone on the WordPress Courses team to give a lesson on what you can do in both the Default View and Classic View, and I posted this as a comment on the Weekly Feedback, nobody has yet taken up the challenge.

I did install the Sensei plugin this week and immediately raised a couple of questions with the Sensei support team. One is regarding UK pricing and how you go about installing just the Sensei blocks, and whether if you started with the Sensei blocks and then later upgraded to Sensei Pro whether you are credited for the price of the blocks which is included in Sensei Pro.

The second question was whether I could create a part of the existing Maximo Secrets website which could only be seen by a colleague who I will be developing the courses with, he will be my first pupil. I do not want other visitors to the website to know that I am looking to create a course, it will be a lot of work and I may not be able to make the time to see it through.

I did get an answer on both points. There is no current upgrade from Sensei blocks to Sensei Pro, so this means either go with Sensei Pro now, or build all your content with the free version and upgrade to Sensei Pro when you are ready to launch a course. I’ll probably subscribe to Sensei Pro sooner rather than later.

The access to the courses is a URL which you can privately tell your pupils, the chances are that nobody will discover the URL unless Google finds it for them. You add the course to the menu when you are ready to launch. A pupil needs to subscribe to get access to the content rather than the marketing pages that go with the course. The subscription is handled in the same manner as anyone who can log in to your account, and not via Sensei itself. I had a quick look, and it does look as if you can create Subscribers.

My objectives for Week 47 will be:

• Create the weekly YouTube video, it should be much smaller which will give me a fair chance of completing the next one after that, so two videos are a reasonable goal although a bit of a stretch.
• Add a page for each of the 15 tags created recently. I think I will use a Parent Page to group them all. I’ll add an Excerpt to each page, but a featured image for each will require a bit of inspiration and unlikely to be in place next week.
• 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, assuming he studies one of my videos each week.
• Test a subscription access for Tadas to see if he can see a post with the quiz questions.
• Install the Sensei Pro plugin for Learning Management.
• Start using the Lavalier microphone and Power Director 365 video editor.