Second YouTube production: Kindle Review and new Lessons Learned

After many weeks in my dwindling free time, I managed to complete my Kindle 2 video review. You can check it out on my YouTube Channel.

This is the second episode of “Tim’s Gear Review”. There will not be that many more that I can foresee; I have a Korg synthesizer that musicians may be interested in buying used that will lead them to a search for video review, but beyond that….

This continues to be hard work, primarily because I’m using aging equipment for an application that is known as “expensive” (in terms of CPU power required) – nonlinear video editing. I’m optimistic that a planned year-end upgrade to my computer hardware may “re-inject the fun”.

Some lessons learned:

Lapel (lavalier) mic:
From my results in the first video gear review, this became a must because of the hum introduced by lights for any onscreen appearances. I went with an affordable one from the local “Shack” because I was in a hurry to record, but I want to upgrade this in the future.

This same mic should not be used for off-screen voice over narration if you have any alternative. I tried and found the overall quality to be inferior to the results with the condensor mic I use on my podcast “Everybody Else Is Too Loud”, so I had to re-record.

Thanks for checking it out and please leave a comment.

Webcomic Kick-off: A Soft Launch Post-Mortem

The day before yesterday, I flipped the switch and went with a “soft launch” on my webcomic My Life In The Trenches. It’s a semi-autobiographical strip that publishes weekly on Tuesdays.

Here are some thoughts and some webcomic production lessons learned:

  • The personal excitement and emotional investment was akin to having another child. In fact, it proved to be harder work than actual childbirth; at least my contribution(!). The great WordPress plugin ComicPress release a major, feature-rich update to a heavily widget-ized version that simply “broke” my comic. I was able to roll-back to the previous version, and may still want to explore this when time permits; just not on launch day.
  • I’m an infrequent Facebook updater, but I thought it important enough to inform my friends and family about this new chapter in my artistic life. My announcement netted comments and “thumbs up” from about a third of my close friends and family.
  • It doesn’t make much sense to start paid advertising campaigns until the archive is filled beyond the intial kick-off comic. Let’s face it, word of mouth alone isn’t going to cut it. What that magic number of strips is, I’m unsure – but I can create the banners in the meantime. Seems Project Wonderful is better for my intended audience than Google Ads.
  • Finally, as a follow-up to my post that explores webcomic workflows, my initial hunch to flatten the process and keep everything in Photoshop is the way to go. I may someday write the Part II to that post, but suffice it to say that after watching a streaming demo by a leading webcomic artist about how he achieves his crisp lines, it’s simply easier (read: more fun) to stay inside one graphcs program from beginning to end.

I’m planning for a bump in website traffic with a promised guest strip that I recently did for one of my favorite webcomics, Jefbot by Jeff Schuetze. The practice of guest-strips is a free marketing technique to drive traffic, insofar as the time is donated on spec that the strip will reach a larger audience. In fact, this was the reason for launching slightly sooner than planned. It was a lot of fun to draw in the style of another comic artist whose linework I love.

Starbucks, New City NY


I fear I may be exhausting all possible angles at this “hang”, which has become my favorite place to take a break from my personal projects that keep me so busy.

Game designer Mike Sweeney has started a blog called “One Game Every Day” where he reviews a game daily. This only further motivates me to draw every day, which is sometimes difficult.

I’ll likely discuss Mike’s blog when I record my podcast tonight.

My Weekly Podcast: Workflow

I have been bitten by the podcast bug, and even though audio mp3 podcasts seem to be soundly trashed by the ease of vlogging, the following is my workflow of my podcast “Everybody Else Is Too Loud1“.

A little back-story first: from my musical hobby I have amassed some respectable gear, and even though your mileage may vary, if you want quality results there are a few things you’ll need:

Sound card

The integrated sound chip that you have already installed on your mother board is best for playing the system alert sounds, but if you want to record your voice so that it is pleasing to listen to, you’ll need to make this upgrade. There are prices to match every budget, but look to spend $100.

I’ll spare the technical details, but be sure that you can sample 24bit, 96khz. You will “downsample” this when making your mp3, but the logic goes that if you capture “better bits”, the compressed end result will be richer.

Good microphone

Garbage in, garbage out. There are fundamentally two types: condensor and dynamic mics. I have both but only use the condensor mics from MXL, although you could get a dynamic mic for less; and they are more rugged.
The sensitivity of the condensor mic requires a windscreen or pop filter, due to the ungainly way it captures plosives.

DAW software

The sky is the limit here and a more detailed round-up is beyond the scope of this post. Recommended reading is “Podcast for Dummies”. There is an open-source (free) option called Audacity, and Mac users may opt for Garageband for the recording and editing.

I’m chiefly concerned with the quickest possible recording and editing. This means that my five minute podcast takes no more than one hour to record, edit and upload to the podcast’s website.

In support of flattening these steps, most DAWs allow the creating of template files. This is typically helpful when composing music and you have wired all your MIDI instruments to connect automatically. However I find this to be less useful for podcasting than setting the software to open the “last file used” – that way I merely delete the previous week’s main audio talk-track and retain the consistent show opener and closer, and music beds.

For recording on Friday night , I start amassing notes on my iPhone of topics of interest approximately a day or two before; it’s typically good to have one more than needed. If there is a particular webcomic I want to highlight or industry news that is particularly compelling, I’ll note it here.

Finally, I found that as I wrap editing, it’s pretty undesirable to start typing the requisite show notes, so lately I’ve been starting the “Draft” post status in WordPress and use it as my talking points, to keep me on track. The WordPress plugin that makes it all possible is Blubrry Powerpress.

Since this is relatively short podcast, this is merely a process that works for me.
If you have a podcast and have any tips, please let me know what works for you!

1. The title of my podcast was inspired by the Who song “The Quiet One”, by John Entwistle and paraphrases the lyric “I ain’t quiet, everybody else is too loud.”