More thoughts on equipment, emergencies, budgets, free recording and video editing tools, and speech recognition once again
Finding virtues in necessity; that was the week that was...
Within limits, life’s turbulence can helpfully shake things up and settle them in a more stable configuration as we reconsider them. That’s probably the best way to describe the past month here at our Portuguese quinta.
The week ahead will be more of the same, mucking goat pens, covering shallow graves with more soil to dampen the stench, another round of dentistry, travel to the Big City, cataract surgery and all those other things that make life worth… re-evaluating.
As seems ever to be the case, times like this are filled with useful discoveries which I hardly have time for. But I’ve time enough to share a few highlights of the mad miscellany, which may prove helpful to some.
New gear
Last week I mentioned my video editing and equipment tribulations:
After a week of using that new microphone (the lightweight desktop Trust Mantis GXT 232) and those JLAB Go Sport+ earbuds, I can say I love ’em, love ’em, love ’em. They certainly aren’t the best of their types on the market, but they have all the performance I need at a fair price that won’t cause me to freak out if I lose or break them at some point as I tend to do.
The microphone performed well about 20 minutes into last week’s webinar on aspects of memoQ QA once I realized that the horrible static I and others heard wasn’t coming from someone else’s unmuted microphone, but rather from the broken one in the laptop I was using, which the new “Zoom workplace” app that I was forced to install 5 minutes before showtime had inexplicably chosen to use rather than the good microphone I had been using all afternoon with other programs.
That little faux pas led me to some new ideas for how to edit and publish this and future presentations, which I hope everyone will find more useful. Stay tuned; I hope I can get to that before the Portuguese Steve Martin gets another crack at my mouth on Wednesday.
Those earbuds. Wow. Just perfect. My only mistake was to swap out the little rubber pillow for the largest of the three sets that came with them. The sound is great with any of them, but the big ones block too much ambient sound in the room, so it’s harder to hear things like the honked horns of delivery drivers or my companheira telling me I need to go clean the dog shit out of the kennels right now. That’s a bad thing, right?
Video stuff
Camtasia is working great on the recommissioned laptop. Better than before, in fact, because the old machine had more RAM. I had forgotten about that. Anyone who tries to do serious work with less than 16 GB these days is just a masochist.
I have a long to-do list of videos to make about quality assurance and regular expressions use, and I intend to make a number of videos and other resources to support some friends teaching at universities this semester, so I’ve been using my copious free time, all twenty minutes or so of it, to work on my old ideas for some kind of personal styleguide or standards for such things.
When I talk about a style guide for mostly free and often rather spontaneous video tutorials, I often get the side eye from colleagues who probably think I’m a bit nuts and there he goes again. They’re right, of course, but folks like me with no cinematic talent really can benefit from some well-defined principles implemented in checklists and templates. And the poor consumers of training materials they produce probably benefit more if the style guides are properly considered.
In various recent essays, I’ve mentioned my fascination with front-loaded highlight previews in many of the political commentaries I consume in that Advertising Hell known as YouTube. The purpose of those previews, of course, is to hook the viewer and get them to watch most or all of some rather long discussion. But it occurred to me that this technique might solve a problem I often face. In a typical technical tutorial for software or hardware, I often really need to see only 15 to 30 seconds of five to 15 minutes to do whatever task I need to do. And if it’s some recording in a language I don’t know, or in an accent that makes me wish I didn’t know the language, well, the faster I can bail out and complete the task, the better.
And in my many videos influenced by exposure to se non è vero, è ben trovato at a tender age, I’m sure others have felt the same. Enough of those stories and sidetracks, those obscure serendipities in peripatetic workflows and just show me where to find that fucking command icon!
So I’m experimenting with ways to do that, as you can see in a recently published YouTube playlist that shows four different versions of the same boring instructions for importing a regex library to memoQ, which differ only in the first 30 seconds or less of the intro. The same content is also discussed in the Substack post with those videos.
Your comments and/or poll votes in that post are welcome. I’d like to see what the consensus on this is before I crank out another few dozen tutorials.
All that trouble with the laptops and video editing also reminded me of the many times over the years when similar things have happened, or I’ve had to produce a quick video tutorial without having my usual tools available. A question from a friend a few days ago, who is taking a class in which she’ll be required to make some kind of video (for the first time is my impression) and who thought she might need to go buy a tripod and a bunch of other stuff (for reasons that aren’t really clear to me) also got me thinking that maybe we should have a discussion about free tools that will do the job without a lot of pain when you need to do something quick and instructional that won’t be too totally awful and time-consuming.
Most of us have smartphones, of course, that record video and even edit it in some pretty sophisticated ways, but in my world, quick videos are usually built around some kind of screencast, usually of software I’m trying to explain.
Integrated recording features in Windows 11 might do. I usually resort to Zoom, solo or in a meeting with others to whom I explain something. You can capture MP4 video with screen shares, etc. for up to 40 minutes on a free account. I have a paid professional account that I use for free public webinars, which is paid for these days by generous subscribers to my Substacks, but all that really gets me is a lot more time if I can’t shut up when the 40 minutes are up. And there are surely many other good options, which I’d love to hear about in the comments if you know of one or more.
