Video
Summary
This cycle I was mostly stuck working on personal matters that needed to get done. I did mostly get the teleprompter set up though, so hopefully I can start using that effectively in the future. And I also built a spreadsheet to automate some of the stuff I need to do to send updates about these ministry progress summaries, to speed things up more moving forward.
Timestamps
00:0000:00 - Introduction
00:0900:09 - Outline
01:2101:21 - Set up new phone
02:5602:56 - Set up full teleprompter assembly, including software for reversing the computer display that is reflected
07:1407:14 - Created a spreadsheet to automate the creation of update messages for these ministry progress summaries
09:0309:03 - Set up a new framework for daily progress summaries moving forward
10:4310:43 - Upcoming work
13:0713:07 - Outro
Content
Set up new phone
- My old phone was quite old (~5 years), so this was necessary.
- In addition to getting all my apps and data transferred over, I also went into my carrier to get them to swap the SIM, and upgraded my phone plan while I was at it, to be able to use my hotspot over my lunch break at work, as previously discussed. Hopefully I can now get more ministry stuff done during that time slot in my day.
- Doing all this, or more precisely, planning and figuring out how to do all of this seamlessly, took a while.
Set up full teleprompter assembly, including software for reversing the computer display that is reflected
- The teleprompter, webcam, ring lights, and so on all came, and I spent a good amount of time getting everything set up physically. I am recording through the teleprompter right now (the webcam sits behind it), even though I’m not using it in this video, since this isn’t the type of video where I am planning to use full scripts.
- To get the teleprompter to work properly, my tablet’s image needs to be reversed in software, so that when the beam-splitter glass mirror reflects it, the reflected display is shown in the correct orientation. I was rather horrified at the lack of good software options (at least on Windows) to do this for the screen as a whole. Long story short, I finally found one that works (called UltraMon), but it only works if you hook up at least one additional monitor, which kind of stinks, and it’s not free either. But I did get it working properly, so that is at least something.
Created a spreadsheet to automate the creation of update messages for these ministry progress summaries
- I suppose it would be considered bad marketing practice to have messages that look mostly the same update to update, but I’m trying to keep things as informative and to-the-point as possible, so I don’t particularly care. These aren’t about looking flashy or impressive, but just to keep interested parties up to date in a practical manner.
- The spreadsheet I built will hopefully reduce the amount of time it takes for me to post these ministry progress summaries to all the relevant channels: the TinyLetter mailing list, Facebook, Twitter, the forum, and so on.
- In essence, the spreadsheet lets me paste in the links to the webpage and video form of one of these ministry progress summaries and enter the summarized version of the ministry update, and then it builds everything else automatically. Hurray, less busywork.
Set up a new framework for daily progress summaries moving forward
- I won’t spend much time on this in this ministry update since it is not particularly ministry related in a direct sense, but I set up a more systematic framework for making the progress summaries I do daily. Hopefully the time I invested here in this cycle will help me keep up with these daily videos better, so that they no longer end up as a bottleneck, as they have from time to time thus far.
Upcoming work
- I still have the same overarching goals as the last couple times: finishing organizing through lesson 3 in the SR4 series, finishing documenting discussion pages, and then finishing organizing the rest of the videos in the SR4 series that have already been posted.
- I have decided to add another goal before all this though: writing a couple bash scripts to much more thoroughly automate the video processing workflow I have. Right now I have to manually (i.e., by copy-pasting pre-made commands I’ve written one-by-one sequentially) run like 4 processing steps before I’m ready to upload any content videos, and this takes more time than it needs to. So I may as well write the scripts to automate this better sooner rather than later, so that I save the most time in the long term.