I Need A Little Help!

[Kenny Gioia]

I'm making some free tutorials on using Pro Tools.

I found a little program called SnapZProX (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/) that seems to be perfect.

It will capture all the video I need for the tutorial. (No one really needs to see me. Do they?)

The audio is pretty weak so I'm going to be recording Pro Tools output along with my voice (sorry) to a second computer.

I'll probably bring the video back into a new Pro Tools session to mix with that audio. It doesn't need to be sample accurate.

The problem I'm having is quality vs file size and what is standard.

I need the complete Pro Tools window but I can size it smaller.

I have a 23" monitor and not everyone viewing the video will.

Also frame rate is an issue. 30fps is gonna be huge. What's a good rate for viewing my Mac screen moves?

Compression is also a big issue.

Anything less than full size seems to be unreadable.

The video will be between 7 to 15 minutes.

I don't want to rush thru it but I also don't want it to be 2GB.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks.

[EricTheKid]

Shit, Kenny. Honestly, I'm an audio guy who quivers at the first sign of video...won't go near the stuff...

The first person that comes to mind that could answer your questions is this guy...

(I don't know him personally, but he seems very passionate about his work in this field)

http://womb.mixerman.net/member.php?u=570

Worth a shot. Jon might know.

Best of luck bro,

ETK

[vocalnick]

I've worked in TV graphics, and while this isn't exactly the same process (I was exporting to tape), the endgame remains the same - getting things legible at low resolutions - so I'll offer what I can.

Off the top of my head, I'd suggest adjusting your screen resolution back down to a more manageable size for the purposes of the screencaps. This might mess up your workflow a little bit - everything's going to look huge - but it'll mean legible menus & text in your vids, which you won't get if you're down-scaling a huge desktop to internet-friendly sizes. You might also want to experiment with increasing your font point-sizes, although I'm more of a Windows guy, so I'm not sure how you'd go about doing that on the Mac.

If I think of anything else, I'll check back in. Good luck with it. I just jumped on the Pro Tools bandwagon myself (mixed feelings, but when job advertisements all list Pro Tools knowledge as essential, it has to be done) so I'll be keeping an eye on your progress ;)

[PSN Big Al]

Hey there Kenny,

I've found when capturing with Snapz you can often get by
with 12 frames per second to help with compression and
file size.

Then use something like Sorenson Squeeze to do your final
compression to your delivery format.

[MacGregor]

I'm making some free tutorials on using Pro Tools.


Good!


It will capture all the video I need for the tutorial. (No one really needs to see me. Do they?)


Great!


The audio is pretty weak so I'm going to be recording Pro Tools output along with my voice (sorry) to a second computer.


Take care of the mic!


The problem I'm having is quality vs file size and what is standard.

I need the complete Pro Tools window but I can size it smaller.


From a video capture point of view capturing a computer
screen is more or less like canuckistan women, motionless.

That means it compresses EXTREMELY good, if not better.
Just play around with your software to get a feeling how it
handles your stuff, you'll be surprised.

I've done things like this in 1024x768@30fps (or 15 fps) and
it's still good enough to see all the details even on a beamer.

MacSpielberg

[myrtlebacker]

Also frame rate is an issue. 30fps is gonna be huge. What's a good rate for viewing my Mac screen moves?


Try IShowU (http://shinywhitebox.com/) maybe. You can set a minimum and a maximum framerate. I used 4 to 20 fps. So if there are very little changes on the screen there is less data.

An example screencast I just made had 50 seconds of not too much stuff happening at 1680x1050. Just a couple of moving windows and the mouse cursor produced a quicktime file of 1.3MB without sound.

Ah, and I use the H.264 Encoder.

[jord]

Because the screen is probably not busy with action, such as moving backgrounds and eveerything happening all at once, you can easily get away with a low frame rate (between 4 and 10fps) and a low data rate (experiment as it varies with your movie size). Be careful of your compression method as well, because even though you may achieve a really low file size, older CPU's may be brought to their knees trying to decode it.

If your text is mainly speech (no real music), you can get away with very low data rates without seriously affecting speech.

Keeping this in mind, you can do a 1024x768 video even on the slowest computer. I've done this for various methods of delivery from QuickTime to Flash FLV's. :)

jord