Who is ? Archives - Yves Hanoulle

This week I did my third attempt at recording an interview for who is agile.

Just like last time, I used StreamYard to record the video with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.

The difference between now and last time, was that I did a lot of research and I even followed a 1 hour booster session about StreamYard.

For me the best moment to follow a training is when I have already played around with the tool. Having recorded already both as a guest and as a host, made me very aware about what I wanted to learn.

The technical part of recording, is very easy with StreamYard. I had managed that pretty good the first time. Only at that moment I wanted to use OBS to transition between the scenes.
What I learned this week, is that StreamYard can do what I wanted to do with OBS.
Yes OBS can do a lot more, yet for the limited things I wanted to do, the paid version of streamyard can help me. And Streamyard is better at recording my guests and synchronizing the sound and the video.

And so I paid for a month of StreamYard. I on purpose did not select the year version as I knew that I am still discovering tools, and I might discover more tools in the next months.

After trying for a few days, I realized that it would be very hard to use Davinci to manipulate the recorded video from Streamyard. I know it’s possible, yet I also know I don’t know the tool enough and I decided that as it’s the first video of the series, it’s OK for me to just record an introduction and glue that one to the recorded video as I recorded it.

And that is what I did tonight. This means I finished the second recorded video (With Deepti Jain) and I scheduled it to be published by Youtube, on Friday at 9 am, local time.

At the same time I also uploaded the third video with Rebecca and that one will be published on Friday the 28 also at 9 am. (Brussels timezone)

I’m writing this while I wait behind my computer to record the fourth video, this time with Rashina Hoda. As she is living in Melbourne Australia, I’m recording this In the middle of my night. That is a huge difference between the book version of this project where I could do my part of the publishing at an asyncrone moment from the person I was interviewing.

After the problems I had with lagging for the first recordings, I decided that for the second recording (with Deepti Jain) that was the next morning I would have a quick try to fix the lagging with recording over skype, yet if that was not quickly fixed for that second recording I would swap the recording technique.

1 lessons learned:
Never scheduled the first few recordings, directly after each other. I should have put some time in between to fix the (technical) problems I found.

Luckily I had some conversations the last weeks with agile friends who are regurly recording interviews on youtube.

Dave Farley from the Continuous Delivery youtube channel told me records himself with his own video camera and uses zoom to record the other person.
And then uses DaVinci Resolve to align the recordings and highlight the person doing the talking. So in the night between my first two recordings I thought, if I can’t pull of Skype lagging problem, I can work like Dave works. When I got up in the morning, I realized that I did not know yet how Dave does his local recordings, so I could not do that.

2 lessons learned:
Even if I don’t plan to work a certain way, I should still ask for more information, so that I have a backup plan.

Luckily for me, I also had a conversation with Jimmy Janlén from Jimmy with agile. When we recorded my appearance on his channel to talk about Work Retrospectives , we used StreamYard for that recording. Later he told me that after the recording in StreamYard, he downloads them and edits them in Adobe Premiere Pro, to add the image, the questions etc. He is also using OBS Studio for recording the prologue and epilogue of the episodes.

By the time I had checked out StreamYard, it was already time to connect with Deepti.
I did some checks with her to fix Skype. I know that I understand what I need to do, yet it also felt time pressure. I decided that I would need more than just 10 minutes to get the OBS settings correct to fix the lagging problem between Skype and OBS. I did not want to do all of this checking with Deepti. I should first check that out locally. Hence we swapped to StreamYard.

3 lessons learned:
When I do a technical check-up as I did before the first interview with my daughter, I should have done a real recording. and not just a check-up if I could hear and see her.
And I need a metronome with a visual and an audible part so I can get that lagging fixed.
(And preferable a software one, so that for the next interviews, after I get good at fixing this, I can quickly set this up with all the people I’m going to record, as I expect this might be a different setting for each interview. )

The interview was going great, the first 5 questions are the same question as I used in the Who is agile book. I have to say, in a conversation, I find these questions even stronger than in writing. It’s great to feel that because with all the technical difficulties it could have been tempting to give up. Yet both recordings have convinced me that I need to push forward.

There are a few more interviews scheduled, yet some of my evenings in the next weeks I’m going to spend on:

– Editing the interview with Deepti in DaVinci Resolve

– Fixing the lag problem between Skype & OBS

– Exploring my options with the interview with Elisabeth.

Sounds like a year I’m going to learn a lot about video editing. I promised my daughter already that our next year video will be created using different video editing software.

