This week is putting the final touches on a few web components for our veterans outreach website. I needed to make a short video to put into the website and decided that it would be best to simply have a stock graphic video of an American flag waving. With that stock video I did a voice over and burned captions of the voice over on to the video.

Typically, I would get the camera and tripod to go outside and film this with a lavalier for audio. I decided against that because I have put my face on so many materials for the organization, that I feel it may be oversaturated at times. My voice is known, but it can easily be disassociated with my face over time so I felt this would be a better approach. It would also cut time for post production of both the audio and the video.

I grabbed the stock footage from the Envato Elements subscription that I currently have.

The week had two interviews for the podcast, but only one is being released. The release is being done as such because it has dated material to promote an upcoming event. The organization also needs extra podcast material to last over the winter/holiday break as I will be taking that time off to be with family while they are on vacation. So, the material will be edited and scheduled for release one a week for the next several weeks.

There isn’t much else to add for this week as things are winding down for me with school and the work needed for the time frame. I have zero plans to make an special edits or do any special compositions. The footage I had from the Texas Hemp Summit was practically a wash. I needed more footage of what could be considered b-roll and my camera was failing in the middle of the Sid Miller speech. I may be able to make some shorts out of it for YouTube but that will be about it.

This time and the next week are also about focusing on putting together the portfolio for the internship credits.

The post Week ending 12/03/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

This was basically a dead week. Its Thanksgiving. Sunday I did the news review which covered a bill sent to Biden’s desk regarding research. That covered an article that I did the previous week. That news segment also covered the fact that the Texas legislature has already started filing bills for the upcoming legislative session. Monday was basic preparation time for our upcoming live stream

Tuesday was our first ever live streaming podcast. Instead of just recording it and editing it for later, it went live on our platforms. From there it was uploaded as of writing this (these are written on Sunday’s to follow up the week of work). I figured with this version there was no reason to do any edits because it was already on other platforms and would should obvious differences between versions.

Thursday had me putting in an hour because I needed to create an image post to share on our socials. Usually we have something ready and one of the other members takes care of that. That was not the case, so I stepped in and made something to post on our Facebook and Instagram to address the holiday.

The post Week ending 11/26/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

This week was nothing special in the way of editing. I was able to cut out a clip of Sid Miller speaking at the Texas Hemp Summit and spent time researching how I could make the audio salvageable. There was a lot of echo in the conference room where the speakers were at. So this was really a lot of reverberation off of the the glass and walls in the building.

I learned that Adobe Audition has a noise reduction special effect called de-reverb. This actually worked out quite well after making a few adjustments to get the best quality I could. Had I likely been in a different area of the building, this effect would have been amazing. The reality is that anybody who wanted to professionally record would have set up a mic at the podium where Sid was speaking. That wasn’t practical though because not every speaker was at the podium to talk.

I spent most of the day Sunday finishing up a decriminalization website project made in bootstrap. Part of that included placing an interview video embedded into the website. I made this easy on myself and filmed myself in front of my greenscreen with my web-studio program doing a chroma key just like our podcast. The questions came up as text and I would answer them. I used a wired lavolier that I own and plugged it into my audio interface to get quality audio.

As well as to make sure levels were fine the entire time I used my in-ear earbuds on my non-visible ear during filming. I ran the wire into my shirt down my shoulder and out the sleeve where it was not visible. As, always with items like this I take the audio out of Premier and process it through Adobe Audition to make it clear and level.

Our podcast guest did not show up again this week, and with no backup episode had to grind on through with my co-host to do a basic monthly/seasonal update to follow up on election items. The Saturday saw me attending an event in Austin, the Texas Hemp Harvest Festival. That was more of a meeting with the owners of the event and vendors to network while being able to enjoy myself.

Hopefully though I will be able to get footage together to make a quick montage of the Hemp Summit speakers.

The post Week ending 11/19/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

This week has been working primarily on a Bootstrap website as a class project that I designated to be for the non-profit. That way the work that I would be doing for the classes would be put towards my internship time. This helps keep the amount of time I have to work on multiple projects down, while still keeping my grades up and availability for personal time to wind down.

For the site I decided to do an updated version of a case for decriminalization using the data segment from before, but adding updated numbers. The site included an article about the disparities that Texans can see in arrests, prosecutions, jail time, etc. There are interactive data visualizations, an interview that I filmed where I answered some questions, and some information on the ethics of the concept.

This week I also had to take a trip out to Texas A&M for a Hemp Summit. So, I had a two-hour drive from Austin to College Station, and a two-hour drive back. And the first day was a summit and then a get together to network and socialize, which was well spent talking about marketing and creating short form media content for social media.

This was an exhausting trip as the event was all-day on both days, with some after-time for discussion. It didn’t help that both of my batteries for my video camera decided that they would no longer maintain any charge. So, now I will have to look into investing money into new batteries. Perhaps this is an opportunity to get bigger better batteries as the camera does have the opening for such batteries.

The post Week ending 11/12/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

I will say that it is frustrating that the material being recorded can still have the opportunity to be botched on the video side by the platforms being used to record said video. This happened with the latest episode of our podcast. The video recording side took the audio in at a level that caused it all to be clipping. Luckily I have my own hardware side audio recording that did not do that.

the video side though is not recorded locally and therefore is recorded as the server receives it from the guest and from the host. This means that the video and audio can wind up going in and out of synch. I edit the audio with the video to occasionally come back into sync. That little bit takes a lot of time and doing it for the whole video can take a day’s worth of work. I have other pressing things to work on and the organization is not that concerned about it.

