Videos Approved (Mostly)
Over the weekend, I worked on the first two tutorial videos for integrating the AdAdapted SDK into an Android project. I wanted to take a minute to talk about why the process of figuring out how I was going to go about making the videos was frustrating:
[StartRant]
First, the audio editing software I use has terrible noise suppression. There was a point where I used it before and I remember it working fairly well, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to get it to work like that again. After playing around with their Noise Gate plugin, I decided that it was awful and I couldn't do it that way.
However, a while ago, I installed OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) just for fun to play around with the tools. I discovered that they have excellent noise suppression that you can enable. The quality of my voice in the recordings is phenomenal. There's absolutely no background sound (even when I speak), no buzzing, no static, no artifacts, and it's very crisp (yay good headset mic). So, I wound up doing screen captures with OBS and then doing the voice overs in OBS as well, then dragging the resulting video file of the voice over into my audio editor and removing the video component, grabbing just that delicious audio. Then I could use that. It took me about 2-3 hours to work all of this out, though.
Now that it's all worked out, I can pump a full video out in 45 minutes to an hour, with the actual recording taking about 30 minutes and the rest of the time being devoted to the basic editing I've been doing. I still have to record the voice over a couple times just to try to get it to match the video as best as I can, but that's no problem. Doing multiple recordings to get the best one is just part of the process.
[EndRant]
I showed the videos to Molly, the person here at AdAdapted that I've had the most contact with, and she seemed to really like it, but, understandably, she couldn't give too much feedback outside of comments on the overall presentation and quality. She's a marketing/sales person, and the videos are aimed towards programmers. However, she seemed very happy with the presentation and quality, and even went so far as to say that the videos were better than she expected.
After showing them to Molly, I showed them to Mike, the CEO of AdAdapted and the guy who's in charge of the more technical side of things. He also seemed to like them, but wants me to revise some terminology specific to advertising (mediation?). They also want to get Chris in on the series and get his feedback on it. Chris is the main code developer here, and he's the one who actually wrote the libraries I've been using. It's an odd feeling, sitting 10 feet away from someone who wrote code libraries that I use. In programming, you use a massive multitude of libraries, but it's easy to just see them as magical code chunks that were produced by the finest Code Fairies from Codeland. It's... different to actually see someone who spent so much time developing those magical code chunks.
For the most part, the videos are approved, I just have to tweak some things. There's also going to be a bit of lag time between when I can actually make videos now, since I'll need to share my scripts with Mike and Chris to get them approved to make sure the terminology I use agrees with the terminology they've been using throughout the course of their work. That's all fine and good, I'm just happy that I finally get to make videos. I've wanted to make videos for a long time, which started when I was about 12 when I'd watch innumerable tutorial videos on Youtube to teach myself skills. Now, I finally get to be the one making those tutorials, and in a professional capacity. My hope is that these videos will be really useful for AdAdapted, since developers asking them questions on the integration process is one of the problems they have and I was taken on to alleviate that issue. Hopefully, this does that, or at least greatly reduces the number of emails they get asking, "Hey, how do I do this thing?"
TL;DR:
The videos are good to go, though the ones I've already made need some tweaking. It was a real pain in the ass getting them going, but now that I know how I'm going to do them, it's much easier and faster. My videos were well-received and I'm glad to start making videos. Hopefully, this will all be a lot of fun while simultaneously helping AdAdapted with one of their major problems: reducing questions developers have about using their libraries.
[StartRant]
First, the audio editing software I use has terrible noise suppression. There was a point where I used it before and I remember it working fairly well, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to get it to work like that again. After playing around with their Noise Gate plugin, I decided that it was awful and I couldn't do it that way.
However, a while ago, I installed OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) just for fun to play around with the tools. I discovered that they have excellent noise suppression that you can enable. The quality of my voice in the recordings is phenomenal. There's absolutely no background sound (even when I speak), no buzzing, no static, no artifacts, and it's very crisp (yay good headset mic). So, I wound up doing screen captures with OBS and then doing the voice overs in OBS as well, then dragging the resulting video file of the voice over into my audio editor and removing the video component, grabbing just that delicious audio. Then I could use that. It took me about 2-3 hours to work all of this out, though.
Now that it's all worked out, I can pump a full video out in 45 minutes to an hour, with the actual recording taking about 30 minutes and the rest of the time being devoted to the basic editing I've been doing. I still have to record the voice over a couple times just to try to get it to match the video as best as I can, but that's no problem. Doing multiple recordings to get the best one is just part of the process.
[EndRant]
I showed the videos to Molly, the person here at AdAdapted that I've had the most contact with, and she seemed to really like it, but, understandably, she couldn't give too much feedback outside of comments on the overall presentation and quality. She's a marketing/sales person, and the videos are aimed towards programmers. However, she seemed very happy with the presentation and quality, and even went so far as to say that the videos were better than she expected.
After showing them to Molly, I showed them to Mike, the CEO of AdAdapted and the guy who's in charge of the more technical side of things. He also seemed to like them, but wants me to revise some terminology specific to advertising (mediation?). They also want to get Chris in on the series and get his feedback on it. Chris is the main code developer here, and he's the one who actually wrote the libraries I've been using. It's an odd feeling, sitting 10 feet away from someone who wrote code libraries that I use. In programming, you use a massive multitude of libraries, but it's easy to just see them as magical code chunks that were produced by the finest Code Fairies from Codeland. It's... different to actually see someone who spent so much time developing those magical code chunks.
For the most part, the videos are approved, I just have to tweak some things. There's also going to be a bit of lag time between when I can actually make videos now, since I'll need to share my scripts with Mike and Chris to get them approved to make sure the terminology I use agrees with the terminology they've been using throughout the course of their work. That's all fine and good, I'm just happy that I finally get to make videos. I've wanted to make videos for a long time, which started when I was about 12 when I'd watch innumerable tutorial videos on Youtube to teach myself skills. Now, I finally get to be the one making those tutorials, and in a professional capacity. My hope is that these videos will be really useful for AdAdapted, since developers asking them questions on the integration process is one of the problems they have and I was taken on to alleviate that issue. Hopefully, this does that, or at least greatly reduces the number of emails they get asking, "Hey, how do I do this thing?"
TL;DR:
The videos are good to go, though the ones I've already made need some tweaking. It was a real pain in the ass getting them going, but now that I know how I'm going to do them, it's much easier and faster. My videos were well-received and I'm glad to start making videos. Hopefully, this will all be a lot of fun while simultaneously helping AdAdapted with one of their major problems: reducing questions developers have about using their libraries.
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