Product Recommendations - Screen Cap / How-To Videos
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We've been using DemoWorks. Anyone else have an experience / recommendations? Particularly vis-a-vis output formats and 'lossy-ness'? Cheers, Dan
Hi, we've been using Captivate for our product documentation. The size of the videos can get quite big and the output format (we are using flash) needs special access rights that some of our customers don't have. So all in all I would not recommend this software although it interacts quite well with our html help. Best regards, JF
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We've been using DemoWorks. Anyone else have an experience / recommendations? Particularly vis-a-vis output formats and 'lossy-ness'? Cheers, Dan
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We've been using DemoWorks. Anyone else have an experience / recommendations? Particularly vis-a-vis output formats and 'lossy-ness'? Cheers, Dan
WINK[^], 1024x768 max (even better if you an demo well on 800x600). Use a non-standard mouse cursor and color scheme for the recording session, helping the user to distinguish "theirs" from "yours". Short segments work best, especially if they provide a dedicated intro and outro freeze frame (intro: title + overview, outro: meaningful results or summary). For "real" videos (showing hardware usage[^]): dunno about the formats, but shooting them takes a while, so does cutting. Spoken text is even harder to get right. For the samples: We spend a good chunk of time on them, still they are nto perfect. IMO using snippets on a web site makes load easier, the first video is pointless (though it "sets the scene" for our customers), I'd wish for more subtitles, "Outer clamping" has an error in cut, some zooms could be faster. Please, for the love of teh kitten god, don't record spoken audio without investing the time to get it right. Podcasts / most demo videos do make me angry: First the format is broken - it's their speed not mine, navigation is very limited. Second, brokage is added. "Hello, this is Josh, we are actually waiting for Jim, who should be with us any minute, I'm a Sofware triangulation and specification detail senior engineer at RKWBXCDT corp., Jim likes cycling and long walks on the beach. O here he is. Hi Jim Hi Josh How are yo? Fine and you? fine! Great! So let's jump right in! Ah, umm, I take the.. take the click... click the take... LOOK MY MOUSE CAN DANCE THE TARANTELLA!"
GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
WINK[^], 1024x768 max (even better if you an demo well on 800x600). Use a non-standard mouse cursor and color scheme for the recording session, helping the user to distinguish "theirs" from "yours". Short segments work best, especially if they provide a dedicated intro and outro freeze frame (intro: title + overview, outro: meaningful results or summary). For "real" videos (showing hardware usage[^]): dunno about the formats, but shooting them takes a while, so does cutting. Spoken text is even harder to get right. For the samples: We spend a good chunk of time on them, still they are nto perfect. IMO using snippets on a web site makes load easier, the first video is pointless (though it "sets the scene" for our customers), I'd wish for more subtitles, "Outer clamping" has an error in cut, some zooms could be faster. Please, for the love of teh kitten god, don't record spoken audio without investing the time to get it right. Podcasts / most demo videos do make me angry: First the format is broken - it's their speed not mine, navigation is very limited. Second, brokage is added. "Hello, this is Josh, we are actually waiting for Jim, who should be with us any minute, I'm a Sofware triangulation and specification detail senior engineer at RKWBXCDT corp., Jim likes cycling and long walks on the beach. O here he is. Hi Jim Hi Josh How are yo? Fine and you? fine! Great! So let's jump right in! Ah, umm, I take the.. take the click... click the take... LOOK MY MOUSE CAN DANCE THE TARANTELLA!"
GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server. -
Hi, we've been using Captivate for our product documentation. The size of the videos can get quite big and the output format (we are using flash) needs special access rights that some of our customers don't have. So all in all I would not recommend this software although it interacts quite well with our html help. Best regards, JF
What are you making demos of/what settings are you using in captivate? For non-video apps I found captivate videos to be much smaller and higher quality than the competition because instead of recording a video it only took a high quality jpg (png?) each time the dialog changed along with data like mouse cursor moved from 100,100 to 400,500; instead of taking multiple frames every second even when nothing was changing. Unless you're budget limited I'd recommend it over any of the competition I've tried. Edit: captivate also made it very easy to adjust the timing of the playback, insert separately recorded voice overs, and change highlighting (its auto highlighting works fairly well for flagging the important details) in post-processing.
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What are you making demos of/what settings are you using in captivate? For non-video apps I found captivate videos to be much smaller and higher quality than the competition because instead of recording a video it only took a high quality jpg (png?) each time the dialog changed along with data like mouse cursor moved from 100,100 to 400,500; instead of taking multiple frames every second even when nothing was changing. Unless you're budget limited I'd recommend it over any of the competition I've tried. Edit: captivate also made it very easy to adjust the timing of the playback, insert separately recorded voice overs, and change highlighting (its auto highlighting works fairly well for flagging the important details) in post-processing.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
We are using captivate the record help videos for our imaging application with several live camera images. Since we could not use the mode which reacts on gui events our videos needed to be recorded in live running mode and that made the files that big (i think 200MB for a 1 min video is not acceptable).