I’ve been out for a little while, as in not doing very much crafting. There are a couple of reasons for this, and that’s because I’ve been suffering with my mental health this last month or so, and it got to a point where I wasn’t liking where my thoughts were going so I got the help I needed. I’m currently off work at the moment and on new medication, so hopefully I’ll be back on track shortly.
I can’t stress how important it is to get the help you need, especially when something doesn’t feel right when it comes to your mental health, so please talk to someone if you are struggling, by getting help from your local doctor surgery, or hospital – it’s certainly helped me! Lastly speak to your family and friends, where you can get some great support from them! My wife, other close members of the family and friends have been there for me and can’t tell you how much that has helped! But remember, there’s nothing wrong with asking for help, trust me!!
I’ve been looking into creating video content for this site and using YouTube to upload them to. So I’ve been looking into software and other tools to help me do this.
Video editing software
Just to note, this isn’t a review of any software or tools. This is just my view and/or process of trying to find the right software for me to edit my videos. There are no affiliations to the companies below and purely my thoughts.
I’ve been thinking about creating videos for a while now, and I’ve been wanting to make video tutorials like my posts on creasingpaper.com. This is something I do as part of my day job where I create I.T. tutorials and how-to guides for the global users in the company.
I use software by TechSmith called Camtasia and for me, it’s a great piece of software to create the videos, but there is a cost to this software, so I wondered if I could find anything else out there that’s cheaper or even free.
The one feature that was a must for me, is to be able to record the screen, which Camtasia does very well – it also records the left and right mouse clicks and in new versions of Camtasia, you can alter the path of the mouse movements.
So I did some digging around the internet to see what I could find, and there is a lot of software out there that can do screen recordings for you whether that be a paid piece of software or it’s free.
In the end after testing a couple of other video editing software, I decided to stick with Camtasia, where I purchased a license for myself. The reason for this was that I know the software very well, and I must admit I didn’t want to go through the process of learning new software again, I just wanted to get creating.
I tested two other software, which I did like, they were:
- Filmora by Wondershare. This has the feature to record the screen like Camtasia, but not as good in my view. You can use the software for free, however, if you want to export your finished videos it will apply a watermark. To remove the watermarks when exporting, you’ll need to purchase a license or a yearly subscription.
- DaVinci Resolve by Black Magic Design. This video editing software is completely free and is a very powerful piece of software, aimed more towards intermediate and professional video editors. There is another paid version called DaVinci Resolve Studio which is the same as Resolve but has a lot more additional features, and you can edit 4K video. I still have this software installed and I have used it a couple of times. Black Magic Design’s software is widely used by the movie industry.
My first video
So now I’ve chosen the software I wanted for the video editing I got to work recording (which is now live on YouTube). The video is a tutorial on how to create A5 lined paper in Affinity Publisher. The full post is here: Creating Lined Paper.
Please let me know what you think. So that it can help me improve my videos.
Speech
I don’t have a proper setup with a microphone to record my voice for the video, and also anywhere I can record audio without disturbing others or being disturbed as we don’t live in a large place. Perhaps that is more an excuse for the other reason…and that’s because I must admit I’m not sure I have the voice that people want to hear! 😉
I’ve used a text-to-speech tool to add the spoken audio to the video. There are several developers out there that you can subscribe to and use such tools. There are lots of paid and free text-to-speech out there, and generally, the free ones aren’t that great and just don’t sound natural, they sound more synthesized!
What I’ve found though, is a free text-to-speech tool with great voices, and a lot of the voices in the tool can be found in a lot of the paid text-to-speech tools I’ve come across. This tool is called Clipchamp which was created by Microsoft. It’s a basic video editor but has the text-to-speech as part of the features.
The one thing with this tool is you can’t download the audio to an audio file. So what I do is use Audacity to record the computer system audio when I preview the audio in Clipchamp, and then I save it as an audio file (MP3 or AVI). Once I have the audio files, I’ll then add them to the video.
As mentioned there are some very good text-to-speech paid tools. Two of the best ones I’ve used are Murf AI and Voicemaker. Both have several different voices, in English and other countries in male and female voices and allow you to download to an audio file format like MP3 and AVI. As mentioned some of the voices I have come across in these tools are in Clipchamp.
Final thoughts
Hopefully, this will have helped in some way if you’re like me, and looking at creating videos and uploading them to YouTube or other online video platforms.
Also, with the text-to-speech, if you’re like me and would rather use a tool like this instead of recording your voice? It’s possible to do so. But don’t get me wrong the text-to-speech isn’t perfect, and for some sentences, I find you need to work on it a little by adding any additional commas here and there or perhaps tweaking the sentence slightly to make things sound a little more natural. But they do the trick, and this sort of technology is getting better and better every day!
