Projects and Problem Cascades
As the New Year is still young, I have embarked upon several new projects that I’ve been planning since Autumn last year. These undertakings have gone beyond the planning stage and are currently being implemented. The fun thing about the phrase “implemented” in this context is that it implies that it is by far the easiest and most straightforward part of the process. The initial brainstorming of ideas has been completed. A cogent and detailed plan has been written. The costing of materials and time required have been determined. These are the hard parts. All that remains is to “just do it”. It should be a piece of piss (a British phrase indicating that something is easy). It virtually “implements” itself. However, that is a load of bollocks. Because there is always scope for something to go wrong. It may well start as something minor and innocuous but it all too often ends in a “problem cascade”.
In early 2025 I experimented with recording video game footage, editing it and uploading it to YouTube. Initially I thought it would be a straightforward process. All I needed was some video capture and editing software along with the time to learn the basics of the process. I did eventually upload two videos to YouTube but I wasn’t entirely happy with them. The main problem was that at every stage of the production process there were factors that impacted upon the results. For example, OBS requires a great deal of fine tuning and a lot of that is dependent upon your PC and its respective hardware. Hence you have to make changes, record some video content and then appraise it to see if it is adequate. If not, it’s a case of rinse and repeat. Hence there is great deal of time spent fine tuning your set up and effectively just experimenting. It isn’t the most efficient of processes.
Last year I bought Corel VideoStudio 2023 for video editing. It proved adequate but took a while to figure out. As I haven’t used it for 10 months I am currently struggling to recall what I have previously learned. During that time I have also changed monitors, which means that several videos I created for branding, are now in different resolution to any new video content that I may record. This can be addressed when editing future videos but it has added another layer of complexity to the process. As a result I have also purchased Movavi Video Suite 2026 to see if this software is a little more intuitive or will automatically address problems like this one, without manual intervention. However, the software kept on freezing upon launch and it took two hours of troubleshooting before I determined that it was due to a conflict with my Action! screen capture software, that launches on Windows start up.
I also dusted off my Yeti X microphone this week and made some test audio recordings via Audacity, to see what the sound quality was like. Again it required a lot of fine tuning as I had to set the microphone to an appropriate “pickup pattern”. Cardioid is the best for recording a single voice and is recommended for solo podcasts. Next I needed to find an optimal distance between myself and the microphone, so it recorded my voice at an acceptable level. The microphone also had to be positioned so I could access my keyboard and monitors while using it. The final results were good but I did waste some time troubleshooting a humming noise that was present on the recordings, before I realised it was the sound of the washer/dryer in the kitchen being picked up. Once again, an unforeseen factor can derail your progress and send you down a proverbial Rabbit hole.
Mind you, it hasn’t all been a continuous struggle. I installed a piece of software recently called Custom Resolution Utility that allows you to create custom screen resolutions for your monitor and add them to the drop down list in Windows. It worked immediately without any fine tuning. I often find that utilities written by the public and shared on GitHub are far better supported, have better instructions and have superior quality control than a lot of commercial software. As for projects, I guess it is in their nature that there will always be problems and areas where you simply have to experiment to get optimal results. But I do find it frustrating that so much software these days feels only 80% completed and that technical support is often a case of “troubleshoot it yourself”. It is not a business model we’d accept for other products, where we expect things to work straight out of the box. However, that enough complaining from me. I’ve got some projects to “implement” and they’re not going to do it themselves.
