FITC 2006 Presentation Screencasts

I created 48 minutes worth of tutorials exploring the use of Camtasia Studio, Flash, After Effects and more for my FITC presentation (way more than anyone will be able to stomach, but it was worth not sleeping for a 4 days :) ).

I haven’t updated the rss feed for the podcasts, but will tomorrow so that you can see what they look like in that format. I’m going to try and scratch out a couple of hours of sleep before my 9:00 A.M. presentation tomorrow.

Update: I have updated my itunes podcast feed, so you can now download and watch the screencasts on your video ipod.

Create a table of contents navigation tree for Camtasia Studio output

Customize your Camtasia Studio table of contents

Use After Effects to apply perspective and animation to Camtasia Studio screen recordings

Hack Camtasia Studio to Create a Flash 8 swf that imports into the Flash IDE without artifacting

Camtasia Studio makes major improvements to html wrapper—SwfObject (formerly known as FlashObject), CSS, XHTML 1.0 strict

Embed your Flash screencasts into your WordPress blog

Screencast: The Power of Perspective

One of the things you notice real quickly if you watch the typical screencast is how visually uninteresting and downright boring they are—my own included. With this in mind, I’ve begun to explore injecting some visual spice into screencasts using multi-application workflows.

One of the great strengths of Camtasia Studio is that its a video based tool with a set of lossless cross platform codecs (EnSharpen for .mov files and Techsmith for .avi files) which allow you to pass relatively small lossless video files between video editing applications. What’s the benefit you might ask—killer content that is visually compelling and maintains the interest of your audience.

A favorite multi-application workflow of mine is to record the screen with Camtasia Studio and take the resulting avi file into Adobe After Effects to add some visual spice. I’ve used After Effects quite a bit in the past to add keyframe tweening (zooms, pans and effects), but I recently have begun to experiment with perspective to add depth and visual interest (an old trick camera operators have been using for a long, long time).

After adding some visual punch, I typically export an .avi from After Effects that uses the TechSmith codec to maintain lossless quality while keeping file size way under a full frames uncompressed export. Finally, I take the avi back to Camtasia Studio and produce an .flv file that takes advantage of the 2-pass on2 compression Camtasia Studio has licensed. If I’m going to the iPod as well as the web, Camtasia Studio will also allow you to export an .mov file with the lossless TechSmith EnSharpen codec which can then be easily converted to an iPod .m4v file using iTunes.

As an interesting side note, I was reawakened to perspective when watching a professional video promo for the upcoming Microsoft Office 12 release which used perspective quite a effectively. Sadly the video didn’t have the desired effect of juicing me up for the new release—my impression of “the ribbon” was that it should be called “the double-wide” toolbar. :) Apparently a single-wide isn’t enough to impress the neighbors now that free alternatives like Open Office and Writely have begun to build homes in the neighborhood(The Java Posse were talking about a slick Java-based office web app, but I didn’t chase down the url).

The thumbnail below is your entry into the screencast and I’ve included the podcast rss below that for those who wish to go mobile.

Screencast: Camtasia Studio Productions & IE 6/7 Active Content Changes

At the request of some Camtasia Studio Users anxious about the latest round of changes forced on IE as a result of the Eolas patent suit against Microsoft, I’ve created a screencast which illustrates how to use FlashObject to update existing Camtasia Studio 2, Camtasia Studio 3 and Camtasia Theater productions. The screencast is geared towards an audience that has little to moderate Web development experience, so let me know if I missed my mark. :)

Click the image below to view the screencast.

I’m still waiting for approval from the iTunes Music Store, but in the mean time, here’s a podcast feed that you can use to subscribe to this and future screencasts. This is the exact same video, but I’ve done a bunch of zooming and panning enhancements for iPod viewing.

Cogito Ergo Flammeus podcast rss feed

UPDATE 1:
FlashObject has been renamed to SWFObject at the behest of the Adobe legal department. All this really means is that flashobject.js becomes swfobject.js and that the constructor changes from FlashObject to SWFObject.

