Video Tutorials

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I found I could make a tutorial fairly easily with FastStone Capture.

The resulting video was 17 Mbytes, and decent quality, but when upload to YouTube it got compressed so much that the dialogues and menus are hard to read. (Updated with a new version recorded @ 800 x 600 resolution)

It seems like a great way to teach the basics of FontCreator, but we need better quality.

Audo would be nice too, but that is too much for me at the moment. Remembering what to do is hard enough, without having to remember what to say too.

Here is another one I did this morning on Changing Funits/Em Values. I recorded it at 800 x 600 monitor resolution to make the menus and dialogues easier to read.

[William]

The resulting video was 17 Mbytes, and decent quality, but when upload to YouTube it got compressed so much that the dialogues and menus are hard to read.

Would it be possible to upload the video as an attachment to a thread in this forum? If so, would it get compressed?

Audo would be nice too, but that is too much for me at the moment. Remembering what to do is hard enough, without having to remember what to say too.

Would it be both possible and desirable to have caption panels, rather like in silent movies from the 1920s?

If so, maybe your Carita font could be used for formal headings and your Lekhana font could be used when explaining what is happening in a tutor-to-pupil manner.

William Overington

28 November 2008

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I think the best way to go would be to host them on the High-Logic server as Flash Video and embed them in a Tutorials page. Still a long way to go before mine are good enough, and we need to add audio too. Captions would be a help — I think I can add those on YouTube.

Over the next weeks/months I may add some more as I find the time and inclination, and then maybe later we can do some more professional editions for hosting at High-Logic.

[William]

Is the video which you produce a .avi file?

The reason I ask that is because Serif PagePlus X2 (for the benefit of some readers I mention that version X2 is not the latest version of PagePlus, it is just the latest version that I have here) has Insert PDF Media Clip Movie Clip and also has File Publish as PDF Slideshow... and I am wondering whether it would be a good idea to have a pdf slideshow with a number of pages with each page of the pdf having some descriptive text in the usual pdf manner together with a video clip, the video including captions. Indeed I have not made a pdf slideshow with a video clip, and I have no experience with video files, but I remember that I have some .avi files as clip art on some old CDs.

I will try to find them and test the technique.

I think the best way to go would be to host them on the High-Logic server as Flash Video and embed them in a Tutorials page.

I found the following about Flash Video.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video

It looks like it is something different from a .avi file. What do you use to make Flash Video? Will one or more of the Serif packages do it?

William

[William]

I have now found the disc, which is some XOOM clip art, and have made a pdf slideshow using two .avi files.

The pdf is 859 kilobytes.

I tried to upload it as an attachment to this post and got the following message.

The file is too big, maximum allowed size is 512 KiB.

However, I have now uploaded it to our family webspace.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/s ... _video.pdf

I chose two of the smaller video files that were on the disc for the experiment. However these are real life action clips, one of a flower opening and one of a bird in flight. Hopefully the avi format is such that screen capture still images of FontCreator in use with no change in the picture for five seconds or so would need a much smaller file-size than action clips of real life: however I do not know that at the present time: I know that if the movie were old style film that it would take just as much film even if the picture did not change.

William

----

Supplementary note at 10:05 am

The slideshow_with_video.pdf does not, at this location, display the font correctly on the first page when viewed directly on the web.

However, downloading to local storage and running from there produces good results.

William

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I added a couple more today:

Creating Superscripts from Numerals

Adding Subscripts and Fractions

The latter tutorial uses this new Fractions Transformation to add a full set of fractions:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<DATA>
  <TransformScript>
    <OtherComments>
      <Content>Fractions
Inserts fractions and composes them from superscript and subscripts. Adjust the advance width and alignment to suit your font. </Content>
    </OtherComments>
    <GlyphInsertCharacters>
      <Characters>188, 189, 190, 8531-8543</Characters>
      <OverrideRange>TRUE</OverrideRange>
    </GlyphInsertCharacters>
    <GlyphCompleteComposites>
    </GlyphCompleteComposites>
    <MetricsLeftSideBearing>
    </MetricsLeftSideBearing>
  </TransformScript>
</DATA>

[Erwin Denissen]

Nice videos that can really help get people started. More experienced users will benefit the more advanced topics, like Transformations. It's also very useful for me to see how people use the software. It's not like a real usability test, but it can help further improve the user interface and documentation, etc.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

A video is useful in that it shows how I work in real-time, how I recover after making errors, etc. It takes just one or two trial runs to get it right, so I can easily produce a video in ten or twenty minutes.

If anyone wants to repeat something it is easy to stop the video and roll back a few frames. The 800 x 600 resolution is a bit limiting, but it does make smaller files, and nice big icons, dialogues, and menus, which are easier to read quickly. The frame rate is 10 frames per second, and I am using the medium ("better") quality setting of FastStone Capture.

The latest video is on Cleaning up Superscripts.

After generating superscripts from numerals by scaling and making bolder, they usually have a few validation errors, intersecting contours, etc.

Three more: Adding Kerning Pairs from a text file,

Inserting Characters, and Completing Composites (Pro and Home Edition)

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Some more:

Combining Contours • Off-curve Extreme Co-ordinates • Cleaning up Glyphs

Eastern Europe Glyph Transform Script