The Making of the How To Configure… video

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A few days ago, I put the finishing touches on a video I created about our new Fax Gateway. The purpose of the video is to show how easy it is to configure the gateway to send and receive faxes. The idea is that you would put this between your Fax Server with a Dialogic SR140 and the phone lines. It turned out to be so much easier than I ever expected to configure. For more about the benefits of the Gateway, check out the FaxSolutions blog at http://faxsolutions.wordpress.com. Also watch the video for 7 minutes of pure bliss (or something somewhat close).

I assumed that most of the time of producing the video would focus on figuring out how to configure the gateway, but that part turned out to be very easy. The tough part was figuring out the right export settings from my video editor. I had better document the process (and might as well do it here) so that I don’t forget next time around.

It started, as it always does, with a script. I thought about what I wanted to cover and tried it out on the gateway. After going back and forth between VMWare and notepad I finally came up with a script I thought would work. Now it was on to VMWare Workstation and Camtasia Recorder to record the screen portion of the video. I like to keep the audio separate from the video during recording mostly because I have a hard enough time remembering what I am supposed to click on without having to sound intelligent. Since YouTube has a limit of 10 minutes per video, I needed to edit down my 30 minutes of video down to something more usable.

I used Camtasia Studio for this first edit. I like to edit out the time between each keypress during user/password entry, remove the seconds where I am reviewing my script to figure out what’s next, etc. Also things don’t always work out in the recording and I have to edit out the workarounds. While doing that, I also edit the script so that it still makes sense. At the end of all that I had about 4 or 5 minutes of silent screen capture video.

Going into this I knew I also wanted to capture video of three sides of the physical gateway. So I took over an office with my little GH1 full HD video camera (for those who care, with a Nikon 50mm/1.4 and 20mm/2.8 lens attached to a Gorillapod). Those hands you see are mine.

Next I created some slides for the intro and outro in PowerPoint 2010. PowerPoint allows you to export to video, but I thought it would be best if I exported to PNG files.

The final step in gathering source materials was to record the audio. You can find out more about my search for the right tools for recording audio in my previous post on the topic on my personal blog: http://technovangelist.com/blog/how-to-create-a-good-screencast-and-preso-in-camtasia.html. Basically the configuration is almost the same, except I am using the Zoom H4N as a mic for my MacBook Pro. Also, instead of Audacity, I am using Adobe’s SoundBooth (whose PM happens to be someone I used to work with at PCDocs and CMSData in Tallahassee, FL about 20 years ago). There is a limiter and compressor in there to make the audio sound pretty good.

Now that I had source materials, I could start editing it all together. This took the longest, mostly because it is a brand new thing for me. In the past I have used different tools like Vegas and Premiere Pro. I tried an eval of Premiere Pro on the Mac, but like most Adobe CS4 products, the PC version is far more usable even on older equipment. I tried iMovie on the Mac, but there were several things I wanted to do that were difficult. After a few visits to a local retailer, I decided that Apple’s own Final Cut Pro was the easiest for me to work with without giving up on features.

Editing in Final Cut Pro is surprisingly easy. There is a lot that I don’t know how to do yet, but I see how I will grow into the package. Now if only it weren’t so much more expensive in Europe than in the US but that is the case with everything and I am getting used to it. The stumbling block with FCP came when I started to export it out to a file I could upload to YouTube. Everything I tried seemed to take 40 minutes to export at 7 minute video and resulted in a file 1GB or larger. It wasn’t until I stumbled on this post on the Vimeo site that I started to clue in to how to do a more efficient encoding. The actual settings I used were option 2 on http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/12/08/exporting-with-quicktime-in-720p/.

Now I had a working video I could easily upload. But then a snag. I had asked a day earlier if anyone had some pictures of some of the other gateways. Due to the differences in time zones, the pictures didn’t get to me until late that night so i didn’t see them till the next morning. I knew I wanted the images in there so I started figuring out what the right place for them was. The photos were taken on a light background, but not completely white. Using Photoshop and Topaz Remask2, I was able to quickly create a great looking mask so that the pictures looked like they were taken on a pure white background. A quick edit in PowerPoint gave me the slide I wanted and FCP allowed me to easily just plop the slide into the right place. The result is perfect. Within 20 minutes of seeing the pictures for the first time, I was able to start the upload to YouTube.

I think the resulting video looks really good. There are a few things I will do differently next time though. Better lighting on the live video shots will be needed. A closer sync of audio to video is also needed. Hmmm, now what is that next video going to be???

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