Video Tutorials on forum usage

Replies

• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Ash, please make one video and post a link for all of us to review. My vote goes to YouTube. ( for some reason, their streaming is superb! )
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  Ive uploaded a youtube vid, but its processing. Btw, can we embed vids in a post?
  
  EDIT:
  here ya go:
  - YouTube
  
  Its got no audio, and ive compressed it from 200 megs to about 5 megs. Im still tweaking the settings obviously!
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  aha!
  
  Btw, wait for the restructure to happen 😁
  
  Looks good! I think we should add voice to the video. Anyone with good voice? 😁
  
  I think the video quality can be better.
  
  [another idea: How about an animated presentation hosted on Share and Discover Knowledge on SlideShare ]
• 

  xheavenlyx

  You know, you can zoom in and zoom out at important points. Having a full page view all the time might not be clear at times. Overall its a very good draft! 😀
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  *grin*
  sorry for the late reply. Had to go out just now.. Thanks for the tip, xhx. I'll try to zoom in and out. Biggie, that slideshare thing can be useful too!
  
  Regarding the voice, i'll try it out later tonight. Try not to be shocked on how I sound like, ok? 😉
  
  EDIT: 2nd try: - YouTube
  
  Slightly better quality, and used some basic zooming tools. If I want to have that special progressive zooming effects, I need a software like Sony Vegas, which I dont have 😔 Well, lets keep it simple, eh?
  Its kinda funny.. I was trying to do a post tutorial, yet I clicked on "preview post" instead of submit, lol. That'll confuse some people. Remember, its only a DRAFT!
  
  one more: - YouTube
  I messed up the dimensions for this, thats why the black boxes appear. I need to keep it to a ratio of 4:3 I guess.
  
  again: - YouTube
  Quality seems alright. But I had trouble panning the screencast at the end 😛 I may not need to rely on the zoom function if people can see clearly now. Oh well, as long as its going to a good direction.
  
  Btw biggie, can we add this feature? #-Link-Snipped-#
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  That's okay, we'll take some time before coming up with final tutorial. I think the zoom isn't helping. I could not read the text.
  
  I think we should give slideshare a try. Let me see if I can come up with something. Regarding the voice - can we have a female voice? 😁
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  Have you checked the last vid? 😀 I may not need to use the zoom if its clear enough.
  
  Lol, whats with you and female voices 😛
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  ash

  Have you checked the last vid? 😀 I may not need to use the zoom if its clear enough.
  
  Lol, whats with you and female voices 😛

  😁 "Corporate like thing, you know" 😁
  
  Nothing official about it, anyway 😉
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  Well, if thats the case, its up to YOU biggie to find a volunteer 😉
  
  Im pretty curious how many female engineers we have on board. I could only guess by the avatars, if nothing else.
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  *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), 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?
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  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 😔
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  Heres some other alternatives:
  
  Wink
  Wink - [Homepage]
  
  VNC (coded in python. Used for the Pyro vids you watched 😉 )
  #-Link-Snipped-#
  
  Im going to test using the Flash format. Might look much better than AVI..
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  Okay, I've done a basic tutorial on how to start a new thread.
  
  #-Link-Snipped-#
  
  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:
  #-Link-Snipped-#
  
  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.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Hay Ash,
  
  This is awesome! 😀 I wonder if Google video will be useful. Btw, what player is that?
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  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:
  Home - OpenLaszlo Archives
  
  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!:
  #-Link-Snipped-#
  😔
  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.