Comments on: Europa Screencasts, The Making Of

By: People Over Process » Editing with The Beast – Dell Precision T7500 Workstation Review

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:17:03 +0000

[...] been using my early generation MacBookPro to do this editing with Final Cut. I’ve written up parts of the process here and there, which can be painfully time consuling. Using the Mac day-to-day for work is great: I’m a [...]

By: People Over Process » Video and Audio Services at RedMonk

People Over Process » Video and Audio Services at RedMonk — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:59:52 +0000

[...] Eclipse Europa Screencasts – mid last year, we did a series of five screen casts (on EMF, DTP, Mylyn, BIRT, and Equinox) on the topic of Eclipse Europa components. These are our so called “moderated screencasts,” where-in I sit down with a (usually quite technical) person and we go through a demo of the project with me asking questions and starting topical discussions through-out. [...]

By: Miles Parker

Miles Parker — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:01:05 +0000

I just wanted to say thanks! For a non-video savvy OS X Eclipse developer wanting to make my tools more accesible your article is perfect. I do have to say that I'm worried now that what I thought might be a Q&D way to provide folks with a sense for what my tool does might end up being an endeavor in itself.

By: cote

cote — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:01:36 +0000

rf: I'm glad the post was helpful ;) And thanks for your method write-up as well.

By: rf

rf — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:48:51 +0000

Thanks for posting this. I thought I was the only one wanting to scream bloody murder at FCE-HD for editing screencasts. Like you, I tried iMovie for initial editing but you quickly hit the limits. The new iMovie-08 looked promising but then on export to Quicktime it generated rubbish, taking one random still image from the middle of the piece and stretching it across the entire movie.

My method is slightly different than yours. I record the screencasts in short snippets and with no audio tracks, then make opening and section titles in the editing program, then record voice-over trying to match the narration to the action. Two words of advice for anyone trying it this way: 1) write down what you plan to say and keep the text on a second-monitor window while you're playing back the video — otherwise you get a lot of um's and ah's, and 2) Don't use the voice-over recording facilities of the movie editor software unless you KNOW it's all going to work (it took me a while to extract the audio voice-overs from the death-grip of iMovie-08).

In desperation I switched a couple days ago to FCE-HD. Not too hard to learn the basics (after watching the tutorials and skimming through a couple of How-to books, that is :-) I totally agree with you on the interface. It was obviously designed by people who like working with jeweler's screwdrivers in the dark.

Did a quick pass edit in FCE, exported it to QT *with the same dimensions as the screencast* and it came out like crap — all squeezed out and looking like the titles at the end of those Cinemascope Spaghetti Westerns (anyone remember those?) A desperate Google search brought me to your post.

I'll give your method a try — exporting to a larger HD video format and post-trimming the sides. It's good to know there's a way to do it. All I can say is I'm glad I *only* spent $300 bucks on the Express and not $2K on Final Cut Pro. Hopefully for the next release, Apple will clue-in to the fact that there are people out there who want to create video not just for TV screens but for online consumption.

Thanks again.

By: Ian Skerrett

Ian Skerrett — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:55:11 +0000

Cote,

Wow, sounds complicated. I am certainly glad we had you to help figure it out. :-)

Personally, I think the format is great. I think having the demo as a conversation makes it a lot more interesting to listen to.

I am surprised that the technology seems to be so far behind. I can only imagine that this will get easier.

Thanks again for doing them. Hopefully we will do more in the future.