Genii Weblog

Screenshots or movie snippets

Wed 9 Nov 2005, 12:03 PM



by Ben Langhinrichs
I am trying to decide whether to use screenshots more, perhaps as a story like Linda Discovers CoexEdit and perhaps even more simple than that, or whether to produce movie snippets, such as this very rough movie clip about our Midas Rich Text LSX Report It! sample.  Obviously, I would add call outs and such, but I wonder whether it would help people who wanted to see what the sample did before requesting an evaluation license, installing and downloading the sample.  Might you want to just see a movie clip first?

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:


392.1. Stan Rogers (11/09/2005 09:45 AM)

That's a really solid idea, particularly for devs who need to sell uphill. It's one thing to know what a product does and tell the pointy-haired manager about it, it's quite another to be able to show them. In full motion, so you don't have to spend quite so much time telling them which slide was "before" and which was "after".


392.2. Ben Langhinrichs (11/09/2005 09:59 AM)

The only problem I have now is that the clips get so large so quickly. I am using Camtasia to edit and put in Callouts, but when I reduced this from 47 seconds to 24 seconds, and added nothing new, the resulting AVI file was twice as large as the original. Do you have any experience with creating reasonable quality clips which don't get huge? No audio needed. Any format better than others? Any settings? Help!


392.3. Stan Rogers (11/09/2005 11:30 AM)

I have a feeling that if you were to take the resulting file and run it through, say, the built-in Windows Movie Maker or another video editor, it would probably shrink again. I have a feeling that Camtasia is storing the cuts as "don't read this" blocks in the file rather than actually discarding them.


392.4. Ben Langhinrichs (11/09/2005 12:26 PM)

That may well be true. I did find that I could save it as an animated GIF, which gives the user zero control but is a good bit smaller. I may just recapture the Camtasia playback as it happens and see if that is smaller


392.5. Nathan T. Freeman (11/10/2005 01:10 AM)

Didn't Wild Bill publish some stuff recently where he'd used some kind of Flash converter for the video? I remember it getting down to < 1MB/minute, and looking great.


392.6. Doug Cohen (11/10/2005 05:18 AM)

We've used animated gif's, in the past, for movies under 30 seconds that require no audio as it created the smallest files.