Wow that is sweet!
The hard part for me is capturing the video. After that, I can use
something like iMovie to create the final content and VisualHub to
compress to multiple formats.
-dain
On Dec 14, 2007, at 7:56 AM, Alexander Saint Croix wrote:
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
