I'd Rather Be Writing » audio

Screencasting Tip: Self-Dub the Audio

Tom Johnson — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 17:41:29 +0000

One of the most difficult elements of screencasting is getting good audio. I implemented a technique in my last video that I thought worked quite well. I’m calling this the Self-Dub technique. Here’s what you do. Whether you write out a script beforehand or not, it doesn’t really matter. Just record the screencast while simultaneously narrating. After the screencast, proceed through each of the sentences and dub over them.

For example, listen to about 10 seconds of audio, then silence the selection. Re-record that sentence with a new voice narration and add insert it there. It sounds tedious, but you can make your way through a three-minute screencast in about 30 minutes. You can voice-dub everything, even the parts that sound good. This may allow for a more seamless replacement. (If the audio you’re dubbing sounds seamless with the existing audio, then you can only dub the parts you want.)

When you’re done, you’ll have a bunch of little 10 second audio clips strung together. In Camtasia Studio, go to File > Produce Special and export the audio. Then clean up the audio a bit and reimport it back into the screencast, deleting all the little 10 second audio clips. The result is a clean audio script that perfectly fits the timing of the screen actions.

The seamless match with the timing is main advantage of using this method. If you weren’t recording a screencast, this technique probably wouldn’t make much sense. But screencasts, at least the software tutorial kind, have intricate timing between the mouse actions and the voice. The voice has to describe exactly what you’re doing on the screen in the moment you’re doing it. This Voice-Dub technique allows you to preserve the timing while simultaneously cleaning up the audio.

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Podcast: Developing a Personal Voice in Audio (Intermountain-STC event)

Tom Johnson — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:15:38 +0000

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Download the PowerPoint
PowerPoint in Zip file (in case you have trouble with the above)
Length: 60 min.

A while ago, our chapter held a half-day eLearning event, and I presented a version of my Developing a Personal Voice in Audio presentation (similar to what I presented at the STC Summit in Dallas). The recording has been sitting on my hard drive for a while, and I thought I’d finally release it. I’ve also included the rather large PowerPoint file that accompanies the presentation.

Note: If you like podcasts, check out the latest podcast from IT Author, which he recorded while walking his dog.

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My STC Summit Proceedings Paper on Voiceover Techniques

Tom Johnson — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:52:06 +0000

When you present at the STC Summit, you’re supposed to submit a proceedings paper describing your presentation. Given that only a fraction of my followers are members of the STC, and an even smaller fraction are attending the Summit, I’m providing my proceedings paper here: “Developing a Personal Voiceover in Audio” (PDF). (It’s allowed under the STC copyright agreement.)

As you know, I wrote about this topic at length on my blog through a series of posts on voiceover techniques. I had about 10,000 words overall throughout the posts. In this proceedings paper, I mostly used the material from these blog posts, but I reduced the length in half. I also implemented some of the feedback from the comments (thank you, by the way).

It turns out that consolidating individual blog posts into a longer essay works well, as I was able to condense it all in just a few hours. Based on this experience, I’m going to write more series posts. Look for an announcement about my upcoming series tomorrow.

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The Seven Sins of Blogging, Sin #6, Being Unfindable

Tom Johnson — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:56:20 +0000

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Length: 25 min.

The sixth sin in my ongoing series on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging is being unfindable. (The other sins include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and inattentive). Admittedly, lack of findability seems more a sin of omission than commission. Being unfindable seems like a sin bloggers commit against themselves.

I’ve written more than 1,000 posts on my blog, but usually the posts on my home page are the only posts people read. In this sense, blogs are like the news. A newspaper that’s several days old lines bird cages. Reading blog archives is like reading yesterday’s news — there’s no appeal.

And yet, many times archive posts have more substance that news commentary. The posts incorporate research and get into issues in depth. They don’t deserve to go into the garbage can once they slide off the home page.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com compares blogging to reaching down and grabbing a handful of sand. The sand slowly slips through your fingers. You have to reach down and grab another handful of sand, and another, and another. In the metaphor, your readers are the sand; your reaching and scooping — those are the new posts. Perhaps if the content were more findable, you wouldn’t have to do so much reaching.

How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about.

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, wants to move toward a world “in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” He admits we might never achieve it, but it’s the direction we’re moving. To start, Morville says to ask three questions of your content:

1. Can people find your website?
2. Can they find their way around your website?
3. Can they find your content, products and services despite your website?

Aggregation Techniques

You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way.

Tags function similarly to categories. You usually add tags as you would index keywords, including as many as you want to describe your content. Categories, on the other hand, are more like folders. You usually have only about a dozen categories on your site.

