The Importance of Constraints

I stopped at the local Big Ten Party Store on the way to the golf course last week and busted up when I saw this sign:

Sometimes limits are a good thing. Now to convince my friends on the Jing team. ;-)

Going HD with Jing Pro and YouTube

YouTube has made huge improvements over the last 6 months that finally make it an awesome one-to-many delivery platform for screen video. The video below (shared via the Jing blog) shows how to use Jing Pro to deliver high quality HD screencasts on YouTube. It’s also a great opportunity to see just how far I’ll stoop (intro shows me in curlers) to get a giggle.

Go fullscreen to see the video in 720p High Definition.

It’s that easy–time for y’all to get Jing Pro and set up a screencasting channel for your favorite piece of software or dev project!

ThumbGenie: An AIR Thumbnail Generator for MPEG4-AVC / SWF Files

One of the not so nice aspects of hosting your own Jing / Jing Pro videos is generating thumbnails that can be used for the “click-to-play” screen that viewers initiate video playback with. My current thumbnail workflow works something like this:

1. Capture video.
2. Save video to local disk (desktop).
3. Open video with QuickTime Pro ($30).
4. Select a video frame and Choose QuickTime’s “Export Movie as Bitmap” option.
5. Open .bmp file generated by QuickTime Pro in Fireworks (beaucoup $$$).
6. Resize image in Fireworks to fit my embed dimensions (embed dimensions are different than video dimensions).
7. Export out JPEG file (.jpg) with some compression applied (trade quality for size).

Jing’s supposed to be all about the easy, but the workflow above is decidedly not. It shouldn’t be that hard to generate thumbnail images from your JIng videos and it shouldn’t be ultra expensive. Enter ThumbGenie, an AIR application, written by moi, that allows you to load MPEG4-AVC or SWF files, select a video frame and generate a thumbnail image as either a JPEG or PNG file. Wait, it gets better. You can apply JPEG compression and scale the exported image down. Best of all its completely free, as in beer. So what are you waiting for, download ThumbGenie and start generating thumbnails pronto!

If you head over to ThumbGenie central you’ll find some helpful “getting started” videos as well as the installer badge.

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…)