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Just Sven
Editor
2 years ago

It’s the weekend!

Paddy O'Furnijur
Editor
2 years ago

Happy Caturday, Gerbil Nation!
Good morning, Sven!

I’m going to work on re-stringing the patio lights today. I need to move the anchor point in the tree higher and move the other two anchor points to the house, instead of the patio cover. All of that means that a trip (hopefully only one) to Home Desperate is in order for moar cable, cable clamps, eye bolts, etc.

Just Sven
Editor
2 years ago

A question mostly for Fatwa, given his background, but anyone can chime in.

I’m putting together training videos for a software application for teh bestest place ever. In the past, I’ve avoided doing any narration and have relied on text captions and callouts. Adobe-Captivate used to be perfect for that, but licensing now is more than I want to spend. For the actual screen recordings I’m using TechSmith’s Camtasia, which does a nice job of screen-video recording, but adding captions and callouts is more tedious than Captivate.

Looking ahead, I can see how voice overs would be more useful for the end users. I could request some assistance from our training department, but that would take forever and I want to have this fully under my control.

The problem is that I’m not trained for this and the practice runs I’ve made using my own voice are sure to put people to sleep -- monotonic would be a generous description. These will be short videos, 1-3 minutes, with minimal voice instruction describing what’s happening on the screen. A good example of what I’m trying to accomplish is shown in this video from Rackspace:

I’ve looked at some text to voice software, figuring I could type out the script and convert to voice, but the ones I’ve come across all sound too robotic. I had another thought which was to do the audio myself, then modify my own voice to something more appealing -- this seems maybe doable, but I’ve yet to find the right software.

Any ideas on a technical solution? Or any ideas on hiring someone to do the audio tracks and any idea on how much that would run?

Just Sven
Editor
2 years ago

I was betting on San Francisco, but that’s a real long shot.

Paddy O'Furnijur
Editor
2 years ago

It looked like there were only two comments today, until I refreshed the page. At that point it refused to load. I tried with Chrome and got the same thing. I can ping the website, but a trace route times out. I can get on with Tor, though.

Sven -- you can do the voiceover yourself, but you need to use your stage voice. Put in lots of energy. It’s strange at first, but you can get there. It’s easier if you write an outline of what you want to say on each ‘slide’.