As I've said in a past blog post, I've been posting minecraft Youtube videos documenting what I do on my survival minecraft world. But it's not just any "world", I have it on special settings to make it very challenging, and it consists of a lot of item preserving and farming to make the most of the few items I have or can get. 

I make 1 minute long videos and post them to youtube shorts. Youtube shorts is a different type of youtube video, where it's limited to a 60 second time length, and the format/frame size is like a phone (9:16). When I make the videos, I record my voice describing what happens over the video. I always say my lines several times so I can get the best ones, and I say them off of the top of my head rather than read a script. 

You can hear them all here:

Yesterday I switched my whole stream setup to streamlabs. Streamlabs is extremely useful for essentials for a stream, they provide everything from twitch alerts to webcam overlays. I've been using OBS for streaming and recording, but turns out streamlabs has their own OBS version specific for just streaming! The layout is very similar, but you can customize everything for your stream strait from the software, rather than going to their website which is what I had to do before that. 
The original reason I switched was because apparently streamlabs had it so you could customize certain overlays, but it was only possible by downloading their app for it. I needed an overlay that showed the specific amount of followers I got per stream out of a follower goal. Unfortunately since this was so specific, googling how to get an overlay like that wouldn't get me anywhere.

OBS owns streamlabs, so what was really nice is that when I opened streamlabs, it asked me if I was using OBS already. When I answered yes, they asked me if they could import ALL OF MY SETTINGS FROM OBS TO STREAMLABS. I said yes, AND THEY IMPORTED ALL OF MY SETTINGS IN!!! This really impressed me, because I thought I would have to set everything up again, which would be a pain, especially since I would have to track down a ton of videos and images I used for my stream and re-upload them.

I can't wait to add more features to my stream using streamlabs. I wish I downloaded streamlabs months ago!

I've dabbled a few times with descript. Here are my experiences and what I think of it so far:

I've run episodes through descript to get a transcript of them many times. It's very helpful for clients if they want a transcript for their podcast. Descript also has an option to render subtitles with a video, which you can easily overlap onto your video.
Descript doesn't take too long to process a transcript. It took about 5 minutes to process a 45 minute long podcast interview. 

In descript you can go through and "scrub" out a podcast. Scrubbing means removing all of the filler words, breaths, repetition, etc. Pretty much the long time manual work a podcast sometimes needs.
Descript is famous for it's auto filler word removal. With the help of the transcript, it can detect almost every filler word in an audio file, including ums, uhs, and you knows. Descript will underline any detected filler words for you when you look through the transcript. By right clicking one of the filler words, there's an option to auto remove them all. This process can take longer than the transcript to process. I recently processed a whole podcast episode through its auto filler word removal... I would strongly advise against doing this without a double listen to make sure it sounds good. It constantly messed up edits and many sentences that had a filler word would sound really choppy. It wasn't too good at detecting more complicated mess ups in the call, like if a guest or host repeated a sentence (which I would usually take out). 

I've learned the way to go is process the transcript, then rather than auto removing the filler words, go to them (descript provides a list of the filler words with time stamps) and manually remove them. 

A Youtube channel I've been subscribed to and watching for a while now, Black Plasma Studios, makes awesome Minecraft animations. I found them probably 3 years ago, and have been watching their videos since. The channel is owned by a team of around 5-10 animators, who use the software Blender to make the animations, whether it be posing the characters, adding good lighting, or modeling scene objects. 

I've always thought it'd be cool to do sound design for the channel and the animations they make. They made a Minecraft music video a few months ago using a song by a famous song artist, TheFatRat. They rarely do music videos, which means they don't use sound effects besides the song throughout the whole video. Although most of their other videos have sounds with them, the animators themselves do the sound design, which I imagine can really take up a lot of their time when they need to animate.

With this animated video they made, I will be removing the whole song, and then adding my own sounds to match up to the characters footsteps, grunts, arm movements, any bird chirps, general ambience, etc. I will be using Premiere Pro and Audition for all of the editing, and getting sound effects from either my personal library, or Artlist.io.

I recently subscribed to Artlist, and it's been nothing but handy and helpful. For the monthly subscription, I can download as many sound effects as I like. You can even upgrade and use sound tracks for any project. Since all of their sounds are completely royalty free, and I can use their sounds on anything I work on without getting copy right striked, it works perfect. 

Here's a sneak peak of what I have done already: 

Today I launched my new website for my podcast editing business.

Quail Audio Editing

I bought the domain name from godaddy.com, and I'm using the hosting service from squarespace.com. Buying the domain cost me around $20 per year from GoDaddy, and I bought a yearly subscription from SquareSpace for $140.

I created one page where I included samples, a short video showcasing my process, and a contact form to fill out.