Of course these free options don’t have all the features of pro tools like Camtasia, and if their video is edited later in better software there may be some limits on the effects you can apply (like those cursor highlights I use occasionally). But they do the job without risk, complication or possible budget stress. And to edit, make clips, add callouts, transitions, etc. the free editors in Substack, YouTube and other platforms may work for you too. That’s more or less how I started out doing these videos many years ago (yeah, they are pretty awful, I was clueless) until a friend gave me one of his unused Camtasia licenses and I learned how much easier the videomaker life could be.
Audio tutorials?
Podcasting is a thing now. Maybe my Substacks even tell you I have a podcast because I clicked the wrong button once. But I don’t. I thought about it long ago, a friend even made a musical intro for it based on some jokes we made about blues stereotypes, and I had my wonderful Argentine artist Juan Tavela make a logo (which is used on this Substack), and I’ve thought of doing some interviews lately, but I really can’t find the requisite enthusiasm for some routine like that.
But quick audio tutorials? Hmmmmmmm.
How would that work? I’ve thought of it before, but discarded the idea, because I thought that such a thing would need graphics or video to be effective since I’m not really into pontificating on mindset and other hands-free, mindless frippery. And who would be nuts enough to listen to a detailed software tutorial while jogging, washing the dishes or driving a car?
But then I thought of the likely thousands of hours I’ve spent explaining how to do something over the phone, guiding people as I cast a virtual screen in my mind and described the images and the steps to perform. Often translating them to another language at the same time.
And all those times I’ve stood behind someone’s chair, letting them “drive” as we carried out some software process they needed to learn.
So I’ve done this essentially.
And a tutorial originally planned to work as audio-only might make a good basis for an exceptionally clear video tutorial.
And a transcript of the audio could be edited and annotated, expanded, to make useful written tutorials, perhaps clearer because they started as a presentation with no images or helpful downloads or hyperlinks, etc.
Hmmmm. Stay tuned.
More fun with speech to text.
After retiring from high-volume, time-pressured urgent legal translations that often required me to dictate a good draft of 10,000 words or more in a day, I haven’t put a lot of time into matters of speech to text. All the chaos and uncertainty with Dragon NaturallySpeaking being swallowed by the Evil and Neglectful Empire didn’t help.
And living with an orthopedic surgeon who is a true expert on treating gout (“Forget the drugs, stupid,” she said, “improve your diet!”), I don’t have the same motivation of great, constant pain in my hands that made me such a fan of voice transcription.
But I do use speech to text for most social media chats, especially on my iPhone, and I often like to draft articles or summarize ideas for them that way, especially if I’m speeding down a narrow, windy country road at 120 kph or so. Yeah, I did take something more than memories from all those years in Germany.
Recently Windows 11 started nagging the f*ck out of me every time I started the computer, telling me that my autostarted Windows Speech Recognition (which I use for English, German and Spanish) was deprecated and replaced by something called Voice Access in Windows 11 22H2 and later. Now I like WSR because it’s actually pretty good at recording one’s personal dictionary of terms not found in the shipping configuration. Voice Access hasn’t gotten there yet, alas. But… wow.
Here are the languages currently covered:
No Portuguese. No Russian. Rats. Not yet anyway. Not in WSR either, for that matter. But WSR has all of the list above, and Chinese and Japanese too. I haven’t found any information on where Voice Access is headed and what languages might be coming soon. Our phones do a lot more with languages, as does Microsoft Office, where I find the Portuguese dictation feature rather good, and you can dictate in many other languages.
But why am I so excited about Voice Access in Windows 11?
Look at all the editing controls and other features in that PDF! As good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Now if they add personal dictionary features, I’ll be blissful.
I made that PDF from a DOCX into which I pasted the content of the corresponding Microsoft help page. You can use Microsoft Word to convert that file back to a DOCX if you like. My intent is to read through the whole thing and then edit it down to a single page of commands I’ll actually use routinely and use that for personal learning and teaching.
We’ve come a long way and gotten a bit more out of the journey than a shoe full of sharp stones.
So that was the week that was, and a wild one. I hope yours was equally productive and less bonkers. And I hope that some of the breadcrumbs along this trail can offer you a bit of ergonomic nourishment and insight.
Video camera image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cartoon_Online_Video_Sharing_And_Streaming_Camera_Icon.svg
Human ear graphic source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anatomy_of_the_Human_Ear_blank.svg
For a completely free setup, using Open Broadcaster Software (https://obsproject.com/) for recording, along with DaVinci Resolve (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/edit) for simple edits or DaVinci Studio (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/studio) or Shotcut (https://www.shotcut.org) for more advanced editing, is likely the best option.
For a paid but affordable solution, Canvid (https://www.canvid.com) paired with one of the editing tools mentioned above (or something similar) for final touches is another good solution that doesn't break the bank.
For quick and easy video screen captures to add to a blog post or website, Screen to Gif (https://www.screentogif.com) is a handy utility. Another option is ShareX (https://getsharex.com), which is a powerful screen capture tool, though it has a steeper learning curve due to its wide range of features (quite the Swiss Army knife for screen capturing).