When I was at TechEd I visited the Beantown.net INETA User Group and gave a (fairly ad-hoc) talk on Developer Productivity Tools. Jim Minatel loaned me his microphone and a copy of Camtasia and we recorded the talk. Thanks Jim!
It was a great crowd, a lot of fun. We had a number of "off the cuff" discussions about random stuff so I hope it doesn't take away from the gist of the talk.
The complete presentation was around 1 hour 45 minutes, so for online, Jim has split it into 4 segments. This week's segment is #2 and is available now and is about 20 minutes long. If you watch it in your browser, I recommend you double click on Windows Media Player to make the video go full screen. You can also download the full video.
It covers:
The remaining two segments for following weeks will cover roughly:
Here's a few notes about the video quality from Jim:
1. Why can't I fast forward or skip ahead through the video while it's streaming? Answer: We're running these off of a standard IIS server, not a Windows Media Server. IIS supports streaming, but not indexed playback during streaming to allow skipping ahead. If you want to do that, just download the whole video and all of the forwarding and timeline controls will be available in Windows Media Player. 2. Why isn't the video quality better? Is Camtasia to blame? No, Camtasia rocks. The raw videos I'm getting in Camtasia format are 100% clear, as if you were looking right at the presenter's monitor. The problem I've discovered is with the Windows Media Encoder. It just isn't well suited to on-screen presentation videos like this. The blurring and color blotching seems worst in Scott Hanselman's videos and I think I know why. When I watch the raw presentation, he's flying back and forth between open windows, background tools that pop up, and his desktop. It's just faster switching between very varied images than the encoder can seem to keep up with. I've twidled all the settings and got the best I can for now without doubling or tripling the file sizes. The other option would be to post an alternate version in Camtasia format and a link to download their playback codec [Scott: or a large FLV]. Because WMV is universal for my .NET developer audience, that has to be my common choice though.
1. Why can't I fast forward or skip ahead through the video while it's streaming? Answer: We're running these off of a standard IIS server, not a Windows Media Server. IIS supports streaming, but not indexed playback during streaming to allow skipping ahead. If you want to do that, just download the whole video and all of the forwarding and timeline controls will be available in Windows Media Player.
2. Why isn't the video quality better? Is Camtasia to blame? No, Camtasia rocks. The raw videos I'm getting in Camtasia format are 100% clear, as if you were looking right at the presenter's monitor. The problem I've discovered is with the Windows Media Encoder. It just isn't well suited to on-screen presentation videos like this. The blurring and color blotching seems worst in Scott Hanselman's videos and I think I know why. When I watch the raw presentation, he's flying back and forth between open windows, background tools that pop up, and his desktop. It's just faster switching between very varied images than the encoder can seem to keep up with. I've twidled all the settings and got the best I can for now without doubling or tripling the file sizes. The other option would be to post an alternate version in Camtasia format and a link to download their playback codec [Scott: or a large FLV]. Because WMV is universal for my .NET developer audience, that has to be my common choice though.
There's also some other good screencasts up at Wrox. The growing list of videos is available at wrox.com. The first few videos in the series are:
I hope you enjoy them.
Ads by The Lounge