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The Best Free Annotation Tool for Presenters

October 19, 2020 by Arun Leave a Comment

If you’re into presentations or teaching something through screen sharing online with others, you know you cannot annotate, highlight nor zoom into the screen while presenting.

This is possible in some presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint to some extent but not without showing the audience what you are actually doing in front of them.

But here’s what’s possible after you read this guide post / watch this video:

  • You could draw,
  • write directly on the screen,
  • highlight directly over most desktop applications including the presentation software and web pages.

Here’s how to get them done.

Just head on to this website which is from Microsoft and download the ZoomIt software.

Once the zip file gets downloaded click on it to open it – this only contains the exe file and is a portable file – you only need to double-click to use it.

This exe file opens up an options dialog box. Just go through this video demo for a detailed walk-through of how to make use of all these options to suit your situation.

In case you are in the Teaching profession or in any training Department within your company then this is a very useful tool to keep handy.

Filed Under: Technology Tips, Blog Posts, PowerPoint Tips, Windows Tips Tagged With: guides, Resources, software, tools

How to Create Short Intro Videos for YouTube using InVideo

September 22, 2020 by Arun Leave a Comment

Creating a short video as an intro or outro for YouTube from scratch is hard work. It takes time to position the logo where we want (after multiple trials and errors), find suitable music, get quality footage to use – not to forget the copyrights involved in the process.

InVideo is a tool which can help us exactly with just that. And more. I have been using it for a while now and it has become an important component of my video creation tools, mainly because of its ready to use templates and pre-made designs with music, scenes, animations, placeholders – it all cumulatively saves a ton of time!

A Definitive Guide to Using InVideo Video Creating Web App

Throughout this blog post, I will also mention some key features, tips, tricks, settings that you may find useful. I also mention a few things that need some improvement, so make sure you read this article completely. It took me a long time to break down all the important steps in this guide post, to create any video within InVideo – so once you finish reading this guide post, you’ll master everything that is there within InVideo.

Start using the InVideo tool for free NOW!

We will see how to use the InVideo tool to create your next professional-looking video, ad, or any promotional footage in under a few minutes.

Here’s a video with a sample intro video (actually two) + a complete walkthrough of what we are going to cover in this article. You can simply watch this video for the full walkthrough or keep reading further if you are of the ‘reading’ types.

Both the intro clips you see in the above video are created using the InVideo software in just a few clicks – and yes, no installation required in my computer – it’s all happening within the browser.

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to create a similar video for your own purpose.

We will cover 3 sections in this article:

  1. First, we’ll see the account setup process. It shouldn’t take long, it’s really short and simple.
  2. Then, we will do some initial important setup such as uploading and adding some brand presets.
  3. Finally, we will see how to create the video.

Now a full disclaimer here. I got a free account for creating this review video, and that being said, this video doesn’t show any bias and I have been using this tool for full 30 days tinkering around finding what’s good and what needs improvement, before producing this review for you. So, rest assured, you can be sure that this is a fair review article.

But if you choose to invest in this software (I don’t necessarily call it a purchase because you can definitely reap its rewards in terms of time saved and of course in terms of the professional boost you are about to give to your brand) – so if you choose to buy and invest in this software through my affiliate links below, I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you and that way you will be supporting my creations.

Get InVideo for just $5 per month.

We now know what is InVideo, next let’s create a new InVideo account.

There are some limitations with a free account but it does let you produce videos with a watermark – as you can see above from the screenshot.

If you choose to upgrade, there are two plans available at the time of making this video – which are Business and Unlimited plans.

The names of these plans may change depending on when you read this. These plans cost you $20 and $60 if you choose to go with paying every month, but you can instantly save 50% of it if you pay for the annual price, which costs $10 and $30 respectively, billed annually.

InVideo Promo Code:

And if you want to get an additional 50% off of this price you can use this InVideo coupon code arun50 and click on ‘Apply‘ to get it at just $5 per month paid annually.

Next, let’s see the account signing up process

Signing up process is pretty quick – just provide your name, email, number, and sign up. Once you are in, you will actually have a few setup options that can be done, but these are not compulsory to proceed and can be set up anytime later on. For now, I will just walk you through these settings.

