This weekend I had a play with some shiny new PRTech tools that I’d bought in the Black Friday deals I shared in last Friday’s blog post. I thought I’d share my first impressions.
Every Monday morning I publish my That Was The Week That Was newsletter which is a round-up of the best PR and corporate affairs stories that I’ve spotted and I think are essential reading if you want to stay on top of the future of public relations.
This week I decided to use TWTWTW to test some of my new tools.
PRTech tools used in the experiment
The TWTWTW newsletter is published on the Curated platform which I bought a few weeks ago when it was on a limited lifetime deal. I originally started That Was The Week That Was on Substack mainly as experiment to find out how Substack worked. I switched to Curated because it was created specifically to publish curated newsletters like mine. It also has a really responsive support team and interesting road map of new features planned. The images used in TWTWTW are currently sourced from JumpStory which I’ve got on a three month trial to compare it with StockUnlimited (which I already own a licence for) or Pexels (a free image library).
BigVu
Once I’d finished issue 19 I then cut and paste the text into BigVu which is a video recording tool with a built-in teleprompter. Originally it was an Android and iOS app, but on the team version which I’ve bought there is a beta version of a web based teleprompter. I used the new beta to record a video of me reading TWTWTW.
It’s an easy and mainly painless process. One issue is that it doesn’t remember the default webcam or microphone and kept automatically selecting a virtual camera which I rarely use. But that’s easily rectified. You then have to play with the speed control to set it at one that is comfortable for your reading speed. I had to edit my script to remove blank lines as at the right speed for me it took too long to scroll past blank lines between paragraphs.
Happy Scribe
Once I’d recorded the video I uploaded it to Happy Scribe to automatically create subtitles. This was quite simply amazing. I’ve used other subtitling tools before but Happy Scribe is the most accurate and easy to use by a big margin. For this experiment I burnt the titles onto the video, but it also generates lots of different files types for proper subtitles or for use in Adobe Premiere Pro. In retrospect, I should have uploaded the unburnt video to YouTube as I’ve also uploaded the subtitles file which people can choose to use.
The only snag I hit was that my Blue Yeti microphone appears to have had a glitch towards the end of the video I’d recorded earlier. I didn’t notice it before I did the transcription as I hadn’t played the video the whole way through before uploading it.
I was just going to publish the video but as so far the whole process had taken well under an hour I thought I’d do I quick edit in InVideo (another AppSumo lifetime deal I bought earlier this year, but is still available). I added an intro and an outro (both created earlier using InVideo).
This is the result. I can think of lots of ways to improve it and usually I wouldn’t publish it like this, but as a first time experiment to show what you can achieve with BigVu, HappyScribe and InVideo. It’s not bad considering the whole process took under an hour and that I was learning how to use BigVu and Happy Scribe!
You’ll notice that if you watch the video and read this week’s That Was The Week That Was newsletter that I don’t read all of the stories. That’s because I added some extra ones this morning after I recorded the video yesterday afternoon.
Until the end of today (Cyber Monday 30 November) you can still get all these tools as lifetime deals on AppSumo. Disclaimer – if you use the links on this blog post or last week’s Black Friday blog post then they are affiliate links which means you get at $10 discount and I get a $10 credit.
If you don’t already then don’t forget to subscribe to That Was The Week That Was.