You can display your categories in a list on your sidebar, which could be helpful except that hardly anyone reads this way. And you can aggregate your tags into one of those jumbled masses of words called tag clouds. But like the list of categories, tag clouds don’t seem that useful to readers. At least I never use them. They’re merely a visual novelty.

Another way to increase the findability of your content is to add a string of related posts below each post. A variety of WordPress plugins do this for you (for example, the Contextual Related Posts plugin). Their matching algorithms vary a bit — some match by tag, others by keyword, others by custom keywords. Mostly, I think lists of related posts help searchers who land on your site from search engine results. These searchers are usually looking for information and sometimes prefer to drill into additional content on the same topic.

You can also aggregate your content through plugins that compile your most popular posts, such as the Popularity Contest plugin. Popularity is defined by hits, links, and comments. Your most popular posts may not be the posts you want to showcase, though. This is why I chose not to implement the Popularity Contest. My most popular posts are apparently posts on grasshoppers that look like aliens, a WordPress image gallery plugin, and notes from a keynote on WordPress 2.7.

You can also manually pull together your best posts. I recommend using the links feature in WordPress to manage your lists. You can also use the Section Widget (a tabbed widget) to show various lists in a compact way. Note that the tabbed section widget slows down your site’s loading time a little (I was intrigued by it earlier, but I removed it). It also seems to consume a lot of memory on the backend.

SEO

Let’s recognize a basic fact about websites. The majority of your readers — anywhere from 50 to 85 percent of visitors — find you through search engines. The web is mainly used for research, so these stats make sense.

But if visitors mainly find you through search engines, shouldn’t your content be optimized to rank high in search engine results? Search engine optimization (or SEO) should be a key influence in the way you write your posts, right?

Jakob Nielsen agrees. He says,

Web users are growing ever-more search dominant. Search is how people discover new websites and find individual pages within websites and intranets. Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist. So, the first duty of writing for the Web is to write to be found.

Yes, you must write to be found. To do this, to make your posts SEO rich, you have to integrate the right keywords into your title, first paragraphs, headings, image alt tags, and other places (without going overboard).

However, in Google’s search engine results algorithm, links pointing to your content from other sites matter more than anything you can do alone. So more than anything, write compelling content. Compelling content invites links back to your site.

One trick that allows you to get the best of both worlds is the All in One SEO plugin (if you have a WordPress blog). This plugin allows you to make two titles: a title that Google sees and a titles that readers see.

For me, I sometimes don’t bother with SEO because I’m not sure my content would rank for a specific topic. I’m not necessarily writing just to attract more hits. Maybe with some posts, sure. With other posts, not so much.

Formats

Another technique for increasing findability is to push your content across as many formats as possible. Recognize that readers have a variety of preferences. Some like Facebook, others Twitter, others email, others RSS readers.

You can automate all of this so that when you publish a post, notification of the new post is syndicated across each of the formats. The RSS feed is automatically pushed out (if you’re using any standard blog platform). Twitterfeed allows you to hook up your RSS feed with a Twitter account. Facebook allows you to pull in a Twitter feed. And Feedburner allows you to create email subscriptions for RSS feeds.

Audio and Text

One challenge that still remains with formats is the interchangeability of audio and text. I regularly publish podcasts, and people who don’t listen to podcasts often request transcripts of the podcasts. It can take hours, however, to record and produce a podcast, and 5+ hours to render a transcript of the audio. It’s a tall order to fill just to make the content more accessible.

I believe Adobe Sound Booth will transcribe audio (though this is application isn’t free). You can also outsource transcription for about $1 a minute (and a two-week turnaround). A direct transcription of the audio, however, often sounds incoherent and unreadable.

Going from text to audio is much easier. Services like Odiogo will automatically read your post. For an example, see Todd O’Neill’s Doing Media blog. The problem with these text-to-audio services is that they’re read by a machine, so it sounds like robot. Additionally, people who are blind probably already have screen readers that perform with similar functionality. Odiogo is really designed for people who want to listen to your content on the go, while they run or drive or work in the yard.

Nevertheless, if you want to make your blog perceivable, a conversion to other formats is what Glenda Watson Hyatt recommends. In her book How POUR Is Your Blog, she writes,

Content must be perceivable through sight, hearing or touch. Since not everyone has the same abilities or equal use of the same senses, one of the main keys to accessibility is ensuring that content is transformable from one format into another, enabling your blog readers to perceive it in multiple ways. (p.6)

(POUR stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.)

Apart from making your content findable for the disabled, rendering your content into text and audio increases your reach. An hour long podcast transcribed into text theoretically gives you rich SEO keywords that will bring in many more search results from Google. (Of course, the extra time you spend transcribing the content means less time to produce new content, so perhaps it balances out.)

