I'd Rather Be Writing » jing pro

Embedding HD Quality Screencasts in Your Blog

Tom Johnson — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:10:57 +0000

If you’ve ever uploaded a screencast into a video sharing site, such as Youtube, you’ll notice that the screen quality is poor. Screencasts require a high degree of clarity to be watchable. For example, here’s a screencast I uploaded to Youtube. It’s hard to see what’s going on.

Other video sharing sites have the same problem. Here’s the same video on Viddler.

And here’s the same video on Vimeo.

Unlike the other video sharing sites, Vimeo also provides an HD version. At first I was excited about Vimeo, because the HD version is pretty clear in the compressed form. To see what I’m talking about, watch this same video on Vimeo’s site.

Pretty clear, right?

Now, here’s the catch. To embed the HD version of the video on your own site, you have to upgrade to Vimeo Plus for $59.95 a year. Then you only get 5,000 embedded plays, which means only 5,000 people can watch the HD video embedded onto your site, or one user can watch it 5,000 times. You can buy more embedded plays for more money. For example, you can buy 100,000 embedded plays for $199, which isn’t that much. But still, the costs start to add up. This is already about $260 — each year.

And of course if you’re embedding HD video, you’ll need an HD camcorder, which is another $600 (for a low-end version).

Even if you go to all this trouble, the HD embedded screencasts you post on your blog might not be so viewable at a width of 550 pixels, which is about my blog’s post width. The text will be miniature, and users will want to expand it anyway. To make it viewable at this width, you’ll probably end up relying on the pan and zoom features in Camtasia Studio. As soon as you start adding in the pan and zooms and other post-production processing, creating that simple screencast jumped from about a 5 minute operation to an hour. After a few screencasts, you’ll tell yourself you don’t have time for screencasting.

There’s a much better way to create screencasts: Jing and Screencast.com.

Here’s a sample screencast embedded with Jing.

In the compressed form, the text is hard to see, similar to the other video players. However, if you click the expand button (see image below), the player expands to show perfect pixel clarity, unlike the other video services. It also darkens the background, giving you more of a movie-viewing experience.

Brooks Andrus, one of the Jing developers, created a tutorial on how to embed Jing videos into WordPress blogs. You have to change a few parameters in the default screencast.com embed code to make it play in WordPress, but it only takes 10 seconds to change this. (It’s a bug they’re fixing.)

With both Jing Pro and Camtasia Studio, you can also capture HD quality screencasts. Just record a dimension of at least 1280 x 720 pixels. If you increase that size, maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio. Choose the MPEG4 output (only available in Jing Pro). In both Jing Pro and Camtasia, the video output will be encoded with the H.264 codec. If you were to upload such a video to Vimeo, or embed it with the Jing wrapper as I explained above, the video would appear in HD quality.

You don’t have to use Screencast.com with Jing. Brooks also shows you how to FTP the video to your own site and embed the screencast with the Kimili flash embed plugin. This solution is useful if you want to maintain tighter control over your content.

I’ve been experimenting with Vimeo and other video-sharing services for the past couple of days. Overall, I’m pretty sold on the Jing/Screencast.com solution (or the Jing wrapper solution), for the reasons I explained in this post (cost, clarity, screen real estate). Jing and Screencast.com are also in their development infancy, so who knows, they may be working on more HD features similar to Vimeo right now anyway.

Do you agree with my analysis of screencasting solutions ? Are you embedding screencasts a different way? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

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A Five-Click Solution to Publishing and Uploading Screen Videos to SharePoint

Tom Johnson — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:25:15 +0000

Customizing Jing to auto-publish to SharePoint

The other day a developer approached me at work to ask how he could quickly capture and upload video to explain database processes he was documenting. He said he downloaded a trial version of Camtasia Studio, but wasn’t sure if it was the best solution.

