intro

	Now that I'm becoming a (terrible) youtube again I feel obligated to document the learning process. I just published the video above, and it went terribly.
	
	I got some really helpful advice and feedback on my first youtube video. The lighting was piss poor, I only had the overhead lamp turned on and it was behind me so my face was in shadow. The audio was sub-par and rather tinny. Finally, what was the point of capturing my screen and keeping my camera in a small part of the screen if I wasn't doing anything with the rest of the screen?

	Armed with this knowledge I set out to fix all of it. And, of course, everything went wrong.

gain, not pain

	I naively assumed that the reason the audio was tinny was because my gain was too low and I should drastically increase it to capture the full, vivacious range of my voice. That was wrong. Very wrong in fact. The audio turned out so poorly that I couldn't even salvage it with post-editing. To make matters worse I also experimented with stereo recording instead of cardoid. Now I understand why you shouldn't do that.

	What I should have done is turn it down (a lot) and simply move the microphone closer to my mouth. Obvious in retrospect. Thus the first attempt to record this video hit the trash since the audio simply wasn't salvageable.

screencap, not dunce cap

	The reason I kept my camera off to the side in the first video was that I was actually going to show more stuff. But I got so caught up with my rambling that I simply forgot. But that's fine, this second video is almost all screencapping. With the exception of my camera freezing (god knows why) everything else went without a hitch.

lighting, not littering

	I should have known about the lighting issue. I used to record my videos in front of a window with sunlight providing ample light, I'm not doing that anymore. Oh well. I had a couple of desk lamps, they're philips hue so I can easily change the color tone. Simple fix.

quality, not no-quality(?)

	The final thing that could go wrong.. did. I decided to use kdenlive for as my editing software. It's a lot better than I remember it to be and was a pleasant experience. Until I exported the video.

	Being the dumbass that I am I simply picked the right resolution and formats, rendered and uploaded. Not for a second did I consider youtube's own compression bit which crushed the video's quality since it's now been rendered three times to h.264. Ouch. Turns out getting the correct (ffmpeg) settings and applying youtube's guide was an extensive process that I'll likely detail in an upcoming post once I've perfected them.

	Youtube video delete, re-rendered and uploaded. Sigh. I was considering leaving it up to authentically document my journey and mistakes but no, only two people had seen it. Might as well fix it.

outro

	Overall I'm happy with the video. It covered everything I wanted to cover and was a lot easier this time around. Audio quality seems to be vastly improved too but I think I can make it even better. I'm increasing the top range of the spectrum to make my voice lighter since I have a rather bass-y voice that can sound a bit muddy. That might not be necessary now that my actual hardware settings are dialed in better.

	It's fortunate that I decided to do these videos before I began working on the video aspects of chimerasyntax since there's just so much to learn. Not least of which are the indirect aspects, like thumbnails. Apparently they're vital for capturing the attention of youtube users. I had never considered them since I don't pay attention to them personally.. or do I(?).

	Still not sure what the end form of the thumbnails will be, especially for chimerasyntax, but I'm getting there. Text with a background layer to the left, large background image and potentially a related image to the right. That seems to be the formula. And it does look good.

	I wish video creation was more straight-forward, the dream of record once, trim excess and upload is still far, far away. But it's A LOT better than it was 15 years ago.