Mobile Platforms

Finally, as you design for different formats, make sure your content is visible on mobile platforms. Mobile browsers are getting to the point that they can display many websites well regardless of whether you have a mobile stylesheet, but it’s still a good idea to add a mobile plugin.

Hyatt recommends going to http://ready.mobi to test how your blog displays in a mobile browser. If you receive a poor rating from MobiReady, try installing Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin and rerun the test.

MobiReady also has several emulators that show you how your blog looks on various phones.

Other Findability Tips

To wrap up findability, I suggest adding a few more simple, commonsense practices.

Let your URL match your blog title. This helps readers remember how to get to your site without having to google it each time.
Include an About page. Your About page is one of the most visited pages on a blog because people want to see information about the person whose opinions and advice they’re reading.
Use Feedburner to route your RSS feed. If you ever change platforms (for example, from Expression Engine to WordPress), you can update your RSS feed on your new site so you don’t lose all your readers who subscribed to your old RSS feed.

To conclude, remember that the goal of findability is to help your audience connect with your content. On A List Apart, Aarron Walter writes,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message. A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. (A List Apart)

Don’t whisper to the wind. Don’t let your content blow around aimlessly. Make it findable. When it’s findable, you get to keep it forever. When it’s not, it disappears into the wind.

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Audio / Video – The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry

Tom Johnson — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:37:52 +0000

Audio / Video – The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry

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Details About the STC Summit Recording — Interview with Lloyd Tucker

Tom Johnson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:37:55 +0000

The next STC Summit will be entirely recorded and made available for free to all conference registrants.

At the next STC Summit, May 3-6 in Atlanta, Georgia, the STC will record and distribute every one of the 120+ sessions, making them available to all conference registrants for free and to others at a cost. Because this is the first time the STC has attempted to record the Summit, I asked Lloyd Tucker, STC’s Director of Education and Membership, if he could share some details about the upcoming recording.

Why did the STC decide to record all the sessions this year?

STC has been considering some type of conference recording for the last two years. We have been watching several associations and companies to see how their programs unfolded. We knew that the technology (remember those old cassette tapes?) had improved considerably, but needed to find a company that could provide more than just recording capabilities. The company we are working with has been “capturing” sessions for large conferences and companies like Microsoft for several years.

Capturing sessions is one part of a new conference management program. You may have noticed that the call for proposals for the 2009 conference was new and web-based. The program will also help us manage speakers, rooms, scheduling and all the things that have to get done during a large conference. Another exciting part of the conference management program will be the capability for those registered to use a personal planner in selecting sessions and events to maximize their time at the conference. That planner will aid in the planning for the proper size room, and allow us to directly contact registrants who intend to attend a particular session in case of changes and much more.

Probably the biggest reason for recording the sessions is to be able to expand the exposure to the great content of the sessions by giving individuals the capability to “attend” the conference sessions that they could not physically attend onsite. An attendee can only go to about 12 sessions during the conference even though 120+ are presented. Being able to “attend” the sessions after the fact greatly enhances the value of a conference registration and provides the attendee with a huge volume of educational materials to review.

Won’t the cost be astronomical?

While it is certainly not cheap, the cost is not astronomical. We will be able to include the “recordings” in the price of a conference onsite registration. We also plan to resell the conference package to those who did not attend in person. This price, while not set yet, will likely approximate the cost of a single registration. We expect this income to greatly offset the cost of the original recording.

Technically, how will you pull this off?

The good news is speakers will no longer be required to bring their own laptop. STC will provide laptops and speakers will only need to bring their presentation on a thumb drive. We can make exceptions and use a speaker’s laptop if they have unique applications, or the like, that they need to use.

The laptops will be loaded with a program that will record and synchronize the speaker’s visuals and audio as it is presented. The program does a screen capture of any visual that goes through the projector. So, not only will a PowerPoint slide be captured, but speakers that use the internet or an application will have that captured too. As it happens, our vendor works with Microsoft to use the same process to capture software training sessions as the presenter moves from screen to screen.

What were the conditions that led to this decision — e.g., why now? For example, are people perceiving less and less value from their STC membership?

The TechComm Summit is the crown jewel of STC’s continuing education programs. We are constantly looking for ways to improve content and delivery methods to satisfy our members. One of the comments made most often on evaluation forms is disappointment from not being able to attend all the sessions that are applicable. Even companies that send multiple attendees have expressed that frustration. We’re eager to see if this new capability of capturing the sessions will satisfy those who wish they could have been in all sessions.

Are people perceiving less value from STC membership? We realize that the key to a healthy association is continuous improvement in value and services. There have been several new benefits added to the list this year (exclusive discounts on software, access to the Aberdeen Group research library of best practices, an expanded Salary Survey, and more). This recording capability is but one of the new member benefits that the staff has in development.