The post Week ending 11/5/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

This week has been more of the same grind. Get lower thirds ready, still no solution for the motion graphics template. It hasn’t really been a pressing matter because it is still faster than the method I was using before with the third party and then resizing to create a gif. I have limited space for info on these lower thirds compared to the previous lower thirds I was using.

So I take the opportunity to put their social media handle for IG, FB, or Twitter in that space with the appropriate logo. If they want the handle for somewhere else, they are free to ask for that and I will put it in. I’ve gotten pretty quick at making these adjustments.

Beyond that the interviews are becoming that never ending cycle of fix one problem and a new one is created. Get the person to center themselves and have proper lighting, and they decide against using earbuds/headphones and either it echoes or the echo cancellation cuts people off and they don’t stop talking despite it’s obvious the host is now talking and only person would be heard. I need for attendees to have earbuds and turn off echo cancellation because we have bed music that signifies it’s time to go into a sponsor break. That bed music will trigger to cut them off and only music is heard, and then I must start talking. It makes it look awkward and the guests are puzzled. And guess what?

They’re all given this advice in an email before the show. Usually 1-2 days before the show they get an invite link and advice with strong recommendations. I’m just blown away by the amount of people that claim they watch and listen to podcasts but then pull these types of stunts like they have no clue.

The post Week ending 10/29/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

The problem here is that I must edit in AE, and then export via Media Encoder for Adobe using the quicktime format with alpha channel. I cannot do a render que from AE and keep the alpha channel for some reason. From there I have to import the .mov file to Premiere and resize the lower third to a preset that I have created. I need to be able to take this AE template and turn it into a PR mgrt file that allows me to change the stroke, but so far I cannot figure out how to get around some of the rules that prohibit some animations from becoming mgrt files in AE.

On Tuesday evening I went to a showing of The Faculty at the Paramount Theater and it was presented by Robert Rodriguez to do a Q&A afterwards. Then the movie The Thing was shown as part of it being a double feature. Rodriguez mentioned that the Faculty was an homage to The Thing with the drug scene of testing who is an alien to be the direct mirror scene to the blood test scene in The Thing.

I also learned that when sitting down with a guest, that I will need to ask the person to silence or turn off their phone for the duration of the interview. I had a guest this week that their phone went off and we moved on. I figured they were smart enough to silence their phone, but instead it went off a few minutes later. During our sponsor break I messaged them in the streaming system chat to please silence their phone. The phone went off a third time and to me they treated it like it was nothing.

From here on out I will request before the show starts that they please silence their phones. I can edit out a lot of background noise, but a ringing smart phone with a custom tone is not one of them.

The post Week ending 10/22/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

I’ve learned that YouTube has been updating the requirements to monetize a channel and it’s becoming tougher and tougher for smaller channels to do so. It would be nice if we could obtain that status, but creating the content needed within our niche to make that happen, likely isn’t going to happen.

Another week with a podcast to edit as well, and the platform for recording seems to be a bit more stable now. As well, another event that I had to attend and grab photos for rather than video. It was a 5 hour event located in San Marcos at the end of the week. This next week I have two podcasts to record but they both won’t be going up immediately. We want to have one on reserve in case we have a drop out like we did this week with a guest.

The post Week ending 10/15/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

This week was another podcast and then preparation for our event in Fort Worth on Saturday. I did an interview with Mara Gordon who has done Ted Talks. The beginning did not go well because we had a microphone issue on her end of the stream, fixed it, and then it came back as we started the interview up. Turned out she was having an issue with her webcam microphone and switched to a mic built into some earbuds.

It is frustrating having those types of issues for several reasons. One is that you can’t be with them to take a physical look and walk them through a troubleshooting process. And even if you did it the way that a tech support person does, usually the person on the other end winds up telling you they don’t see what you’re talking about or repeats back information that doesn’t matter. Or the person just flat out doesn’t do what you tell them to do, then remarks the solution doesn’t work until they do what you said, and then pass it off as something else despite they’re saying exactly you told them to do the first time.

The other part is when a malfunction happens in the middle of the recording, you cannot tell if it is just you or everyone else hearing/seeing the issue. I don’t want to interrupt them and throw them off with trying to restart the conversation, especially for something that may be an issue on my end. I also have a time crunch to be on as the podcast must be done within 1 hour as scheduled. So the more the podcast gets delayed at any point, the less wiggle room I have to record it.

The even was a from 11am-7pm, but required me to be around past the event ending to deal with break down and cleanup. I did log my time driving there and driving back because that is work related travel. I see it as this. If a lawyer can bill every quarter hour to a client that they had to drive to the courthouse, I can consider the drive times associated purely for my internship as being “on the clock.”

I learned that despite having some really steady hands for filming, for an event like this again I will need to buy a gimbal.

The post Week ending 10/8/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.

This week has been more about getting things ready for an upcoming event we have going on at Burnett Park in Fort Worth. Posting to social media about the event, and the groups involved. This could be a dud and it could be amazing.

Typical podcast again, trying to solve technical issues still with the streaming service so that I am not getting extra post production work. This is being a pain, but I will figure out a way to deal with it. There really isn’t much to write about other than the fact that work is moving on.

The post Week Ending 10/1/2022 appeared first on Jesse Michael Williams.