Video Tutorials on forum usage - Page 2

ash

*bump*

I plan to have another go for another trial screencast(s) on a basic guide to the CE Forums, next weekend. This is the basic plan:
1. How to register
2. How to navigate through different sections
3. How to reply & start a new thread with description for the formatting.
4. Rules for posting (will use xhx's guide)

I know Big K plans to do a restructuring exercise soon, but I'm just going to practice doing the screencasts for now. Will add voice to it too

Looking back at the most recent screencast (YouTube - Testing again.. *sigh*), I used the zoom feature too much. I think I should only use it sparingly.

xheavenlyx

What progie do you use? I think, there are few where you can make your screen cast follow the mouse cursur at a certain zoomed level, so move the mouse with the important text to make the viewers follow it, keep it in one pos to type something and move to the "Submit" button, u know like this. What do you think?

ash

I use camstudio

CamStudio - Free Screen Recording Software

It has an auto scrolling thing where if you move the mouse towards the edge of the screencast frame, the frame moves with it. Unfortunately, frequent use of that might inflate the size of the video

ash

Heres some other alternatives:

Wink
Wink - [Homepage]

VNC (coded in python. Used for the Pyro vids you watched

)
RealVNC - RealVNC remote control software

Im going to test using the Flash format. Might look much better than AVI..

ash

Okay, I've done a basic tutorial on how to start a new thread.

tutorial1.swf

Don;t worry about the javascript warnings, its only flash. I didnt embed anything evil

I used CamStudio, encoded it with the CamStudio Lossless codec. The output file was around 40 MB. I then use the inbuilt SWF producer to convert it to flash.. which shrinked the file down to 5MB.

You can download directly from here:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/6/.../tutorial1.swf

Heres some problems I see:
1. The player controls arent that user friendly. Theres no "seek" option, and you will need to wait for the whole thing to download (around 5MB) before you can play it without any lag. You can make your own controls, but you need a program like Flash MX, which I don't have! If anyone has it, I can send the raw swf file.

2. You cannot upload a swf file into Google Video, etc. They only use the "flv" format. The swf is actually some kind of container for flv.. and has embedded controls, etc. At the moment CamStudio does not have a "flv" output option. I tested out other AVI to FLV converters, but not impressed with the quality so far.

3. The text and arrows are called Screen Annotations. That recording was my first try with them, so its not perfect yet. I had to pause, drag the "message" in from outside, continue recording, and so on. So forgive me for the disorganized and mistimed messages

I'm still testing out Google Video. At the moment Im having trouble uploading a video that was encoded with Xvid MPEG4. I'll try again next time.

Anywayz, please post in your comments and feedback! Will attempt it again after my exams have finished this thursday.

The_Big_K

Hay Ash,

This is awesome!

I wonder if Google video will be useful. Btw, what player is that?

ash

thanks biggie

That player was created by the SWF Producer. You can customize it a bit.. but full customization can only be done in a flash editor like Flash MX

I'm looking at this web platform called OpenLazlo for some ideas:
OpenLaszlo | the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications

Anyone know a free or open alternative to Flash MX?

.
[EDIT]
Ok, looks like I need to do lots of tweaking before uploading to Google Video. Look what happened!:
CE Test 2

I'm trying to nail it with GV because the viewing size is bigger (compared to Youtube). Also, it'll stream pretty well, compared to if we upload our videos on our own servers.