Last night I did the first recording for Who is agile version edition. I have decided that I want to work out loud in how I’m doing this project. So let’s share how I did do my set-up for this first recording.

Local setup: OBS
The idea is that this allows me to do the recording in one go and be able to publish the video without too much editing.

Communication Tool: Skype

Why a tool that has been around since 2003? The main reason is, it has an NDI output, that OBS can accept as an input. And zoom does not have this (yet) for normal zoom calls. Zoom only supports NDI out for Zoom Rooms.

I learned how to set it up from Cat Mulvihill’s video NDI setup for beginners & Cat Mulvihill video on add Guest to OBS

Switching between scenes: Streamdeck
I’m using the Streamdeck with 15 buttons to swap between the scenes during the recording.
I’m not sure where I learned it from, Andrew from Awall explains it in his ultimate streamdeck guide.

My first recording was with Elisabeth Hendrickson.
We used calendly to schedule our timing. (As I want to talk with people around the world, it’s great to have a tool that allows people to select their own time and it checks if I’m available in my own calendar. ) Calendly was originally configured with zoom, yet as I had Elisabeth in my skype contacts, I assumed we could easily swap. I was wrong. Turns out that Elisabeth had not used Skype in ages and no longer had access to that account. Luckily Elisabeth was oke to create a new account on the spot. It worked although Microsoft made it hard as their “prove that you are not a robot” was some strange thing with pictures of animals that she had to turn around until they are showing correct, and that took a while, yet she managed to figure it out.

After we got connected on Skype, I still had to tell OBS, what source to use for the video of Elisabeth. That was a few seconds of work.

The interview itself was great. Although I did forget some of the scenes I did set up. Mostly because I was either focussing on listening to Elisabeth or focussing on my own question.
Unfortunately, I did not test the audio-video lag. (yet Cat says in the video you should test it, and I ignored that.) and yes there is a big lag in the video. So before I can send that video life, I need to figure out how to fix this. At this moment I’m looking at Davinci Resolve to fix this.

I was hoping to have Elisabeth as a first video live, yet it might take a little longer and I’m not going to wait setting the first video life, if I have another one ready earlier…

In 2010 I started a blog serie called who is agile. I made a lot of friends creating it, and I got to know other friends even better. About a year later I turned it into an ebook on leanpub. And that one turned into a series of local country books. Where local teams are creating versions of these books with people from their country.
This year I will create a video edition of Who is agile.

Here are some of the decisions I took around this project.

I will blog publicly about everything I do
I want to talk to a diverse group of people
I will record the video as if they are streamed; without much editing

Why blog about everything I do?
Over the years I have learned that sharing what I do around community work, is helpful to others to learn about agile and habit. On top, by writing things down, I’m documenting it both for other people and myself. Writing forces me to think about my process and helps me in reviewing and adapting what I do.

Why do I want to reach a more diverse community?

When I created who is agile originally I planned to have 50% male and female in the interviews. Yet I did not actively work on that and I only ended up with 29% women. For my book Tips From The agile Trenches, I wanted to do better. And I reached 51% Women (with 89 people it’s impossible to reach 50%) Yet both of these books were too Western: too many people from the USA and Western Europe. And almost completely white. That is bad. For this video edition, I am reaching out to the global community. I have already a more diverse list of 120 people, yet if you know of people I should contact, please let me know.

Also, I want to make sure I interview all kinds of agile people:

developers
coaches
product owners
testers
great agilists that no one knows
famous agilists
….

Why record as it’s streamed?

This is a community project that I’m doing in my own time, I want to focus on what brings the most value. For me, that means focussing on the interviews, not on editing. (Remember: our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of value…)
Why not just stream?
I believe in habits and continuous delivery. I want the videos to be delivered at regular intervals. As I will be interviewing people around the world, the recording will happen during all possible hours I’m not working. On top of that, posting at all these unregular hours is also not appreciated by the youtube algorithm.

Thanks to tools like OBS, I hope I can record the interviews and still give some nice visualisation, without having to spend all my time on editing…

If after reading all of this, you are ready to watch the first interviews, you can already have a look at our family New Years video of 2021.
Don’t forget to like, subscribe and hit that bell to get warnings about that video’s coming your way… 😉

Category: Who is ?

Third recording for who is agile, video edition

Second recording Who is agile

First recordings for Who is agile done

Who is agile video version

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Interesting article? Dont hesitate to share

Interesting article? Dont hesitate to share

Interesting article? Dont hesitate to share

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