Tutorial questions in General

[Gare]

I have assigned today as Organization Day: entering receipts and odd scraps of data on paper into a spreadsheet, cleaning the car, and transcribing the audio to January's video tutorial. You can applaud any time now.

It's been harder than usual for the past three month because in an effort to slow down my delivery, I've forsaken an actual script which I used to read from. I think it works, but 100% of the script is now impromptu, and as such there is now script I can just port into a PDF document.

Wish me luck with iTunes today: play, pause, type, play pause, type...

-g

[BeanPole]

Gare,

I am new at Xara, so I have been going through your tutorials. They are great, but sometimes you go so fast I miss part of what you are saying. The transcripts really come in handy if I have a part I'm not catching. Do you have transcripts for December and January tutorials? They didn't appear to be available when I downloaded the zip files, but in your video, it shows that the transcripts are there. Thank You!

Oh, I see you answered this before I even typed it out! Thanks

[Gare]

The video uses the same website template I've been using for 2012, BeanPole, so yeah, it's misleading to have the download transcripts button there.

The good news is that I will indeed be putting up December and January. This is at the top of my To Do List, promise!

Q: As of October, I stopped reading from a script. Do you find the videos after October 2012 to go a little more slowly?

Truth is I'm camera and microphone shy and want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, and that's why I go at Warp 3, Scotty.

My Best,

Gary

[BeanPole]

Thanks Gary. I particularly found the July one difficult. I must have stopped and replayed 10 times but could not figure out why I couldn't slice shapes. Wasn't sure if Arrange, Combine Shapes, Slice shapes was the menu path to get to Slice shapes, or if it was 3 separate steps I needed to do. Finally, through reading your transcript I realized that I had not selected both the object and the photo, so the slice shapes option was grayed out.

I have found the tools a little confusing, so I reordered them and set up new short cuts, in doing so I am now a little more familiar with the tools and where they are. Most of the short cuts did not work for me as Windows 8 has commandeered all of the function keys.

Have a quick question though. I am starting the Valentine's Day card and my Xara has me in centimeters. I do prefer inches. So I went to Options, and set the Grid and Ruler Major spacing to .25 inches, the origin shows x0in y 0 in. On the Units tab I set page to inches and font to points.

However, my ruler still shows centimeters. Is there someplace else I can go to tell the ruler to show in inches?

Thank You,

[Gare]

You did everything correctly, BeanPole, except name the increments, a somewhat unintuitive thing. In Grid and Ruler Spacing, exactly where you were in the Options>Grid and Ruler, type the abbreviation for "inches"..."in" directly after the number, as I did in this illustration here.



I'm about to install Win 8 so thanks for telling me it will glom all the shortcut keys! Okay, there's a real easy way to access Boolean actions such as slice and Add Shapes and all that good stuff I personally use all the time: Go to Window>Control Bars> and then put a check in the Arrange Box (then close the Control Bars guy).



Now you have all the Shapes operations on a bar of its own probably below the Infobar as I've illustrated here.

I'm sorry I wasn't more clear in June. Give me some time to practice and it'll get better, promise.

All operations: subtract, add, slice and so on, need to have more than one shape selected, and if you're subtracting, the order of the shapes on the page affects the results. For example, if you want to subtract an orange circle from a red rectangle, the circle needs to be on top of the rectangle, or no go.

My Best,

Gary

P.S. Oh, and we're going off-topic here: this is Frances' thread for the handcrafted valentine tutorial. If you have issues with past tutes, please start a thread in the Xara Xone area, and someone, if not me exactly, will be of humble assistance.

[angelize]

If you open a new US letter size document (file> new> US Letter) the ruler should be automatically set to 1 inch major spacing and 8 subdivisions. If you wish you can set the subdivisions to 16 and click OK. This will set the ruler for this document only. If you want inches to be a default every time you open a new document you can save this blank document as a new template (file> save template) name it some thing like my default and check the use as default box and click ok. Now your new default inches template will appear when ever the program opens or when ever you click the new document button.

@ Gare: we seem to have two different discussions going on here could we split off the posts regarding tutorials in general into a new thread of their own? I think this is a good discussion and will benefit those of us who like to do tutorials both written and video.

[Gare]

If you missed a month, or just need some more info on a tutorial on the Xara Xone, feel free to post here!

My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

Thanks Gary, in regards to your delivery speed and scripted versus ad libbed, I like the slower speed of the ad libbed tutorials and when I do my own videos that's what I do. I do edit the odd stumble, the phone ringing, or the dog barking (he has the worst sense of timing lol) but I try to keep the speed of my delivery slow and clear and I try to do the same with my mouse movements.

I am also a little microphone shy and sometimes I do a practice run with the headset on but not recording to rehearse. I'd be interested in comparing notes with you and others who do or have done video tutorials in the past.

[Gare]

First, I think I've let myself in for some exceptionally humbling critiqués!

Second, Frances—I never do the screen filming and the narration at the same time. When I run the video tutorial part onscreen, I'm making mental notes of how long segments should be, but I don't record anything because a lavalier mic or whatever is simply too distracting. It's not a performance; it's a composition done in non-real time. At least that's the way I have to compile it. This seems to be wrong in part because of the speed, but as I'm looking and reviewing, I think because I've used Xara forever, one simply does things a little too fast for the uninitiated. And that's dead wrong.

But as I mentioned earlier, this video stuff is a WIP. I think I'm producing better videos than I did a year ago, and let's see what 2013 brings.

-g

[BeanPole]

Thank you! And I now have my inches! And your tutorials are great, I'm just experiencing that old learning curve!