A Guide to successful Video Production

While practising to make my bit of a video I have encountered several problems. Here are some of the problems that I found:

• Smoothness of Delivery
• Audio Blanking
• Audio Quality
• Audio Dropout
• WMV Format is Essential

Description and fixes:

Smoothness of Delivery

At first it is very hard to make a smooth delivery of the verbal description of what is happening. Do not despair! – this problem will go away enough to do an acceptable job. Here are some tips:

1. It is worth writing an actual script, which clearly distinguishes between “stage direction” and “narrative”.  Print this script, or if possible display it on a second monitor. The idea is not to rote-memorize the script, but to record the details of terminology that you want to use (e.g. the difference between “project” and “package”), to make sure that your presentation has a good logical flow, and to order the mouse operations in a neat way so that you are not constantly switching backwards and forwards between different windows in a way that is confusing for the viewer.
   This is good work for programmers – it’s no more than we always try to do with our algorithms!
2. Practice plenty of times. If you do, you will find that the job “meets
   you half way”. You will quickly remember the order of things that you want to explain, and you will find that you can fill in the bits between on the fly,in your own words, in a way that sounds very natural and conversational when you play it back. Expect to modify your script a little after every try – particularly the ordering of mouse operations, which will sometimes require a re-ordering of the logical flow of your explanations.
3. Do not start talking the instant you click the Camtasia Record button, or hit F10 (to stop recording) the instant you stop talking. It seems to take Camtasia a couple of seconds to start and stop recording reliably, so click Record (or stop talking) , and silently count “one, two, three” before you begin talking (or hit F10).
4. The F9 key is your friend. Press F9 and recording will pause. Press F9
   again to continue recording. Don’t wait until you are tonge-tied and
   confused before you press it – there’s a weird kind of paralysis which kicks in and makes finding F9 hard. As you practice you will soon learn where the natural breaks are, where you want to scroll your script, take a breath, and organise your next paragraph in your mind.
5. Remember that every go is a practice, until you happen to get one that satisfies you. Also remember that you can hear every little error – the question is, will the viewer notice anything? Go into a quiet and private place to practice if that makes you feel less self-conscious.

Audio Blanking

The Camtasia Recorder control window (with the “Select area to record” button) offers some interesting menu items:

Effects/Cursor/Highlight Cursor is really good – it provides a yellow circle
around the cursor in the finished video which can be used as a pointer to
gesture at interesting things as well as a practical aid to spotting where the
cursor is. Turn this on (a black dot appears by the option).

Effects/Sound/Mouse Click Sounds and Effects/Sound/Keyboard Sounds sound good but actually they are bad news. The problem is that the generated click is embedded in a region of generated silence, which over-rules the narrative from the microphone at a really important point. Do not use these effects!

Audio Quality

All of the available codecs except “MPEG Layer-3 (TechSmith LAME)”
(henceforth “LAME”) produce dreadful audio quality in the finished WMV product. It is necessary to use LAME for recording.

In the Camtasia Recorder control window (with the “Select area to record”
button). Choose Tools/Options…, click the Audio tab, click the Audio Format button and select Format as LAME. Name should be left as [untitled] – this seems to come with LAME. Press OK in the Audio format window, and then OK in the Options window.

Audio Dropout

LAME is the only good codec, but it has a problem of its own. When recording sequences longer than a few seconds I found that the audio would suddenly disappear in the finished product. This does NOT happen in the Camtasia player that starts during the production process, but does happen in the finished WMV file, when I checked them through carefully. The other audio codecs don’t seem to have this problem, but produce unacceptable quality.

Google finds lots of pages about Camtasia audio problems, and one common
suggestion is to use a USB microphone rather than one which plugs into the
analogue sound card. This morning I plugged in a USB microphone and made a WMV with good quality audio which did not disappear after a few seconds.

After Windows has detected the microphone, it can be selected in the
Camtasia Recorder control window (with the “Select area to record” button),
Tools/Options…, Audio tab, where the Audio Format button is found.