Of course I had an answer: Jing, I told him. I showed him how he could use Jing to quickly capture and save video, and he seemed impressed. I thought that was the end of the story, but no. Two days later he approached my desk again and said he needed an even faster way to upload the video. He was using a SharePoint wiki to document techniques. The process of saving the video and then uploading it using SharePoint was too tedious. I need it faster, he said. A couple of clicks and that’s it. The longer it takes, the less likely I am to create video at all.

He reinforced a belief I wrote about earlier: What’s convenient gets used. With that principle in mind, the following is the quickest video solution for uploading Jing videos to a SharePoint directory. This process requires a few minutes of setup, but once you set it up, it literally takes just five clicks to initiate, capture, and publish a video to SharePoint.

1. Find the SharePoint Document Library Path

Find the path of a SharePoint document library that you want to upload videos into. To do this:

Go to the Document Library where you want to store the uploaded videos.
Click the Actions button and select Open with Windows Explorer. (If you’re in Firefox, you won’t see this option.) A window opens into which you can drag and drop files.
Copy the path that appears in the Address field at the top of the window.

2. Map a Network Drive to the SharePoint Library Path

*In Windows XP, double-click the My Computer icon on your desktop.
Go to Tools > Map Network Drive.
Pick an unused drive letter.
In the Folder field, insert the path you copied in step 3 of the previous section.
Before clicking Finish, change the path a little. Remove the http: and switch the forward slashes to backslashes. For example, if you had https://abccompany.org/sites/jing/Documents, change it to \\abccompany.org\sites\jing\Documents.
Click Finish to close the dialog. If you typed the path correctly, the network drive should map and then open.

*Note: In Windows Vista, click the Start button, click Computer, and then click Map Network Drive.

3. Create a New Jing Button and Configure It to Publish to SharePoint

Start Jing.
Mouse over the Jing Sun and click the right ball (“More”).
Click the Preferences button (the cog icon, in the exact middle of the buttons).
Click Customize Jing Buttons. A row of buttons appears, somewhat similar to the following image (but without as many buttons).

Jing buttons to customize

Click the New button.
In the top row of icons, click Save.
In the Button Description field, type a name for the button. This helps you identify the button. (You can’t customize the graphic, and you may have multiple instances of the same graphic, so choose a good description.)
In the Save Location field, select Other. You’re prompted with a pop-up allowing you to browse for a folder.
Click the plus sign (+) next to My Computer and select drive you mapped; then click OK.
In the Clipboard Contents field of the Jing dialog box, select Custom Code.
In the Image custom return text field, type http://abccompany.org/sites/jing/Documents/[filename]. (Or whatever your path is — just make sure you add [filename] in brackets at the end.)
In the Video custom return text field, type http://abccompany.org/sites/jing/Documents/[filename].
Click Save.
Drag the buttons in the order you want, and then click Close.

4. Set a Hotkey to Launch Jing

If the Jing preferences window isn’t open, mouse over the Jing sun and click the right ball (“More”).
Click the Preferences button (the cog icon).
In the Capture Hotkey field, type a trigger key, such as Alt+V.
Click the check mark button to close the Jing Sun dialog.

The Five-Click Process

Now that you’ve set all this up, the five-click process for uploading a Jing videos is as follows.

Click Alt+V (or whatever hotkey you configured to start a capture).
Click the video or image button to specify the type of capture.
If it’s a video, the video capture begins. After you’re finished, click the stop button to end the capture.
Click the custom Jing button you created (the one configured to upload directly to a SharePoint directory). After uploading, Jing automatically copies the path to the video or image to your clipboard.
In your wiki, click the hyperlink button to insert a link, or the image button to insert an image. Press Ctrl+V to insert the link to the video or image.

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Understanding the Jing Pro Video Formats – Jing Help Center

Tom Johnson — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:23:59 +0000

Understanding SWF versus MPEG-4 Formats in Jing Pro

I was confused by the difference between SWF and MPEG-4 before I read this explanation (which includes video examples).