Flat Hatter Collaborative

Screencast Tools

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2008/02/04

Since I get asked a lot, here’s my rundown of screencast tools –

PC - Camstudio: Free and can get you started

PC - Camtasia: $299 but has bells and whistles that most people want after doing it for a while (e.g. pan and scan)

PC - Captivate: $699. Like powerpoint on steroids, lets you capture screen sequences and create demos or interactive simulations — then outputs Flash movies that you can put on the web (.swf) or edit in the Flash IDE when installed on the same machine (.fla).

Mac - iShowU: $20

Mac - Snapz Pro: $69

Mac - Screencast: $29. Here’s a recent review of this third Mac tool in relation to the first two.

My Chumby Just Arrived

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2008/01/07

My Chumby just arrived — here it is (except mine is black) — and yes, this is a realtime reflection of what it is showing –

Way cool physics engine for the iPhone

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/12/06

A physics engine for the iPhone — just play the vid –

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/11/09

I wish they had embed code for this video, would go wider much faster. Since they don’t, just go visit the site — Make My Logo Bigger Cream — so funny because it is so true.

Cardboard Sign Devs: The Movie

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/09/14

From the hilarious, but a little too close to home dept –

Ignite Seattle video featured on Lifehacker

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/09/12

One of the Ignite Seattle videos I produced was featured on Lifehacker this AM.

Wow.

Rob Gruhl’s preso on “How to Buy a Car without Getting Screwed” is a perfect example of why I spend time capturing these snippets of community gatherings.

It’s such a treat to watch these things take on a life of their own and make their way to where they want to go (instead of disappearing into the ether).

Rest of the videos from this last Ignite are on YouTube. Previous ones are on Blip.tv

Thanks to Rob for the presentation and to Brady, Bre, Jessie, and O’Reilly for the opportunity to craft cool community experiences like this.

New Ignite Seattle videos are up

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/09/12

Our new videos from O’Reilly’s Ignite Seattle are up. For the first time we’ve made them available on YouTube (more on that later). Check them out at –

http://youtube.com/ignitenight

Have to say that this is the best batch we’ve ever done.

The content and presentations were fantastic. Vibe in the room was magic — lots of interesting conversations and cross-pollinations. I think we nailed the audio and video better than ever.

Also, the audience voted via text message to send the top talks to present at Gnomedex a couple of days later, where they got some of the best reviews of any of the presenters featured at the conference (not bad when Guy Kawasaki is presenting on the same stage you are ;)

Here’s one from Scotto Moore on internet art called “Make Art, Not Content” (other standouts are linked below that) –

Other stellar ones are –

Brian Dorsey - The Story of Noonhat
(Brian’s Noonhat project recently got picked up by KING5 TV here in Seattle and by the Seattle Times — Very exciting to see how Ignite helps bring wide exposure to a cool grassroots project like this)

Dave McClure - Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!

Rob Gruhl - How to Buy a Car without Getting Screwed

Elan Lee - LIFE: If you’re bored, you’re doing it wrong

Frozen moments in an age of technological wonder

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/04/17

There are moments that, ages from now, you will remember exactly where you were at when you heard the news.

Like last night.

I was driving back to my hotel in Palo Alto from the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West. I turned on the alternative station and heard Loveline come on with Dr. Drew.

I could tell something was different as they started the show — there was a quick note that they had rescheduled the guests for the evening (two porn actresses) and were going to take calls about the Virginia Tech shooting.

What ‘Virginia Tech Shooting?’ I asked myself.

I listened for a few minutes. Not much info. I scanned the FM stations. Nothing there but entertainment. I switched to AM and moved from news site to news site, picking up details.

What a sad moment.

This AM as I listened to CNN while getting ready to head back to the conference, I heard an account from a professor in the building where most of the murders occurred.

He described hearing gunshots and barricading himself into his office. He detailed how he went to watch video on CNN’s web site to get an idea of what was happening around him.

And I am at one of the biggest tech conferences to ever focus on how we, as an industry, create things like streaming media tools, etc. — and how they might be used.

I honestly never imagined that one — streaming video to monitor a massacre in your immediate proximity.

Stranger still is the fact that, after the Dot Com Crash, I worked at Real Networks for a year — monitoring the live performance of those CNN feeds — rallying the troops when surges brought things to a halt — triaging the system when it all went to hell.

I was the guy who woke up the Real news chief when the space shuttle broke up on re-entry in 2003. The team I was on monitored the video readiness as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq and the fall(?) of Bagdad.

Sigh — may you live in interesting times is both a blessing and a curse.

Rives at TED: It is not a question of if you can, it’s do ya?

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/03/21

The TED conference videos are some of the most amazing pieces of free learning I have ever seen. While working out last week I was going through the que of them on my iPod when I came across this 4 minute piece by spoken word artist Rives — a riff on “If I Ran the Internet”.

Amazing — I watched it over and over again for 40 minutes on the eliptical.

As some of you know, I aspire to geek spoken word, and this, I think is the pinnacle of that admittedly narrow genre. Choice quotes –

• “It is not a question of if you can, it’s do ya?”
• “We can make ‘you’ve got hallelujah’ the national anthem of the cyberspace every lucky time you log on.”

Here it is from YouTube —

Udell on ‘Video Knowledge’ and my riff on the death of the specialist

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2006/12/20

Father of screencasting, Jon Udell has great post on the move toward video as a knowledge/rapid-documentation repository. After a few technical points, he hits this gem that completely jives with my experience on getting into the flow of screencasting –

…you have to overcome the same natural reticence that makes dictation such an awkward process for those of us who haven’t formerly incorporated it into our work style. You also have to overcome the notion, which we unconsciously absorb from our entertainment-oriented culture, that video is a form of entertainment. It can be. Depending on the producer, a screencast documenting a disaster recovery scenario could be side-splittingly funny. And if the humor didn’t compromise the message, a funny version would be much more effective than a dry recitation. But even a dry recitation is way, way better than what’s typically available: nothing.

Just another step toward the seamlessness of media where real headway means that this will be less and less of a specialist skill — who is a ‘word processing’ specialist these days?

No one — every one.

There is a point in the future (near? mid? far?) Jon alludes to here where things like screencasting will be a natural repository for business/education/whatever knowledge — a time when this stuff will not be a specialized skillset.

---

Last night with the wife and kids, I brought YouTube up on the family TV and searched for my wife’s username and my daughter’s name. We all sat mesmerized for 30 minutes while we played the various clips Jen has uploaded over the past 6-8 months.

It’s content that I, as a professional multimedia producer, had little to do with — All video my wife produced on her own through mostly self developed knowledge and a digital camera (not a miniDV camcorder).

What does TV look like to my daughter and my wife? Something much less specialized than I could ever imagine — and I’ve got a good imagination.

On with the flattening of the universe…

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