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