I’ve been adding closed captions to all of the Affinity video courses. (Anyone who has signed up for the courses on Teachable, everything except Quick Takes now has closed captions, which means if you hate the way I talk, you can just mute me and still get all the info. Yay.)
Everything was going well until I hit the Quick Takes videos. And then that little editor switch in my brain got flipped.
Because it turns out I have two separate editing modes. One is “this is pretty good, let me tidy up a bit” and the other is “okay, we’ve tipped over into too much to edit, let’s just rip this thing into shreds and start from the bottom up.”
It used to be horrible when that would happen when I was reviewing other people’s content. Because I didn’t want to ever enter the second editing mode. I had too much on my plate to be ripping things apart.
But sometimes…Like that dude who wrote 529 plan review procedures as if they were wire order when they were in fact application-way…(Don’t worry it doesn’t have to make sense. Think of it as the equivalent of someone telling you how to self-publish an ebook by talking about print formatting.)
When something is that far off there’s no choice but to just throw the whole thing out and begin again, because if you tried to redline it would be a blood bath or like Frankenstein with all these mismatched pieces sewn together.
Fortunately, this doesn’t usually happen with my own stuff.
Which makes sense, right? Because, usually I’m not going to be so far off the mark that I can see it in review.
Although that is why the second AMS book ended up being a complete rewrite. Not because I’d been off with the information in the first book, but just because so much had changed with AMS in that year( or two?) between editions that I had to write a completely new book rather than just make some minor tweaks here or there.
At that point it was best to just set the old book aside and construct a new one from the bottom up.
But that’s what just happened with the quick takes videos.
I started to listen to them and a few had weird sound quality that I somehow missed the first time around. Once I noticed that the switch flipped and I started thinking about how I would’ve done things differently if I were recording them today.
And once that happened…I decided to just re-record them all.
So, yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing today.
At least this way I’ll have incorporated four video courses and books’ worth of knowledge into the videos.
And if the sound quality is still off somehow it’ll be consistent across all of the videos. Hopefully not. Although my dog has taken to snoring in the background non-stop because she’s old and I’m too glad to still have her nearby to chase her out of the room when she wants to be near me. So there’s a little of that in there. But not bad. I generally time my speaking around her snoring.
Ah, the life of a small business owner, one-person shop.
So far for those who have the videos the intro, studios/studio presets, and document presets sections as well as the resizing an image sections are redone. I expect to get through them all by Monday.
Good times!
(And I will add that that is one of the more challenging challenges of self-employment. Knowing that thing A needs fixed, that it won’t earn you enough money to justify the time/effort of fixing it because you don’t get paid per hour, but doing it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.)
M.L. Humphrey 