Sunday, April 17, 2016

April 16, 2016

 This morning I got out of bed around nine o'clock and minus maybe a few hours, I spent the entire day working on my video tutorial. I have lost track of how many hours I have put into this assignment. All for a seven minute video. It's ridiculous.

Half of the day was spent recording the video to go along with the audio I recorded yesterday. I finally decided on recording in small chunks based on the original breaks I put in my script. Each video was between seventeen seconds and a minute long, which were much easier to deal with. I highlighted that section of audio in Audacity so it would only play that section. Then I would practice the movements on the website several times before recording the video. After each video I would drag it into my video editing program and, line up the audio of the video (which was muted in the video editing program) with the audio for the tutorial, and then did a bunch of tweaking to make sure things looked right.

The second half of my day was spent working on the captions. At first I was overly concerned about only having around thirty-two characters per line because I read that on some website about ADA compliance. I would be doing that until next week if I kept it up so I ended up copying my script into a new landscape document, made the text the same font and size I was using in the video, and made the margins so each line was around eleven and a half inches long. I had to adjust things manually a few times but that was a lot faster than counting letters for each line. The most tedious part then became syncing the captions with the audio. If I talk too much my voice gives me a headache. Today I spent hours not only listening to my voice but listening to a broken record of it, sometimes in full sentences, like when I was recording the video, and sometimes in chunks of a few words when I was syncing captions. Needless to say, I ended up getting a headache. Probably also aided by staring intently at multiple computer screens all day.

After all that work, I am nearly done. I put in a little time on a title screen tonight when I finished the captions but I'm not happy with it yet. I also need to put the objectives on the notepad I have in the video the whole time. There is also the end of the video, after the time-lapse, where I recap what has happened. I have the same background screen as my title slide but I think I want to list the objectives across the screen. Right now it is just blank and it looks odd.

Even though I still have those things to add, I just rendered the video out to make sure it would actually look good when it was an actual video, not just a preview of my edits. It took around eighteen minutes and when I played it, there wasn't any sound. I forget I had muted the master volume when I was trying different versions of the title screen because I was tired of hearing my voice. Whoops. I'm rendering out another one right now, hopefully with audio this time. Despite that mistake, the video itself looked good, so that is positive. Also, if something horrible happens and I lose my project file and am unable to tweak the last few things tomorrow, I will at least have a somewhat done version of the video as proof that I did actually do something.

Tomorrow will involve more video editing. I'll finish all of the things mentioned previously and I'll have a chance to look at things with a fresh perspective so maybe I'll catch some things I missed. Hopefully nothing big because I've put in enough time already. There are already things I wish I would have done differently or would like to do but I'm trying to ignore those things because they don't have any real impact on the overall video.

The second render finished and I just watched the video, this time with audio. It's not bad. Not counting the things I still need to do, I'm fairly happy with how it has turned out. It could definitely be worse. Due to the amount of information I was trying to squeeze into a small amount of time, I don't think it would be that useful for people wanting to follow along, which was my original hope for the video, I think it may at least serve as a good overview of the website. The audio quality is also way better than all of the library webinars I have watched and most of the tutorials I have watched on YouTube. So there's that.


Now I'm going to go to bed because that has sounded like a good idea for a couple hours now.

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