Jacek,

Thanks for the feedback. :-)

One problem with AV content is directing and production.  It does take a
long time to get the hang of being clear, concise, and especially when
talking about software, specific.  So, let's hope lots of people don't start
sending you guys their problems via screencasts.  The second problem is that
most people (myself included) don't bother to write up transcripts.  Our
MediaMill platform in the College of Liberal Arts has transcription metadata
built in, so I could conceivably spend the extra ten minutes after producing
a short video like these to correctly mark up the text.

That said, I spoke with some of the guys on the OpenJPA list and got a great
response on how to resolve my OneToMany mapping problem.  I did a second,
hopefully more understandable, screencast of the solution so that I could
get some more content and more opportunity to test different delivery /
compression codecs.  Here's the recommended solution to my bidirectional
OneToMany question:

Flash8 (640x480): https://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/embed/6965
Flash8 (480x360): https://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/embed/6967
iPod (large):
https://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/download.php?file=6966.m4v

It took me a few minutes to make the video, less than a minute to upload the
raw content to our MediaMill server, a couple of minutes to enter some
metadata for the video (name, description, copyright, etc) and then I
selected which derivative formats I wanted to produce.  At that point I was
free to leave and make tea.   After about 30 minutes, all three were
compressed and online for the public.  Since production takes place at our
compression farm, I didn't have to expend resources on my local computer to
do the heavy work.

The Flash8 codecs compress remarkably quickly--less than five minutes for
both of them.  The iPod codec took FOREVER to do its work.  I don't know how
useful this sort of doco would be on an iPod, but people might love it.

I think I could help you guys roll out a lot of content--short pieces like
the one above to promote OpenEJB.  For my own part, I'm in the process of
producing a series of articles on Container Driven Testing on an ATOM stack
(Apache Tomcat, OpenEJB, MySQL).  These videos will serve as "value-added"
content throughout the articles.

Another observation is that prior to compression, the videos are in .MOV
format, and should be editable via QuickTime.  So long uncomfortable pauses
and the like can be wiped, soundtracks can be added, etc.  A final
observation is that the iShowU recorder cuts off the last three-five seconds
of input, so give yourself a nice long pause before terminating the
recording when you're using it.

Cheers,
--
Alexander Saint Croix


I don't see any problems with the video. It's fine for me (I'm no
> speaking about its content per se, which is about mapping and the word
> mapping was mentioned so many times that I heard only mapping - I
> don't think it's because it was about gardening but the compression
> software had a bug in itself and changed all 'flowers' to 'mapping'
> ;-))
>
> Jacek
>
> --
> Jacek Laskowski
> http://www.JacekLaskowski.pl
>

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