How to easily make a demo video for a web app Thursday, January 04, 2007

The iscrybe video was really impressive (still not had an invite to use it) and it struck me that most services should consider using a demo video to introduce their service.

Of course, that's easy to say, but how easy would it be to actually do without incurring lots of expense.

Prompted by an article in the Web Worker Daily, it looks like it might be as simple as this:
1. Use Snagit or something similar to capture your PC screen activities (Snagit has a free trial). If you need to edit your video, you can use a free online service like Cuts
2. You can then overlay an audio commentary using Dubit (sadly its a desktop app, but its free)
3. You can then pull the video into Viddler and add global or timed tags/comments. These tags are then usable in search and navigation. Hence, you could put timed tags in when covering specific features of your webapp to highlight specific content.
4. The Viddler video can be embedded in other web sites, with the option to start the video at specific timed points

Alternates to steps 3 & 4, are to upload the video to a service like Blip.tv or even Youtube and then add tags via a service like Veotag or Mojiti but this is more long winded, albeit Mojiti has some neat effects you can play with.

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:12 PM Permanent Link ,

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Viddler could turn out to be the best video host this Xmas Sunday, December 24, 2006

After looking for a service that would let me upload large videos and then "deep tag"them, I may have found what I was looking for in Viddler , which is presently in beta.

You can upload many videos at once, and in various formats, too (.mov .avi .wmv .mpeg). You also don't have to worry about file size — you get an allowance of 500 Mb PER VIDEO.

Moments on the timeline of your video are taggable, so you can classify and share instances in time. Timed tags are searchable, too — this is really powerful.

When commenting, the position in the timeline of a video determines where it will be posted to, rather than having comments being attached to a whole video.

You can use Viddler to record footage directly from a web camera to the website, without installing any software.

The service streams video rather downloads it on a progressive basis, hence the ability to hop about within a video.

This could give many services a serious run for their money, combining large file sizes with in-video tagging. Why - well it means you can now
I know other services are already looking at providing similar capabilities - I got a call this week from CEO of one of the best hosting services, who are based in New York, about deep tagging. To introduce this will necessitate them migrating from progressive to streaming video - however he considered the cost of this to be relatively light with open source software now available to do the job. I suspect that Viddler may well accelerate their plans.

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posted by John Wilson @ 9:08 PM Permanent Link ,

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