Change in career path

Switching the line of work is not common and most of the time is not appreciated by employers either. Patience is the key and self-confidence is essential. Freelance work is treated as trivial and inconsequential during most interviews. To work on your own (as a freelancer or contractor) is not an easy task. Good researching skills, work independently, take ownership of projects and deliverables etc are seen under Ideal Candidate or Required Skills section. These are what one develops while working as freelancer. Lucky are the ones who get to work with someone who understands this. We have a long way to go in accepting freelance jobs or freelancers as mainstream professionals.

I create user guides for a web - Hospital Management System (HMS) application. The pages of knowledge base are currently in Xwiki. Part of creating user guide is to make training videos, or how-to videos. The company I work for use Linux as OS (Operating System). I on the other hand work on a Windows machine. The tools used in making videos are all open source. Some of the software (applications) I tried was not working well on Windows platform, while OBS Studio was not capturing the drop-down list in the videos. Trying my hands on various tools, I found three that fulfilled my requirements

Share X (to record the screen)

Share X is an open source video recorder meant for Windows users. This can be used to record the entire screen, window or an area of your choice. This can be used to capture screenshots (with customised time delay)

Audacity (to record the voice over)

Most of the time, when the transcript for the user guide is ready, the next step is to use the text-to-speech feature. It is good when you are short of time, or don't have the resources to record the audio. Working from home (office) has its own perks, one being the solitude you get and the silence of working in a closed room. Keen on trying my hand at audio recording I started looking for an open source tool, that would apart from editing and tweaking would cut noise (just in case) while recording. Fortunate to have an appropriate headphone to do the recording (Microsoft Life Chat), the combination of Audacity and Microsoft Life Chat brought out remarkable results in the audio. The tool lets you export in MP3, WAV, OGG formats. A sophisticated tool, it has some advanced features that I am yet to explore. The basics of editing audio is not complicated and easy to learn.

Open Shot Video Editor (to combine audio and video, also to edit the final video and add effects)

Openshot Video editor is a powerful tool, that can be used to combine the video and audio files, overlay pictures and videos, edit videos by adding effects and animation and so much more. It is a versatile tool that is beginner friendly. An inquisitive mind would have a good time exploring the tool and for the not so inquisitve, there are numerous tutorials and guides to learn from.

Summing up

The advantages of using some of these open source tools are

• The limitless tutorials, guides to learn how to use them.

• The tools I used are light and don't guzzle down the space on hard disk.