What portable media device will best be suited to playing this content?

Of course the primary method of “attending” the sessions will be over the web. However, the system will allow download of PowerPoint slides in a PDF format, as well as the ability to download the audio file for your iPod or MP3 player.

Did you get any resistance to the idea of recording the Summit?

Thus far we have had no resistance. The call for proposals gave the submitters advance notice that this would be happening. All accepted speakers will be contacted with the details of the agreement.

What do you think the results will be?

Well, so far the response has been great. I have had several potential attendees call about the 2009 conference. When told about the ability to “attend” the rest of the sessions, they were extremely excited. I think that the opportunity to get tenfold the education than previously available would be exciting for everyone.

The recordings will be on the STC website several weeks after the conference. So, just as the memory of what you learned at the conference is beginning to fade, you can “re-attend” the sessions most important to you and view the PowerPoint presentation as well. And, of course, you’ll also be able to “attend” all those sessions that you couldn’t the first time around.

We’re still looking for a good name for this product or service. I’d love to hear some ideas from members on what to call it…”Conference-at-a-click”?…”Summit Remix”?…”Summit 2009 Online”?

Thinking About an STC Proposal to Submit

Tom Johnson — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:26:15 +0000

Did you see the STC’s call for proposals for the next annual conference in Atlanta? Last year I presented on podcasting. The 55 people who commented on my session rated it higher than average (the rating was around 4.6 as opposed to the 4.3 average). I think my presentation was good, but most people wanted me to connect it more to technical communication. They wanted to see how technical material could be presented as a podcast, I believe.

I admit that was a hole in my presentation. I’m still not entirely clear how to pull that one off. Podcasts are mostly vehicles for conceptual information, and help material often consists of nitty-gritty how to content.

At work I do create voice-based video tutorials that users watch, but not a half hour of pure how-to audio (though I do keep meaning to create one on WordPress). At any rate, I really appreciated the feedback. It’s a direction I’m moving to but haven’t quite reached yet.

This year I’m thinking of submitting a proposal about Voice in video tutorials. I’ve watched countless video tutorials where the voice sounded as if someone used a Fisher Price microphone, or where the tone was monotone and boring, or simply unengaging. I want to present on ways to make the voice in your video tutorials sound fresh and spontaneous, natural, friendly. Like someone was sitting right there next to you. Talking to you.

I’d also like to present some comparative research on voice-based tutorials versus caption-based tutorials (e.g., for example, which is better and why).

Creating a video tutorial also requires some knowledge of audio — which file format to use, the bit rate, the hertz, and so on, as well as how to clean it up, enrich the sound, add in music and other effects.

I think the video tutorial lives or dies based on the voice. If you’re warm and engaging, people keep listening. If you sound nasal, stiff, and staticky, the tutorial plummets.

What do you think? Would this be an interesting topic? Has someone presented on this before? Do you know of any resources that would be helpful to me?

Musicophillia — The Brain’s Unexplainable Affinity for Music

Tom Johnson — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:22:12 +0000

I listened to a podcast nearly two weeks ago that I’m still thinking about it. Oliver Sacks, a popular neurologist storyteller, just published a book called Musicophilia that explores the brain’s love/obsession/affinity with music. In this Science Friday podcast, he shares extensive details about the book.

Sacks explains that unlike other areas of the brain that are localized in specific regions — for example, memory is in one area, speech is in another, motor skills in another, and so on — music is “recruited” by almost every region of the brain. When people suffer trauma to the brain, they may lose speech if the trauma affected the area responsible for speech. But music is almost always unaffected because it is so thoroughly distributed throughout the brain.

Sacks explains:

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species.

I find this fascinating because it validates and reinforces the importance of music, even over speech. Like many people, I’ve always felt music to be a powerful influence. Now that I know that music components are found in every lobe of my brain, much more than speech, it seems even more primal and significant in purpose.

But what is the purpose? Sacks asks why evolution favored such a strong integration of music with the brain. He conjectures music may serve as a sexual and cultural selector, but really no one has a good reason why it should aid human survival. He says humans thousands of years ago played bone flutes that carry the same tones as flutes today. Music is baked into our genes and neural synapses.

Some other topics Sacks covers in the podcast include the following:

The subconscious effect of music
Why tunes get stuck in your head
A boy who is amusical (can’t distinguish tones, so all music sounds awful to him)
How deaf people develop a more acute sense of music (case in point, Beethoven)
People who hallucinate that they hear music
A man who is struck by lightening and develops an obsession with music composition

To listen to the podcast, subscribe to the Science Friday podcast here, and then listen to the episode entitled “Author Explains Mysteries of Music and Mind.”