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!

• Import Jing video.
• Create and select clips.
• Add transitions.
• Use lower thirds.
• Introduce your screencast with a title clip.
• Create credits.
• Export an HD MPEG-4 video.

Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.

No one wants change–it screws up your business, but its inevitable and how you react defines you (1:10):

Don’t just have contigency plans for the Internet–embrace it (1:17):

I created a short video that explains how embed code generation works and what you need to modify or replace the sample template code.
Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.

If you’re using Jing Pro + FTP the ability to generate thumbnails and embed code should significantly enhance your blogging workflow. Here’s a short example of how I use ThumbGenie in my workflow.
Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.

If you’re interested in generating thumbnails from MPEG4-AVC files or SWF files created by Jing hit the install badge below. After installing, head over to ThumbGenie central to view some helpful videos.

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.

The first screencast shows you how to use Screencast.com (free hosting that comes with Jing), Jing Pro and WordPress 2.7. We’ll cover the following:

• Creating an “embed” button that returns embed code after your video has been uploaded to Screencast.com.
• Creating a new blog post in WordPress 2.7.
• Fixing the embed code returned by Screencast.com.
• Changing the embed dimensions so that your video will fit nicely within your blog’s content column.

Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.

The second video walks through the process I personally use to embed content in my WordPress blog using the Kimili Flash Embed plugin. It will cover the following:

• Saving locally.
• Uploading video and thumbnail to web server manually with an FTP client.
• Making sure the Jing Pro video player is in the same directory on your web server as the video content you’re hosting.
• Using a previous post’s Kimili embed syntax.

It should be noted that I forgot to change the flashvars variable named “thumb” to use the correct url–you’ll want to make sure you do that.
Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.

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.

Here’s the very first customer email to get sent out:

Finally some proof that it pays to know TechSmith’s Sales Manager Brian “Tour de” Lesperance (get a real golf game Tour):

It took a lot of effort by a lot of people to get this crazy little “what if” from a backyard project to full blow product–I’m just happy and proud to have played a small part. Thanks peeps–it was a fantastic ride (I’m affectionately flipping you all the bird right now). ;-)

If you want more info about Jing (free) or Jing Pro ($14.95 a year) check out Tony’s (Jing Product Manager) blog post or visit the various links sprinkled on this page.

…uh, yah…I hate being subtle….we’ll be making a nice little announcement about Jing on Tuesday, January 6th. ;-)

Essentially Lessig questions why we treat the use of digital media differently from text. We freely and frequently quote (aka copy) text from copyrighted sources yet “throw the book” at anyone who uses digital media in the same manner. In Lessig’s view this treatment stifles ideas and creativity, inhibiting our individual and collective contributions to culture.

Call me a twit for saying it, but this has profound implications for screencasting. In fact, I used Jing to “quote” the section of Charlie’s interview with Larry you see above. Is this legal? Is it ethical? A small citation would seemingly fall under fair use guidelines, but there’s been so much FUD that its hard to ascertain how the copyright owners and their lawyers would perceive my use.

In fact, Charlie Rose seems to be open to non-commercial “remixes” of his old content and they make the clips available for embedding / download. They’ve even gone so far as to encourage it in a curious off site manner.

This however doesn’t clear up what I’ve done. I intentionally “copied” a portion of the video with Jing, uploaded it to my server and embedded it on my personal blog. It’s important to note there are legitimate reasons why I wanted to do this. First, I wanted point to just the relevant portion of the video. If I was citing text, I wouldn’t hand you a chapter with a highlighted passage and hope against hope you had the patience to find it. Second, I’m making another one of Lessig’s points. Today’s technology is enormously powerful and highly fluid. It took me longer to find the Lessig quote than it did to record and share the piece on my site (writing this post is another story). It’s absolutely mind blowing to think about combining video literacy / picture superiority effect with instant sharing across the globe. Lawyers and politicians just aren’t prepared to grok the information flow, empowerment and, dare I say, “culture” of it all.

If you haven’t seen it before check out Lessig’s free culture pitch:

Or just watch the entire interview. As always, there’s plenty to chew on. ;-)