If you scroll down a bit, you can see this ‘Personalize now‘ option through which you can let InVideo know your preferences. This will show some tailor-made content for you to focus on.

Another key setting to take care of is the Brand Presets section accessible from your profile menu here. Adding a logo once at the beginning using the ‘Brand Presets’ section enables you to have your brand logo in each scene by default. It also creates an end clip including your logo and social handles.

The brand presets option detects colors for text, background, etc. automatically once after you add your logo in accordance with the color of your logo. We will see how to make use of all that later.

Now, we are ready to create our first video.

Here, you will be greeted with three different workflows to create videos:

  1. You could use their Pre-made video Templates – where you can use more than 3000 templates to create videos in under 10 minutes.
  2. Use the Text-to-Video option to create videos from articles.
  3. Start from a Blank Template to pour your own creativity.

The best part is that all these three options allow us to create videos in either Wide, or Vertical or Square format, thus catering to popular video content platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and vertical ones specifically to target mobile users and square ones for marketing-related video content creators who can use that to create ads for displaying in mobile or on the sidebar of websites.

The first two options have some pre-made templates in the shown custom platforms and formats, which is pretty cool – as it saves a good lot of your time.

If you have used Canva before, then you will pick this up pretty quickly. If not, don’t worry, I will still walk you through in detail on how to create a video quickly in InVideo.

That being said, they also have an extensive FAQ section if you have any questions on how to use any of their available features or even find out what are some of the features that you may be missing out.

Alright, so, now let’s go to the InVideo home page, and use a pre-made template to create an intro video.

This video has animation, let’s me show my logo and the website link. Perfect for an intro or an outro alike, and it’s also really short.

So, now let’s pick this one.

Before proceeding, am going to add this to my favorites, so you can revisit this later if in case you want to browse through other designs to get some inspiration. You can add a video to the favorites by clicking on the ‘heart ❤’ icon.

Once you are ready, we can start using this template, but before doing that let’s set up some defaults such as the social media handles, logo, company name, URLs, etc. This is where we will make use of the Brand Presets section we saw at the starting of this article.

This step will be really helpful as one-time setup variables which will then be picked up by the template fields when we create and edit. It’ll be definitely a huge time saver.

However, on the other hand, I feel more options could be given here as something I would call ‘Profiles‘ to create multiple presets if I have more than one website or logo to create videos for. It’d be especially useful to have multiple presets if you are an agency creating videos for your customers. Anyway, that’s just my opinion.

Moving on…

Click on ‘Use this template‘ – upload your logo on the left side pane which automatically fits it into this video template, thus making your editing time far lesser. If you already uploaded your logo using the universal Brand Presets section, then you can skip this step.

After selecting the template, we can see the media asset features on the left-hand side and the editing options on the right-hand side.

There are different tabs here to add different types of content elements in your video, such as text, image, video, effects, shapes, etc.

Speaking of images and videos there are more than 3 million Standard Media Library assets from Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash in addition to 1 million premium media content that is copyright free for you to add to the project and produce.

Just search for them using the search bar provided on the left side of the InVideo interface.

Remember that the InVideo Unlimited plan gives us unlimited everything – such as Premium Templates, HD Video Exports per Month, more than 1 million Premium photos, and videos from Storyblocks and Shutterstock to be used in our projects. Whereas the InVideo Business plan offers 300 premium photos and videos and 60 HD Video Exports per Month at the time of making this review.

Okay, so the bottom section has the project’s timeline – you can either choose to have a basic timeline or an advanced timeline by clicking here to change your view. You could modify the way the layers are stacked as per how you want it.

Just ensure to unlock certain layers that are locked by default such as the background and the overlay elements.

Of course, we can also rename the layers (right side of the editing interface) to suit our video projects. We also get to change the colors we want in the video.

Speaking of adding the suitable music tracks, InVideo’s technology adds the music track that is best suited for the theme of your video. But you can always have the option to change it by uploading your own track using the Upload button option. You can change the music track for your video either on the ‘Preview’ screen or on the ‘Advanced Editing’ screen – all under the ‘Music’ tab.

One thing to note here is that you will be able to hear the music only when you play all scenes by clicking its button. We won’t be able to hear any music when clicking on the ‘Play Scene’ button.

