New Experience - Vlogging!

As authors, it's part of our job to keep up with the latest and greatest new ways to do promotion and connect with readers. The time of the publishers doing that for us is long gone. But that's okay. I may not be the biggest extrovert out there, but I do love to play with gadgets and software.

The latest trend I've decided to dip my toes into is video blogs or vlogs for short.

I've owned a webcam for a while and it was just sitting there collecting dust, so I decided it was time to use it! Version 1 was done with the webcam and Microsoft's Movie Maker. It's pretty laughable, but I was experimenting. Realized after the fact that Movie Maker can't handle editing video, so that was a major fail. But what little I could do yielded the following:

As you can see, focusing your attention on the webcam and talking to the audience and putting stuff up takes a lot of coordination! Something I am sorely lacking in. lol.

So, dissatisfied with my first run, I went out in search of better editing software and ran across TrakAx. (This software is especially good for music peeps! And it was cheap!) Hours of tutorials later and I mutated my original offering.

I did run into trouble as one of my two original webcam files was messed up, so I ended up having to use vlog 1 instead and I mutated it. Biggest hassle was getting the final cover and final piece of the video to play nice. Had to use a slow fade to make them behave, but it wasn't as good as if they'd done it! Bad, bad segment - for shame. You'll note the issue at the end. Never did figure out why it was mean to me. But improvement is improvement. So here's version 1.1.

I even now have an idea for vlog #2. I've also chosen the novel I'll try to do short segments with. It also occurred to me that my camera and my phone will both do video. Think of the possibilities! No one will be safe!

Now I truly need a clone. :P