January Books: 5/4 (Weird Parenting Wins)
No February books as of yet.
Sorry I missed my second update last week, squiders. There’s been ~*~drama~*~ with my volunteer commitments, which is always so dumb. We’re all adults, why can’t we act like it? Anyway, I was livid for like 48 hours straight and I didn’t get anything unrelated to that accomplished.
Anyway, that’s awaiting mediation and we’re moving on as best we can.
I’m tracking my goals a little differently this year. I made a spreadsheet. In theory I am noting days when I do each of my normal goals (writing, reading, art, video games, and a fifth column for word count when applicable) but in practice I’m remembering the tracker every few days and so January is a little piecemeal.
According to said tracker, I did 5 writing days, 11 reading days, 2 art days, 12 video game days, and wrote 572 words. I suspect the writing and reading are underreported, but oh well.
I did get through the theory portion of my SkillShare class, which often takes the longest (aside from video editing), and do two exercises in the Ursula Le Guin craft book I’m slowly working through.
So now we’re up to the filming portion of the class. I spent yesterday looking at my options for doing screen share with my face in the corner, since it’s been a while and my webcam no longer supports that functionality, and today I tried them all out, which, I’m not going to lie, was pretty fun. I basically talk to myself and it’s all a bit silly. Maybe I’ll make a blooper reel at some point.
But, basically, my requirements were:
- Free
- Easy to use
- Supports the dual inputs I need for the workshop portions of the class
I came up with four options and made a short video with each (and also, in some cases, played with the editing and exportation options).
Zoom
The idea is that you go into a meeting by yourself and record the meeting. There were some pros to this; Zoom has built-in background blurring and light controls, and you can easily move between your face and screen sharing.
However, I found the video quality of the recording to be quite poor. Easily the worst of everything I tried. So I doubt I’ll use this.
Canva
Canva records screen recordings with talking heads if you download the Desktop app (which I thought I had at some point, but apparently if I did it got eaten one of the times I’ve had to reset the laptop). The image quality is nice, sound levels are good. No blurring of the background that I can see.
You can’t do just screen recording or just video of yourself, as far as I can tell. The editing suite is fairly intuitive, and it’s easy to add in text and other effects, but unfortunately without paying for a subscription I can’t control the resolution the video is exported at, which makes the whole thing kind of grainy.
ClipChamp
I’d never heard of this, but apparently it’s the built-in Microsoft video recorder/editor in Windows 11. I’m pretty sure I used its predecessor for editing before. The video quality is good, and it supports screen/face, just face, and just screen. It too is fairly intuitive on the editing (or at least, is close to what I’m used to) and also supports text and other effects.
It runs a little slow, though, and the videos it makes are huge. Plus the default is to upload everything into OneDrive which isn’t where I necessarily want a gazillion gigabytes of raw video, but I think I can make it work.
Honestly, I’ll probably go with this.
OBS
I’ve had OBS for a while, as it ties in to Twitch and every now and then I do ponder streaming video games. But one would need free time for new hobbies, and we barely have time for the ones we already have.
ANYway, I’ve had issues with sound levels with OBS. When I tried streaming some games last year, the audio for the game ended up being way louder than my commentary, to the point where you couldn’t even hear it in some cases, and I’m not sure how to fix it. It’s potentially easy, but it feels very overwhelming because I don’t understand the menus.
OBS also supports just screen or just face or both, and as an added bonus you can select where your face goes over the screen and how big it is. Video quality is good.
Audio is still so, so quiet. Part of me says that it’s fixable, and maybe I should poke at it and figure it out.
The other part says that ClipChamp basically does everything I want and just use that instead of making things harder for myself.
Wednesday
I started this entry yesterday and then had to go do productive and responsible things, so today I’ve poked around a bit on just screen recording options. Traditionally I’ve used Screencast-o-matic, which has worked well but does put a watermark on the screen. But it does allow me to select a portion of the screen to record, which is useful, because typically I teach from PowerPoint in Presenter mode.
I tried ClipChamp here and discovered that if I put it in Presenter mode and share my screen, it will just do the presentation, but it puts the presentation controls on the screen, and doesn’t have an option (that I’ve found, anyway) to remove the cursor. Perhaps if I recorded the video it could be removed after the fact. Who knows? Not me!
Canva doesn’t seem to do just the screen without a talking head.
Apparently you can also record directly in PowerPoint, which may be the easiest thing to try. And if it doesn’t work, well, Screencast-o-matic still exists.
But I think I’ve done all the research and playing around that I need to, so the next step is to start filming. That’s for next week, I think.
I’ll let you know how things go!
Hope you’re doing things that bring you joy, squiders. See you soon!
