Embedding Jing Pro Videos In WordPress

I get quite a few questions about how to embed Jing Pro content in a WordPress blog. Rather than typing out a long tutorial I’ve made a couple of screencasts that show you how to get up and running. (more…)

Polished Screencasts With Jing Pro and iMovie

The big selling point of Jing Pro is the real-time MPEG4-AVC (h.264) encoding it does. The bitrate is low enough to provide PDG (pretty damn good) file sizes regardless of the type of content that’s being captured, but high enough to allow post-production editing and encoding. If you’re lucky enough to be on OS X you need look no further than iMovie for proof of the interoperability benefits.

When it was initially released iMovie ’08 got some unwarranted bad press from existing users (it has a different model / approach than previous non-linear editors), but its actually a very slick and powerful little tool that promotes the creation of polished productions quickly. It’s extremely easy to combine multiple Jing Pro videos and its template presets allow you to quickly create sophisticated titles, transitions and credits. On the audio front, its simple to add an additional voiceover or background music and apply fading and ducking.

In short, iMovie can make your average screencast look like it was put together by a pro. To prove the point I put together a short (45 seconds) montage of some some recent Jing Pro screencasts I’ve made (I’m calling it a jingcast dash). Check it out, then start creating your own. ;-) (more…)

Video: After Effects Vector Paint Primer

If you’re looking to spice your video up and draw your viewers in quick post-production annotations can help. This short video (3:47) walks you through the basics of using vector paint to create animated annotations in After Effects. Enjoy! (more…)

WordPress Automatic Update Plugin Cures Blog Hosting Fatigue

Let’s face it, keeping your own hosted WordPress blog and plugins up to date is a major drag. It’s the type of tedious work that just begs for a big fat easy button.
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Jing Pro – A “Full Metal” Flex Video Player

This is a little “inside the devigners head” piece that explains some of the conceptual thinking behind the Jing Pro MPEG4-AVC Video Player (there’s also a sanitized version over at the Jing blog).

The player was built with Flex (easy to tell as I never quite got around to creating a custom preloader) which makes her a bit of a pig file size wise, but having a mature framework and consistent approach to component creation was worth it in my opinion (I should add that the Google Analytics lib added a bit to her heft).

Besides being a branded experience, the player does some neat scaling tricks which makes it behave a lot more like an HDTV. Feed it a SD / HD stream and it elegantly handles the scaling and position (pillarboxing, letterboxing and windowboxing in video parlance) of the video. This makes it much easier to embed because you can make the video fit anywhere (big video, small blog post–no problemo). So throw on your flak jacket and check out this “full metal” homage to the Jing Pro video player.
Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.