Posts in ‘Work’
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DJ Baby
From December 25, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
This is the project that I did for my Illustrator class. While I’m not terribly proud of how the actual artwork came out, I’m fairly happy with how the screen cast ended up.
I used Telestream’s ScreenFlow which I bought by the end of this project. Compared to SnapzProX from Ambrosia Software, I was floored by this product. I was able to record both the video and the audio from my computer at full resolution on a 24″ Cinema display while playing Pandora and using Illustrator with no really noticeable slow down. And the fact that I could then do call outs for different elements of the screen including the mouse and the different windows as well as speeding up the larger video clips a dizzying amount (3,707%, thank you very much) blew me away. I’ve done much smaller screen captures of areas of the screen using SnapzPro and my computer has literally almost choked even at smaller frame rates. I don’t know what jujujuice they’re drinking, but I want some too.
Two complaints that I had are:
This may or may not be ScreenFlow’s fault, but while I had all of my peripherals connected (4 External Disks, 2 USB/Card Hubs, 24″ Cinema Display, Keyboard, Mouse, LaCie DVD Writer, Soundsticks), ScreenFlow couldn’t quite make it through the export of the full project. I could export samples but once I tried to do the whole project it consistently failed right near the end. I tried this multiple times with multiple encode settings. I eventually found that the only way I could make it work was to unplug all of my peripherals. I’m beginning to suspect that SanDisk’s godawful U3 Software has been to blame for an assorted list of stability issues I’ve been having of late, although another likely culprit is a recently tricked out edition of Quicksilver (enabling the stuff I did actually says that it’ll make it less stable…). Despite that, no other program was crashing like ScreenFlow was…
Despite the amazing job it did of allowing me to speed up the clips a ridiculous amount, the program did have a little bit of a melt down trying to do anything with them once they were sped up. I couldn’t copy and paste them anywhere. I couldn’t hear audio that was playing near them. I couldn’t get sections of them out. To do any of that I had to undo their speed change and then make whatever edits I wanted, and then redo the speed change and drop them back into place. A small price to pay for the functionality, but it would be useful for them to possibly experiment with what their upper bounds are for clip speedup.
To create the loop for the opening narration and to grab the last clip for the credits, I used that fantastic piece of open source software, Audacity. This software has just gotten better and better since I started using it ~2001. I’m not a power user of it by any stretch of the imagination, but for what I was trying to accomplish it did it and then got out of my way. This marks the first time I’ve tried to create a loop at all. I enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoy creating pictorial patterns. Trying to find the correct repeat point and then refining it little by little so that it sounds like it was recorded that way is a lot of fun.
I used Garage Band, of course, to record the opening narration. While I’m sure I could’ve used Audacity for that as well, I wanted the quick EQ settings and the easy ability to punch in on a track as I knew I’d be refining the opening quite a bit. I started out with roughly 5 minutes which was far too long and in the end I got it down to around 2:15. Garage Band is just nice to work with. Period.
That’s everything. Thanks again to La Blogotheque, Mogwai, and The Album Leaf. Click through to Vimeo to watch in HD. Recommended….