Important Tip:

One unique feature in InVideo is its Intelligent Assistant button. Clicking this will analyze your scenes to look at it from different angles, timing, and setup and lets you know if you have a pixel-perfect scene, LITERALLY!

The sample video we saw doesn’t need to have any voice-overs but if you have that specific need, it can be done using this button here.

You can upload an already recorded voiceover track, or record a live one, or it has a very cool automated Voiceover feature that lets you just type some text and have the computer read it out in the accent of your choice. It could be American, Indian, British, German, and so much more. that’s really cool!

Alright, now we’re all set to export our video – clicking on this Export button will instantly export the video into a 1080p video format.

It provides a jobID to make note of so we can revisit them later. This can also be renamed. The rendering process takes a few minutes depending on the number of elements added in the video and the duration of all the scenes.

Once done, we can download and use it wherever we want. It’s as simple as that.

One of the cool things about InVideo is that they never get tired of creating new video templates. As you can see from the What’s Hot section, there is ALWAYS something new to pick from.

I also observed that they pretty much release a video template for every occasion or event – be it Teacher’s day, Labor Day, and every single celebrated holiday around the world. This is not only great to be current but also saves us time in creating a video on the hot topic or subject to release it to our related audience.

InVideo also has templates for almost every industry – regardless of which you belong to, you can access anything and everything.

As you can see here, there are templates for Finance & Loan services, Social Media Marketing, Bloggers, YouTubers, Yoga, Property Portfolios, Photography bloggers, Fitness, sales, marketing, production, health, education, travel, medical, electrical – the list goes on.

I hope this in-depth article provided a good walkthrough of how to use InVideo video maker app with adding your own music, adding scenes and bringing your creativity to life within a few clicks and a few minutes.

Don’t forget to use the InVideo coupon code ‘arun50‘ to get it for 5 bucks a month paid annually. I have been using it for a while now and it has become a part of my video creation tools that I cannot live without.

Filed Under: Reviews, Blog Posts Tagged With: software

What is MFA and How to Use MFA Apps

February 20, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

MFA or Multi-Factor Authentication is an additional layer of security for our online accounts – be it banking, emails, document storage websites like Dropbox, etc.



There are multiple ways to make use of MFA. Although, some websites make it mandatory to use MFA for additional security, if you see a website offering this step and is not yet mandated, I recommend to immediately opt for it and secure your account with MFA.

Related: How to use Grammarly – Review and Demo (opens in a new tab)

MFA is also known as 2FA or 2SV – Two-Factor Authentication or Two-Step Verification.

In this video, you can see more details on how to use it. But basically, we install the mobile app, click on the + icon to add a website (say, your Gmail account)  – and scan the QR that shows up on the screen.

Watch the video here:

That’s all – it’s that simple.

Resources mentioned in this video:

LastPass: https://lastpass.com/auth/

Symantec VIP Access: https://vip.symantec.com/

Google Authenticator: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.authenticator2&hl=en

Microsoft Authenticator: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.azure.authenticator&hl=en

 

Additional resources:

Google 2-Step Verification: https://g.co/2sv – enable two-step verification for your Google accounts

Oracle Authenticator app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=oracle.idm.mobile.authenticator&hl=en

Filed Under: Technology Tips, Blog Posts, Reviews Tagged With: guides, Resources, software, tools

How To Use Grammarly – Review and Demo

January 7, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

When it comes to writing, nobody is perfect – and that’s because we are all humans.

That’s where a second-eye check can really help us. Be we cannot always find somebody who can do that for us.



In this video, we will see a detailed demo of how Grammarly works and what it has to offer us.

Just hit on the play button below and start learning!

Resources mentioned in this video

Download Grammarly, it’s Free: https://techlibrary.tv/grammarly

Free Grammarly Handbook: https://techlibrary.tv/handbook

Free Grammarly Office Add-in: https://techlibrary.tv/GrammarlyOffic…

Download Free Grammarly Desktop App: https://techlibrary.tv/grammarlydesktop

Install Browser Extensions:

Google Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de…

Safari extension: https://safari-extensions.apple.com/d…

Mozilla addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fire…

Edge addon: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store…

Grammarly Blog: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/

Filed Under: Reviews, Blog Posts Tagged With: software, tools

KDP Royalties – Earn Through Direct Deposit Worldwide

November 22, 2017 by Arun 7 Comments

If you are a Kindle publisher, you might be facing a problem in not being able to receive direct deposit worldwide, while “check” is the only alternative to receive royalties from international sales of your eBooks.

We will sort that issue for you in this blog post!

Amazon provides 13 marketplaces worldwide, as you know, that comprises of US, India, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, AND Australia.

 

how to use payoneer to earn kdp royalties

However, we certainly don’t have bank accounts in all the 13 countries across several continents, unless you excessively travel across the globe and have a place to stay everywhere!

So, now comes the genuine problem of how do we get paid Kindle eBook Royalties from all the countries where Amazon operates?

Amazon currently offers 3 options:

  1. Direct deposit, also known as EFT or electronic funds transfer,
  2. Wire transfer, and
  3. Check/cheque – all options are based on the location of your bank.

Minimum Threshold Factor:

The benefit of direct deposit into your bank is that there is no minimum threshold. For check and wire payments, there is a “minimum threshold” in each marketplace after deducting the applicable taxes. That’s why, you can go ahead and update your bank account details – be it State bank, Axis bank, ICICI bank, or any local bank you have an account in your country.

Please note that although Amazon calls it “Wire transfers” sometimes they refer to “ACH transfers” and there is a difference between the two. Let’s now compare and contrast between these 2 options – ACH and Wire transfers to understand it better.

Difference between ACH and Wire Transfer

Wire transfers move funds from one bank to another in one business day, and the funds can even be made available within that day; sometimes when you receive a wire transfer, you won’t see the funds immediately. If you receive a genuine wire transfer, you can be confident that the funds were sent, as they cannot be reversed. Wire transfers almost always come with a fee tag.

Whereas, ACH transfers often take two to three business days to complete. Banks process ACH payments in batches – they’re all done together instead of being handled individually. On the other hand, ACH transfers are quite safe too, except that they can be reversed in situations of fraud or a mistake of overpayment. However, ACH transfers are almost always free, especially if you’re receiving funds into your own account.

So which option is best?

As you would have observed by now, “Direct deposit” is the best way to receive royalties from Amazon. It’s also the fastest, most secure and environmentally friendly way to receive your royalty payments.

Wire transfers or ACH transfers are the second best options, but only if Amazon has allowed this mode of payment. The 3rd one – check payment is the last option which even Amazon feels it an overhead – a note of caution here that Amazon is planning to phase it out, that is…discontinue it by the end of 2017 for some marketplaces.

How to enable Direct Deposit for all the 13 Marketplaces where Amazon operates?

Let’s now see how to update bank accounts for all the marketplaces so you can get an EFT from worldwide sales. To do this, we will use a Payoneer account (opens in a new tab) which helps in establishing a virtual bank account that acts as a local bank account but can help receive funds in international currencies.

how to use payoneer to receive royalties worldwide

Signing up is a simple 4 step process where you will give your details to create your account with Payoneer. Once done, and to receive funds into the Payoneer account from Amazon, we need to update our PAN number (Permanent Account Number – applicable for indie publishers in India) as well.

Here is our new Payoneer account welcome page.

Payoneer welcome page screenshot

 

Now, this is the secret sauce of this entire setup. Please read and follow these settings carefully.

Click on the ‘Global Payment Service‘ icon as given in the screenshot below.

Global payment service option in Payoneer

Click on EUR and get all the bank details here that are created just for you.

how to earn kdp royalties through EFT Worldwide

Enter these bank details into your KDP account page and you will be just fine, so hereafter you need not wait until a payment threshold is met because, with EFT, there is no minimum threshold.

KDP Account setup - update bank information

After the above update is done, whenever there are royalty earnings in Euro, Great Britain Pound, or other currencies that you choose to update through Payoneer, they will get directly deposited into your Payoneer account.

You can, later on, move your earnings from Payoneer to your local bank account. In case of Indian customers, this process is automated and the funds are usually transferred to the bank account within a couple of days after receipt of international royalties.

Watch this blog post in video format here:

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments section below.

 

Filed Under: Self- Publishing, Amazon KDP Tips, Blog Posts, Paperback Publishing Tagged With: guides, Resources, software, tools

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