philipfoxwell.com

My first assignment at Merry Fools was a big one, an ambitious one. I was to come up with a presentation for one of their applications for a very large client. I don’t know for sure that Mark, the president and owner of MF, expected me to do what I’d set out to, but the end result turned out better than I, and probably he, expected.

The application is called Sqibl and basically it’s a desktop tool that lets a user interact somewhat with company news and other media projects, like an interactive reader. Also, it doesn’t require an internet connection as it’s built with adobe air so an employee can use it anywhere to stay in-the-know. All in all it’s a pretty cool app and has an incredible amount of potential for growth beyond its current scope.

In fact, it’s a great tool for any large company seeking to develop a private social network for their employees. A smart company could even leverage Sqibl’s functionality to promote tools within their business.

When Mark first gave me the assignment, I had no idea of what Sqibl was and so had no idea how to begin developing a presentation to promote it.

The Objective: Design A Two-Minute Presentation About Sqibl

My first step was to download the application from a dev page created by János Erdélyi, Merry Fools’ resident webdev, and play with it for a couple days to get an understanding of what the program could do. It actually took the entire production time to fully comprehend the tool, but that’s because it’s so feature rich that a couple days only afforded me a basic interpretation.

At the end of my first week on the project I had a basic rough draft of the presentation published in Power Point.

Let me interject here that I would never under normal circumstances advocate the use of Power Point presentations. Power Point is such a go-to business world tool that typically results in mundane slideshows of corporate masturbation. Where some hack pieces together cute clip art scenes to demonstrate what a complete brainless automaton he’s become for his company.

A PowerPoint presentation is an easy way out when you lack creativity.

But I used PP anyway as it was only for the rough draft, inserted the script, added relevant images and got the okay from Mark and the others at MF to move forward on the project.

Step One: Decide What Platform Your Video Presentation Will Be Based On

Keep in mind that I haven’t done any kind of intense web work like this in ten years. I’m well behind on industry standards in that regard, despite having owned and maintained several websites over that span of time to the present day.

I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do: build a screencast. That seemed like the best way to go about business presentations, how most companies were doing them and the quickest way to get it done. The only question was what tool to use.

What seemed practical to me was to capture screen shots of the Sqibl application and insert the images into Flash. Then export the movie and be done. I figured a week at the most.

Boy, was that an ambitious guestimate.

It took me a week just to capture the screen shots. I went through with Jing and captured every instance of every feature in Sqibl. My plan was to load my images into Flash and render the video as an avi file.

Brandon Ellis, a Flash platform developer at MF, enlightened me to the fact that Flash wasn’t built for video editing, that I’d need something more capable like Camtasia or another screencasting program.

I have to admit hearing that gave me a sinking feeling, like I was on my way out the door of Merry Fools as quickly as I’d come in.

Jing has screencasting capabilities but the frames-per-second ratio was much too low to capture effectively the features of Sqibl for a truly professional video presentation. So I took Brandon’s recommendation and downloaded Camtasia. Fortunately, and I emphasize that, Camtasia has a fully functional 30-day trial, which gave me an optimal window for completing the project.

Step Two: Implementing Your Presentation Ideas

I ran into continuity issues with my captures almost immediately. One of Sqibl’s features is an event calendar that tracks weekly events on the dashboard. Once a day passes, it’s irretrievable in the calendar as the next calendar day moves into place. A minor setback at best, I thought.

What it meant, though, was long hours in Photoshop. This presentation was quickly evolving into an octopus of unmanageable proportions. Continuity, I discovered, can be an incredible time sink and in fact it pushed me into working seven days a week, all day long over the next two weeks to get it under control and to get the project back on schedule.

Flash gave me a bit of an issue at first as well. I still was of the mind that Flash should be used to animate the sequence of images. However, my captures consisted of hundreds of 300kb pngs. Although small in size comparatively to jpg and gif files, the pngs quickly loaded down Flash after two hundred or so frames. I experienced several crashes before I realized I’d have to make several small files to complete the task.

Fortunately, Camtasia addresses this issue exactly as needed. I exported the scenes from Flash as avi files. You just load your avi files into Camtasia and they render seamlessly into video. Once this was under way the rest of the project went swimmingly.

I got really lucky finding background music one Saturday afternoon. It’s a simple, royalty-free loop that I converted from wav to mp3 to reduce file size and goes perfectly with the theme of the flash presentation.

I didn’t have much luck with the audio functions of Camtasia, however. For one thing, and maybe it was because my video format was so large, the preview screen built into the program drags and jumps which makes it extremely hard to get timing down.

So, at the advice of János, I used Audacity to record the voice over. What a great program. I’ve used Audacity in the past to edit music files but it never occurred to me to use it to record.

To get past the crappy preview mode of Camtasia I had to play the rendered video alongside the Audacity recording session. This was grueling. For one thing, you need complete silence to record a voice over and that meant I had to turn off the air conditioner in my office to eliminate background noise. I did manage to find a foam cover from another microphone to place over my headset mouthpiece, so that also helped to further cut down on white noise.

What made it grueling was the rising temperature of an attic converted office with no air conditioning. The temp gauge on the a/c had climbed to 87F within an hour. I was a stinking mess by the end of it. Fortunately, the voice over only took that day to record and I got it to sync effortlessly with the video.

Finally, after 45 days of production, I finished my first 2 minute video presentation for Sqibl.

I have to admit it looks good and it was even touted by Beth, Mark’s wife, as some of the best work done at MF, so that made me feel that the amount of time it took to produce made it worth it.

Anyhoo. That’s my story of how to do video presentations the long way. I’m sure there are easier ways to do it. If you know, please tell me.

Here are the tools I used:

Photoshop CS5

Illustrator CS5

Flash CS5

Jing (free version)

Camtasia 7 (trial)

Audacity 1.3 beta

And here’s the final cut of the Sqibl video presentation for those interested: