Youtube Journey Part 2 - Adobe After Effects & InDesign - My Crash Course

Youtube Journey Part 2

Adobe After Effects & InDesign

My Crash Course

I was going to do this yesterday for Writerly Wednesday, but I was distracted by making birthday cupcakes for a friend. So today it is!

Now I threw together a banner and a logo for the my shiny new YouTube channel, Tales With Tasha, in Photoshop pretty sharpish as soon as I set it up, but I knew doing anything for actual vids would be harder.

When I started out I knew two things:

1. I didn't just want to film me reading things. I want part of each vid to be live action, but I remember the Disney page turning format very fondly and wanted something along those lines for the stories. Also helps with accessibility.
2. I wanted a short little logo animation to segue from live action to the story.

My first thought was Adobe After Effects.

Of course, then I hit my first problem - I had never even opened After Effects before 😂. However, never let it be said that this has ever stopped me in the past. I taught myself how to use Photoshop using turtorials, how much harder could this be?

Okay, so maybe a bit harder 😎. The thing about After Effects is its for animators and people who understand film terms and I don't, well I've picked up a little now. Never fear, however, because the lovely creators of YouTube have wonderful channels with step by step tutorials on just about everything. I love them.

Endeavour 1 - My Page Turning Book

So I knew I wanted a book with pages that turn, and I found one plugin and several tutorials, but none of them were quite right. In the end this one popped up, thank heavens:

It also isn't quite right, but it does have all the elements I needed so that after following it I could figure out how to create what I wanted. It also allowed me to understand how everything goes together.

For example, I had no idea that when you import images, if you change them on the disc, they are changed in the animation too. This is a revelation to me, and I assume it is actually a setting, like importing the mp3 files into Audition etc.

• Stage 1 - Follow Tutorial Exactly
• Stage 2 - Tutorial pages turn backwards for some reason, so figure out how to make them turn forwards.
• Stage 3 - Figure out how to create page content.

It was Stage 3 that was the hard part.

Page Content

First Idea - Photoshop:

1. Create a base template
2. Place text
3. format text
4. Rinse and repeat

Only problem - with 2K words per story, this was going to be slow!

Next Idea - InDesign

which I had also never used 😝.

2 most useful things about InDesign

1. We can import a preformatted Word Doc and it will automatically paginate for us.
2. We can export all pages as images.

This is the tutorial for I used to find out how to do #1 - Pretty Fabulous Designs has some great turtorials for doing all sorts of things.

The plan was growing! Mwuahahah!!!!

Third Thought - Plain White Pages are Boring

I found some wonderful page textures on Unsplash.com by Annie Spratt. She also has some other fabulous photos, but it was the large number of textures I was after this time.

For this I did use Photohop, creating a template for left and right pages with shadows in the margin so it looks a little 3D. Not a lot 3D, but a little 😉

These can then be used as backgrounds for the pages in InDesign.

The End Result

Anyway, I played and fiddled and now have a format I can easily customise for each video. This is a very short demo to show what I mean.

I can customise everything I need to:

• Background
• Page content
• Book style
• Page turning interval

So it should do as a template.

The Plan

1. Format the story to be animated in Word with the correct size font (I have to play with these anyway to get them ready for reading, so it's only a tiny little step more).
2. Set up an InDesign layout with the background of choice depending on story content.
3. Import Word file into InDesign.
4. Add any extra formatting.
5. Export pages to PNG
6. Import into After Effects project and set pages to have the correct content.
7. Use recording to set page turn intervals.
8. Add pretty background behind the book to please YouTube's algorithm.

Endeavour 2 - My Animated Logo

This one was actually much simpler - I went through Youtube looking at tutorials, found one I liked and went with it.

This was the tutorial I chose in the end:

And here is what my animated logo looks like:

Now I just have to teach myself how to use After Effects in Premier Pro 😎.

Oh and actually film the bits and format all the stories I have planned etc, etc, etc ...

So, y'know, just a bit of stuff. 😂

How is everyone else doing? Any interesting projects going on? Do you have a YouTube channel?

My Shiny New Youtube Channel #WriterlyWednesdays

Now as I mentioned in last week's writerly Wednesday post, I have decided I need a Youtube channel. So I have been thinking about it all week and trying to plan, which involved a lot of watching Youtube vids on how to set up a Youtube channel etc. 😁

First of all I had to decide what I wanted to put on it and this is what I have come up with so far:

• Story narration
• Novel excerpt narration
• Book trailers and other Wittegen Press news vids

Other suggestions of things you might like to see, gratefully accepted.

Then I made a list of all the content I already have to choose from, well actually I made a Google Sheet (so useful). Turns out I have over 100 sources to choose from. And that doesn't include the naughtier stories, which I can't put up because Youtube does not like adult content.

In all honesty I don't have a strategy completely worked out yet, but I am plotting.

One thing I did decide is that my focus is going to be on the narration, with other things as additions, because I think that is what might bring in an audience. So I brainstormed for a Youtube channel name and came up with...

Tales with Tasha

So far I have a channel art, an icon and 2 subscribers, both of whom are other accounts I own, but we all have to start somewhere, down't we 😎.

Next I need to come up with:

• The about section
• A plan of attack so I can get the content prepared.

Apparently I need 100 subscribers and have had the channel for 30 days before I can get my proper URL. 💖So if you feel like subscribing to a completely empty channel, that would be awesome - thank you.💖 I promise there will be content.

Do any of you have a YouTube channel? What content do you put on it? Any tips? Drop me a link so I can check it out.

New Release Day

Yesterday was new release day over at VirginiaWaytes.com (my alter ego) with:

Sexy Stories 12 - The Manor s01e11 - Searching for a Mate

Josh is gone, but there is still hope to find him, even with the pack bond occluded to be useless. His connection to Pippa may be the answer and she and Lucy must work together to launch a dangerous rescue mission.

Joys of Podcasting 2 - Learning Curve

Joys of Podcasting 2 - Learning Curve

My podcast: Virginia Waytes' Sexy Stories is now up to episode 8 and chugging along nicely. For those not in the know, my podcast is a serialised paranormal romance for adults only where each week:

• the podcast🎧 has a brief recap and all the naughty bits from the week's episode 
• and there is also an eBook📕 with all the plot that would make the podcast far too long. 

There are lots of supernatural beings and magic and excitement, as well as plenty of sensual sexy times.

So the whole podcasting thing can be a bit confusing, as I found out, because there are many different ways to do things. For example where to host, how to get the best sound, how distribution works etc. So welcome to my second post about podcasting and here are some of the things I have picked up along the way.

I shared the equipment I use over at this post: The Joys of Podcasting: A Beginning so I won't go into that again. Suffice to say I am still using the same stuff.

However, podcasting has other trip wires I had not appreciated, but once we know they are there it is easy to skirt around them. Please be aware, I am no expert, this is a post about how I went about things.

#1 Create a Podcast Trailer

Some podcasting sites, including Apple allow us to create a trailer for our podcast. A trailer is just what is sounds like, a short introduction to our podcast, usually about 2-3 mins in length. This is really useful for several reasons:

1. We want out podcast approved on streaming platforms before episode 1 goes live
   For example Apple takes a while to approve new podcasts - it can be anything from hours to a week - and there has to be at least one "episode" live for them to approve it. This means if we want our podcast to launch on Apple at the same time as it goes live everywhere else we need a valid episode before we actually launch. A trailer counts as a valid episode.
   Most other places take less time to approve, but it is still best to have the podcast live on other platforms before launch,
2. A trailer gives us a chance to introduce our style and hook listeners before launch day. We're trying to interest people in our product just like movies do, so a trailer is a great idea to gather interest. If we are very lucky they might even subscribe to our podcast.

I use Podbean as my hosting site and it allows settings for an upload to let services know if an episode is a trailer or a full episode. I can only assume other hosts do the same, but you'd have to check.

#2 Where to Get a Podcast Seen

There are many streaming platforms where it is a good idea to make sure our podcasts are seen. These are the ones I use and also the articles I used to find out how to submit my feed to them:

• Spotify
  ➡️Submit Your Podcast to Spotify (Live365)
• Apple Podcasts
  ➡️How to Submit Your Podcast to iTunes (Live365)
  ➡️Submitting My Podcast to Apple Podcasts (Podbean)
• Google Podcasts & Google Music Podcasts -
  ➡️How to Submit Your Podcsat to Google Podcasts (Live365)/
  ➡️Making my podcast available in the Google podcast app (Podbean) - N.B. Google Music Podcasts (not Google Podcasts - confusing I know, but they are separate) is only available in North America, and even to submit to them we have to be in North America, so use a VPN to pretend to be in the US if you are not like me.
• Stitcher
  ➡️How to Submit Your Podcast to Stitcher & TuneIn (Live365)
• TuneIn
  ➡️How to Submit Your Podcast to Stitcher & TuneIn (Live365)

Now these do not all update instantly when a new episode comes out. I tend to set my eps to go live at 1AM because then, usually by breakfast/commute time (which is when podcasts are often listened to when the world is normal) they tend to have percolated through. The one that is always not there is Apple Podcasts. Every week I log in to my console as soon a I get up and hit refresh on the feed - it then refreshes usually in under half an hour.

N.B. we MUST make sure our podcast season and episode numbers are set. If they aren't no matter how many times we hit refresh, the ep will not show up on Apple. One week I forgot to set them and the moment I figured it out I added them in and voila, everything worked.

This is not an exhaustive list of where to list our podcasts, but there are just sooo many and these are some of the biggest.

BTW - I made these little graphics for linking to the various sites on my VirginiaWaytes.com blog and anyone is most welcome to use them if they find them useful. They are all png and were created from various sizes of logo available online, just right click and save them.

#3 Make Sure to Tell Everyone About the Podcast on Social Media

This is an obvious one to most of us who have been trying to get out work out there in any way online, but I think it deserve reiterating. No matter how many podcast services our podcast is on, the best way to get the message out there is with our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, and our mailing lists.

When my podcast goes live it gets a handful of views before I get to social media. Then as I pimp it around the numbers start to jump up. All these sites have algorithms that boost podcasts, but they have a nasty habit of only boosting the ones that already have an audience, so we have to do all the hard graft on our own. C'est la vie in the world of the independent producer 💖.

#4 Fantastic Advice from the Experts

There are many people out there who know more about this than me and many of them are very, very helpful.

Getting the Prefect Sound

There is a channel on Youtube with the most fantastic advice for all things audio run by a chap called Mike Russell. He has some wonderful videos which can help us take the sound of our podcast from good to great. This is my favourite vid of his:

I cannot express how good the advice in these vids is.

So Much Good Advice

Live365 has so many articles about so many different aspects of podcasting. It is so useful.

#5 Make a List

[Edit] I forgot to add this, but, if you like me forget things, make a list of what there is to do every time an episode goes live. Since I have made my list I have found it so much easier. Of course I have all the book things to do as well, but it never hurts to have a checklist 😃.

~*~

And that's all I can think of at the moment. Podcasting is an ever expanding world, but I hope this might help a few people sift through the information overload that is out there. Best of luck if you are launching a podcast, drop me your links in the comments if you are. Let me know any useful bits of advice you have picked up along the way too. Thank you 💖

Domain Name Not Working without WWW When Pointing at Blogger - SOLVED

Domain Name Not Working without WWW When Pointing at Blogger

So as I have mentioned previously, I have been busy setting up everything for my alter ego Virginia Waytes and her Sexy Stories Podcast. I purchased the .com and .co.uk domains for the name as soon as I decided on the nom-de-plume, but had not yet decided exactly where to point them.

This week I finally made the choice to point them at Virginia's presence on Blogger because everything else is linked from there and I can host everything there as well so its all in one place. IMHO it also looks nicest on mobile.

Anyway, this was a little trickier than I expected, even when following their instructions to the letter. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, it didn't completely work.

• http://virginiawaytes.com worked
• http://www.virginiawaytes.com worked
• https://www.virginiawaytes.com worked
• https://virginiawaytes.com returned an error

WooRank.com is a great free service where we can check such things. It does a lot more than that, but after putting in a URL for them to check, we can scroll down to the section called "Indexing" and it will tell us if anything is wrong.

N.B I have "HTTPS availability" and "HTTPS redirect" turned on on my Blogger, because Google down ranks sites that don't have HTTPS activated.

I used these instructions to point my domain at Blogger: Google's Domain Instructions

What is boils down to is that after putting in our domain name on Blogger, we will see this:

Under the black bars on the image is information specific to our Google account and will be individual, but it will be in the same place.

We then have to go to our domain name provider and put in the following record into the CNAME section - wherever that happens to be for them:

Host Name	Type	Result
	A	216.239.32.21
	A	216.239.32.21
	A	216.239.32.21
	A	216.239.32.21
Bit under black box	CNAME	Other bit under black box
www	CNAME	ghs.google.com

And we have to set up out domain forward to point to our Blogger URL (e.g. in my case virginiasparlour.blogspot.com).

However, when I did this the first time, as I said above, everything worked except the https:// without the www.

Thanks to this article: Solved GoDaddy Domain Not Working without WWW in Blogger I managed to sort it out, even though my domain is with Names.co.uk not GoDaddy.

Turns out I had to do the following:

1. Remove the A records above and save.
2. Put the A records back in and save (this refreshes the DNS records).
3. Take out the domain forwarding.
4. Put the domain forwarding back in making sure all domain version forward the same way.

And it all sorted itself out. It can take up to 48 to propagate, but it took mine less than a minute.

And that's it. For a while there I was very confused, but thank heavens someone else had the same issue and worked it out. Hence the reason I decided to share.

The Joys of Podcasting - A Beginning

The Joys of Podcasting - A Beginning

So I have been setting up and practising for recording the podcast as Virginia (my erotic fiction alter ego 😘)- which has been fun and a total headache at the same time! 😂

I am using Audition since I have the Adobe suite of applications and I have never used it before, so that's a learning curve. Nothing Adobe ever makes is intuitive, so I've been checking out all the tutorials etc, but their products are very powerful.

I recommend Audacity to those who do not have Audition - it is fabulous and free and I have used it in the past a lot. The only reason I am using Audition over it is that the Adobe suite had full support if I run into anything I or Rob can't solve.

We put up a bunch of anechoic foam above my desk, because my office is in the converted loft which has a sloping roof, so bounce back was a bit of a problem. It's surprisingly warmer in my little spot now too 😁.

Rob also kindly bought me a foam protector for the mic to prevent reflection from behind, and it keeps out ambient noise quite well too. This is what it looks like at the moment. and yes, the pop guard is held on with bluetac - we couldn't clip it anywhere safely.

Yes, that is also a cat tunnel you can see through underneath it 😂.

So far I have tried three mics:

• My old ProSound Podcasting USB microphone
• A Blue Mic Snowball ICE USB microphone that I am borrowing off my sister
• A posh mic with pre-amp, that was not USB

The best sound by far I can get on my PC is with the Blue Snowball mic. It had a lot more gain than the ProSound and can be set up so it doesn't have a horrible background hiss like the posh mic.

Tip: When connecting a USB mic, plug it straight into the motherboard, not a USB hub or anything similar - it will pick up background noise as a hiss. 

All the mics had a horrible hiss on them to begin with, but Rob used a spectrum analyser on the output and figured out it was power supply noise and plugging directly into the motherboard got rid of it. The posh mic, because it wasn't being converted to digital straight away picked up so much background interference from the rest of the equipment. No doubt it is wonderful with a proper sound desk. 😂

Tip: Don't use really posh, sound enhancing headphones when editing - they will mask problems.

As you can see in the piccie above, I started off using my Bose headphones (originally purchased for flying to help with my air-sickness - I can't take all the low level vibrations), but I discovered a problem. Bose headphones make everything sound amazing! When looking for issues in a recording, this makes them difficult/impossible to spot 😂. I have now borrowed a pair of Rob's phone style headphones until I can get a pair of my own.

The really fun part has been practising Virginia's voice. She does not speak like I do. She has a lower, sexier voice, whereas my voice just gets higher and higher the more excited I get 😂. It's been quite a giggle trying to get her right. So far I have recorded an intro, but I can't start the main part of the podcast yet, until I am sure the set-up is perfectly right. This is the initial music and welcome - LMK what you think!

Anyone else been podcasting? How have you found it? Or do you have a favourite podcast to share?

Join Virginia's Newsletter now to be in with a chance of winning a $20 (or equiv) Amazon voucher and all 12 novelettes of The Manor as they come out.

As join me as Virginia on: Twitter | Wordpress | Blogger | Podbean | Facebook

Banner Background Photo by neil godding on Unsplash

Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Moonlight Hall" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The Joys of Cover Design Now We Have Sites Like Unsplash

The Joys of Cover Design Now We Have Sites Like Unsplash

Making eBook covers used to be a lot harder than it is these days. Why I hear you ask?

Because there were a lot less resources available.

There have always been places like Getty images and some royalty free images sites, but the images on them cost not insignificant amounts of money, especially when combining several images to create new ones.

These days we have fantastic sites like:

• Unsplash.com, 
• Pexels.com 
• and Pixabay.com 

where the most wonderful artists upload their work to be used totally for free. Technically we don't even have to give credit, but I think that's incredibly rude! For example, the image I am using in the background of my banner today is by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash.

Many of the photographers have donation options - a great way to pay back their hard work.

Now these images aren't always the highest quality and could be problematic for high def print work, but for web images like eBook covers, they are amazing.

Over the weekend I have been working on the covers for The Manor, the new series by Virginia Waytes, coming early next year to Wittegen Eros and the Sexy Stories podcast.

(ttps://media.giphy.com/media/elhmwUMsAUbScKLLzl/giphy.gif)

Firstly, can I just say how sexist the photo industry tags seem to be! I typed in the word "sexy" and "erotic" on all 3 of the sites I mentioned above and all I got back were pictures of women. Now while I appreciate this because I needed some of those as well, I was looking for some sexy men too! To get suitable pictures of men the most productive search terms were "young man" "abs" and "muscles" and most of the images returned weren't close to what I was looking for.

Anyway, I did manage to eventually find all the images I was after.

You can check out the cover reveal for Episode 1 - Lamb in Wolf's Clothing over at Virginia's wordpress blog: Virginia Waytes - The Parlour - Sexy Stories. And yes, it's very different from the one that was on the Free Fiction Friday version of the book.  

BTW - for those wondering, yes, Virginia is my alter ego - a new pen name to focus specifically on the podcast and paranormal erotic romance eBooks and get away with being a little bit naughty 😘. Virginia has a shiny new newsletter for everything to do with the podcast and accompanying books, and we will be running a giveaway when we launch for all members.

Join now to be in with a chance of winning a $20 (or equiv) Amazon voucher and all 12 novelettes of The Manor as they come out.

Come join me as Virginia on: Twitter | Wordpress | Blogger | Podbean | Facebook