How I created this large course of 25 chapters (process automation)

[AliShirani]

Greetings dear Instructors and Managers,

Am really happy to announce that my 1st course on Udemy is Live. It took me 50 days to create this 25 chapters (C Language course). It was a great learning experience though. I think it was not a huge achievement when it comes to duration I spent because I was learning a lot about tools, it was not easy for me in the beginning because I had no idea how to record  audio / screen correctly, how to enhance an audio, etc. In the beginning when my 20 years old son started helping me editing videos it was fine, but when number of videos started to grow to hundreds it was not manual job anymore. So started writing scripts and stated automating my process.

Enhance Audio - I tried many software including audacity, and spent hours and hours to figure out a way to do it in batch on command-line but every time result was different on separate audio files. So I found out that if I extract all audios from all lectures and make their IDS, I can enhance them using online adobe audio enhancement tool, I used it and enhanced all audios altogether [noise was gone and sound was normalized].

Now there's a problem Boss! And that is, the enhanced audios have a very low volume, that was the time when I started writing my custom scripts to do all the stuff of hundreds of files altogether !

NOTE: I will gladly supply / upload all script files and tools (that are open source), and will love to create a free course about all this [if you think I should].

What scripts I created for batch processing?

I had a separate folder for each chapter [section], so there wasn't any mess, all new enhanced video / audio was going in their respective folder's sub-folder.

1. Enhance Volume of enhanced Audio, take it's respective video and replace old audio with enhanced one . Boost volume to [150% <--  that was my setting]. Put new video file in folder called "ENHANCED".

2. What 2nd batch script did is, it first found intro file (in my case I have Introduction to Chapter) and created an intro - A banner actually [shown below] using custom background image, custom logo , custom font, chapter name, description [that comes form a text / json file]; Prepended this banner to Introduction video for 6-7 seconds and added a light background music. Mission accomplished, put new file in folder "READY" that contains final / unloadable stuff. 

i. Chapter intro banner

ii. Topic banner [w/o bg music] - different background image

These tiny scripts saved me days of work; Secondly this small tools set will save my time in next course.

I am also planning to convert these scripts to cross-platform binaries so that anyone can use them.

Actually I found this method to be really ZERO cost, and hours of effort that we do designing splash screens is minimized to a single script runtime.

I would eagerly be waiting to know your thoughts on this.

Kind regards

Ali...

[AliShirani]

@FettahBen - sox is cross-platform, I tested it on Microsoft Windows and sent you guys results. There are many software out there and best amongst those is audacity, but the thing is saving editing time and concentrating on publishing. When I have to record using OBS I won't be running audacity at the same time, it becomes confusing. I hope you get the point.

[Robert_Hean]

Bit late on the reply, but that's a solid reduction in background static/etc!

I've managed to eliminate most of it via preamps, but if it can be done with scripts and cheaper equipment thats amazing.

[AliShirani]

In fact am doing it win no cost boss ! Your response is appreciated.

[Michael_D_Nwaogu]

Wow, @AliShirani besides the little decrease in the volume, which I think could be boosted up if needed, the background noise vanished. Nice one.

[AliShirani]

@Michael_D_Nwaogu In fact boosting volume is not an issue, but the reduced volume you are noticing is due to noise gone. Thank you for review. Best would be if you guys can provide me real samples (although short).

Thank you

[HelenGloria132]

Thanks for sharing. I learned one or two things.

[AliShirani]

My pleasure

[DanMunteanu]

Thanks for the idea of using Enhance Speech from Adobe! It was just what I needed for two of my lectures, the sound had background noise and I didn't have a good room noise print.

[AliShirani]

Yes it is a great tool. Am working on svox too, that is part of discussion, if you read through whole thread.