Growing Experiences

October was a month of growing experiences. This is not to say that this entire pandemic year hasn’t been a rollercoaster of challenges, solutions and fresh challenges. It certainly has. That said, October was a crucible. On the upside, when you put things through a crucible, you get a more pure result in the end. I’m gonna hold onto that metaphor and hope that it pays off. 

I made it to 100 subscribers on YouTube at the end of September. That was my first goal for the platform as it meant I could update my URL on the site. It finally did and you can find the channel at youtube.com/c/dungeonbarkeep which is a huge improvement on the random string of characters I had previously. I’ve set my sights on my next benchmark on my way to making something of this channel, 500 subscribers. The actual benchmark for YouTube status is 1000 subscribers but I’m not in it for that sweet monetization. So, for me 500 seems like a good next goal to look to. When I get there, I’ll be adding Chicago’s favourite liquor to hate, Malort to the silliness there. 

It’s been a really fun project. I’ve added a couple elements to the most recent iterations; green screens, more cameras and weekly bonus cocktails.

Green screens

What did I do? For starters, I bought a green screen on wish. Because part of this experiment is to see what you can do with budget gear or things that you have lying around, I didn’t want a fancy greenscreen. The other thing to know is that I ordered the green screen in question months ago and had it sitting un-opened on a shelf in my office. When I decided to add a green screen to the experiment, I opened up that shipping pouch to take a look at this thing. I was shocked to find how far off from the standard chroma key green this piece was. It is also made of the kind of crummy plastic fabris you might expect for tablecloths or mid tier re-usable shopping bags. 

This was after the first steaming.

What have I learned about using a green screen? I’ve learned that while often you will see the advice that you can get away with one light but you want more than one is maybe a little optimistic. This is especially true if you're trying to work with a budget green screen and a corner. I’ve put up my green screen in two spots in my apartment so far and both of them have involved putting the green screen up in a corner. I cannot overstate how much I have become convinced that this is a bad idea. The crinkles in the corner cause problems for the chroma key filter and it’s a challenge to light evenly. If you're reading this for advice, take that as a piece of advice worth listening to, put the screen on a flat wall if you can. 

I also had to do a lot of steaming for my green screen because it came wrinkled and the one I have isn’t fabric so much as it is a sort of plastic material. This makes it challenging to press. It’s another thing to think about as you’re getting into your green screen adventure. 

As I’ve said before, I’m all about developing through iterative changes and this was a great example of how that works over time. I think if you watch the videos I’ve been releasing in order, you’ll notice that the background is getting slightly better step by step. This is from repeated pressing and moving the lights around. I finally changed my camera angle to just the flat wall behind me for last week and I’ll be tweaking from that for the filming I’ll be doing today. I’m pretty happy with the recent stuff I’ve been getting so I think I’m close to the end of the progression for this setup.

More Cameras!

If one camera is good, three must be better, right? If your answer was maybe, you got it. The biggest problem I’ve been running into is that the computer does not seem to be able to consistently run all three cameras. I’m not entirely sure why this is as it works sometimes So this will be my primary troubleshooting issue for the next few editions of the live stream at least (I only use two cameras for the pre-recorded episodes). If any of you out there know why I might be having trouble with a third camera, please let me know. 

The cameras are an Amcrest HD, Logitech C210 and Logitech C920. I’m amazed to say that the Amcrest has been the most robust of the three. It works most reliably with the green screen setup and has so far not been one of the cameras to cut out in the multi camera setup. I do wonder if there is something about the Logitech cameras which causes them to feedback on each other. 

Why three cameras you might ask? Well as this is all about upskilling, one of the big things I want to be able to do is seamlessly switch between multiple camera angles while running an emceed live stream. Whether I’m leading a webinar, playing host to a Starlight Radio Dreams live stream or helping to run a meeting this is a skill in OBS that I need to have honed to a sharp point. I’m also learning that the OBS audio settings can get all kinds of messed up based upon how this is done so knowing the things to watch for has been very helpful as I continue building those habits. 

Weekly Bonus Cocktails. 

This one is for YouTubers especially. As I started this as a livestreaming project, I hadn’t really intended to do a lot of edited video. I’ve never been good at editing video nor have I enjoyed it. What I’ve learned is that my pre-recorded pieces were performing much better in the long run than videos which had started out life as a live stream. I also enjoyed being able to design a cocktail and edit the video in hopes to be about 10 minutes long or less. This means setting things up ahead, making sure I have stuff to talk about and then the dreaded editing. 

If you’re thinking of doing something similar, I cannot recommend enough that you build edited videos into your content creation plan. It’s been rewarding from an analytics standpoint and it gives me videos I can be a little more proud of in perpetuity. 

As this post is getting a little long I will leave you with one last thing. I had been using the Windows native video editing software for my first few videos. It worked fine but it lacked a lot of fitness and capability when it came to transitions, finding an exact spot in an audio track for overlay and especially in getting an audio track to fall into place where you want it. I did a video of a tea kettle boiling and used one of my best mics to give a full ASMR experience. I ended up having to scrap that audio entirely because I could not get it to line up for the life of me.  Incidentally, that is one of my best performing videos to date. People really wanted that content for some reason.

Then a dear friend, Carl let me in on a secret. The program I use for editing my podcasts (which he recommended to me in the first place) can also edit video. My life is changed. I was able to edit my most recent video in easily half the time if not less and that includes the time I spent learning how to use the plugins and settings. If you use reaper for audio (and if you don’t you should) this is a game changer. Carl recommended this video (https://youtu.be/-n0V_KnXbRA

<https://youtu.be/-n0V_KnXbRA>) to start and I’m going to chat with him about using more of his recommendations for a future blog entry as I get into this.