UPDATE 2:
Some people are having difficulty seeing the hyperlink to download the html shells and other files needed to update Camtasia Studio Flash content, so I’m providing a direct link. The only catch is that I’ve updated the resources to include the latest version of SWFObject (1.4).
Download the Files

Beware Flash Conference Organizers

So, one of the funnier things at FlashForward 06 is how pissy conference attendees get when wireless access is not readily available or reliable. There are things we’ll tolerate, and then there are things we won’t….

5 Reasons NetStream Sucks

Ok, I’ve been spending some serious time with NetStream and I have to say it sucks. Here’s 5 reasons why–feel free to add more.

1. Seeking only to keyframes–this totally blows and seems completely inconsistent with other video formats. I want to choose a time to seek to and be guaranteed I’ll end up at that spot.
2. Seeking is super slow until all keyframes are cached. No bull, if you have a file which you’ve completely preloaded, the keyframes aren’t cached until the video playhead reaches that point in time for the first time. If I load a file and seek to the end, the player has to chug through all of the keyframes prior to my seek point. This is slow, slow if I have video of even several minutes.
3. NetStream.time doesn’t update immediately when seeked. The problem here is that since you can only seek to keyframes, you have no idea where you’ll actually end up. If you want to know what time you actually seeked to you have to loop on an interval–this is the same type of asynchronous crap that makes Flash notoriously trecherous (maybe I’m overstating it, but hopefully I’m making the point). I was optomistic that the NetStream.Seek.Notify ( introduced with Flash 8 ) would provide some help, but again it appears to only tell you when a seek is complete–NetStream.time still hasn’t been updated at this point
4. The NetStream.pause() toggle is, again, slower than crap. If I’m in a “pause” state and I toggle back to “play” the flv delays a little before beginning playback and this delay seems to correspond to the renderer crapping its pants. The problem here is that if I’m trying to sync an flv to a swf the two can become significantly out of sync just by toggling back and forth between play and pause.
5. There’s no way to query the flv to find out if its playing our paused. Sure, you can listen for the start of file and end of file events of onStatus, but NetStream doesn’t care to give you anything in between. Yes, I can track my toggle states, but that’s ugly and gets more problematic if I’m trying to synchronize two files of disparate lengths (one gets an end of file before the other and this play state isn’t triggered by a toggle action).

Ok, now that I’ve got that off of my chest, I’d like to say I’m a huge fan of Flash video–I just want it to be better. Hopefully, someone out there is listening and these issues will be addressed in upcoming releases of the player.

Section 102 | Row 55 | Seat 7

I had one of those “landmark” life moments on Sunday evening when I had the opportunity to attend my first Green Bay Packers game on the hallowed “frozen tundra” of Lambeau Field. Raised in Wisconsin, I grew up steeped in the lore of Titletown, so named for the 12 NFL World Championships the Packers have won over the years, and spent many a Sunday throwing down beer and brats while watching the Packers. Lambeau Field has been sold out since 1960 and there’s currently a 30 year waiting list for season tickets, so it was a dream come true, when my older brother, Ford, called me up out of the blue with the news of tickets to Sunday’s game against the Detroit Lions.

I took some short video clips on my Palm Treo 650–actually amazing video for a for a phone. I’m using the kimili WordPress plugin to embed the Flash video’s into my blog post, but for some reason, the component controls don’t show up ( they show up fine when tested in the standalone player, or in their own html wrappers)…if anyone can point me in the right direction, I’d be happy to remedy the situation. I ended up using Camtasia Studio Playback controls so that there was some mechanism for controlling the video. However, this too required a bit of jiggering, as I had to provide absolute paths for the xml configuration file and the location of the swf shell and flv files.

The legendary Brett Favre marches the pack toward the endzone:

Brooks:

Ford: