I started about 6:30 this morning on my book. There were some things that I told myself that I had to finish today. Some of those things were dealing with the movies contained within. I also needed to resize some of them and to manage/normalize the audio.
The biggest thing I had to do though was I needed to work on the images so that they were basically prepped for an epub or interactive pdf. I won’t get into that much, but epubs won’t accept some of the changes that you make in your desktop publishing software, for example rotation. If I rotated the image in Indesign, when the epub was created, the image would be crooked as if there hadn’t been any rotation set. So if I wanted the images to look as they do in Indesign (software) I had to take every image that I made changes to into photoshop and redo them, then save, and then add them back into the book. I don’t know if it sounds like a lot of work, but I figured that for some of the bigger fixes like color correction and replacing the image with a higher resolution one, I spent about 10-20 minutes on each of those images, for the smaller fixes, simple rotation and stuff it was maybe about 1 minute each. At last count there was slightly less than 200 images and 24 movies. I worked on that until about 5, so for about 10 hours or so with breaks.
Then I ran into a huge problem. The file size is way too large. Doing some research on what is considered okay for epubs, there were differences in what I read, but it seems that the high is less than 100MB, my epub is 1GB, ten times that size. I never could find an exact number on interactive PDFs though, but I’m guessing my 1GB is still way too high. There are a few things that I can do, one is downsize the book. Instead of 155 pages, I can probably bring it down to maybe 110. I can remove or shorten movies. One thing that I thought about was not making any video longer than 20 seconds. That could trim 50-100MB off the size. Then I can remove some images and decrease the resolution on others. This will probably be the fix I go with. I don’t need print resolution for the images in the book unless I decide to print a hard copy…which I do plan on doing. So now the problem is I have to finish the book completely, save it for print, then go in and decrease resolutions on all the images, and then make my interactive digital book. Just a guess, but that will take at least an extra full day, something like 10-12 hours to do and with other work going on, that would probably end up being about 3 days.
Taking all this into consideration along with the stuff that I still have to do to complete the book like proofreading, editing, and going over the layout for inconsistencies, there’s probably still 2 weeks to go before I will be finished.
After I post this I’m going to start gather footage for my next video. I’m kind of leaning towards one of two things. The first is a channel intro for my playlists. Should be kind of short, maybe 30 seconds, but I want it to be somewhat sophisticated so it will take a few days to do. The other idea I had was to do Singapore. When I was stuck there for four days I took lots of footage that I think will make it kind of easy to put it together. It won’t be an exciting video because all I did was walk around a too video of things. I didn’t do any fun… not that I usually do anything exciting though. :)
