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...

[Bessy]

Hi @AliShirani Congratulations !!! 🎉

Thank you for sharing your experience during the creation of your course.

May success be with you always!!!

Best regards,

[AliShirani]

Thank you @Bessy .

[GauravSingh194]

congratulation

[AliShirani]

Highly appreciated.

[GauravSingh194]

hello.first upload chapter wise videos.thanks

[AliShirani]

Dear Mr. Gaurav Singh,

Course has already been deployed and approved. Are you proposing to create a free course on this whole process ? didn't follow what you mean.

regards 

[AmanSaurav]

A free course would be great! but for starters if you could share your thumbnail/banner script , it would be amazing!

[AliShirani]

As I can see you already have created  a course on ffmpeg, am heavily using ffmpeg for almost all purposes, except for audio and banner. Banner actually is created using PHP script (GD to be specific), because font rendering of ffmpeg is not good enough.

1. create 4k background first 

2. load as image resource in GD using PHP

3. plot your text and watermark / logo

4. render as HD png file.

5. use ffmpeg to create clip by joining above mentioned png + custom music track (7 seconds), export mp4.

6. Join #5 and your lecture video using ffmpeg

[Robert_Hean]

Ali - love how you combined your skills with a challenge making a course! I've done the same thing by learning how to edit (first in iMovie, then Davinci)... 

Would love to partner with how to document/share this if you're interested - I imagine many folks could benefit from this type of automation.

[AliShirani]

@Robert_Hean Awesome ! Highly appreciate your concern and interest. Why not go for such a course together. Most welcome.

[peter_dalmaris]

Nice work Ali!

[AliShirani]

@peter_dalmaris - Thanks a lot

[ismailkhuz16]

Congratulation @AliShirani 

[AliShirani]

@ismailkhuz16 - Thank you sir

[Samreen Nisa Qureshi]

Congratulation!🎉  Well done 

[AliShirani]

@Samreen Nisa Qureshi - Thank Samreen, highly appreciated

[goyashy]

Awesome, i recently shared my journey as well, it's documented here, will try some of your suggestions.

[AliShirani]

You have am amazing vlog and I think you for your comments. Best of luck

[GertrudeCho465]

Thanks for sharing and Congratulations on your achievement. Creating and launching the first course has a way of creating fulfillment and motivation to do more.

[AliShirani]

@GertrudeCho465 - thanks a lot , indeed, you are right.