WMV Format is Essential

The AVI format offered by Camtasia requires a special codec to be present on the playback machine. This presents an unnecessary barrier to entry, which can be solved by rendering the final product in WMV format instead. The additional benefit is that WMV output files are about 60% the size of AVI output files, with no appreciable reduction in the clarity of e.g. fine fonts in the Eclipse Package Explorer or audio quality.

In the Camtasia Production Wizard (which pops up at the end of recording, after you’ve saved your recording) select “Custom production settings” and

click Next>. Select “WMV” and click Next>. Then keep clicking Next> until you reach the Produce Video screen, where you click Finish.
Rendering in WMV requires a lot of time and sometimes it is problematic… very often Camtasia ” randomly” produces WMV file containing only part of the video (in my case only 3, 5, 8 minutes on 11), so when rendering it is better to:

• close all your applications
• disable the screen saver
• disconnect the cable of the network
• do nothing and to leave Camtasia 100% of the CPU!

At the end play ANYWAY the file in Windows Media Player and verify that is complete until last frame!

Regarding AVI files

AVI files are affected by problems when played in Windows Media Player, the voice at the beginning disappers, so don’t use them.

Regarding Flash files

I didn’t find any particular problem with Flash .flv video files.

Sitemaps are like a roadmap of your site for searchengines. It is an XML file that contain all the information a search engine needs to crawl your site. Creating one can be problematic but there are a large number of vendors that will provide the service for free.

I use and recommend gsitecrawler.com. Go to their site and download the software and install on your computer. Enter the URL of the site you want to generate a sitemap for and gsitecrawler will follow every link on you site. You also have the option of automatically uploading the sitemap to your site. The sitemap, once generated, is placed in a nominated directory on your computer ready for uploading.

Upload the site map to the top level folder of your site i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and inform the search engines where it is. There are a number of ways to do this. You could add a line to to your robots.txt file like this – sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
This will inform the search engines where your sitemap is.

Another way is to inform the search engines directly by pinging them.Here are the addresses:

google

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

yahoo

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

(Replace Domain.come above with the domain of your site)

Another highly recommended way is to sign up to each of the search engines webmaster portals. These are www.google.com/webmasters/tools/, https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/, and http://webmaster.live.com.

Once you start to get your pages indexed in the search engines, your on the way to effective SEO.

OK – it’s not technology related, but it’s an amazing video of how hard people work in this world to get by. Enjoy!

Here is a great php tip for those who want to load a different image into your header every time the page loads. For example, you may have a folder of images that you want to rotate in your header or any element of your site for that matter. Here’s how to do it.

Place all your images in a folder and name them something like this:

• pics/image1.jpg
• pics/image2.jpg
• pics/image3.jpg

Use the php rand() function to give your header an random id.

<div id="header<?php echo rand(1,3); ?>">
<!-- header content here --></div>

The rand function in the code above returns a random number between 1 and 3 which is what we want. So every time the page is loaded, we get an id of either header1, header2 or header3. In you CSS you can now markup like this.

DIV#header1 {background-image:url("pics/image1.jpg")}
DIV#header2 {background-image:url("pics/image2.jpg")}
DIV#header3 {background-image:url("pics/image3.jpg")}

Now your page loads with a random header image. Brilliant!

We all know how important it is to get good rankings on Google and Yahoo. No matter whether you want to outsource your SEO or do it yourself, it is essential to know what not to do as well as what to do. So, without further adieu, here are the most common SEO mistakes that you must avoid at all times.

Link Spamming

This is poison for your site. OK, you’ll have thousands of links, but not quality links. Google loves links if they are authoritative but will penalise you if you have loads of crap pointing to your site. Forget the business of getting thousands of links to your site. Spend your time instead enhancing your site and you will be much better off in the long run.

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Always nice to have a free resource for your webdesign projects. Here you will find some excellent icons you can use for free.

25 Free Icon Resources for Designers

All designers love experimenting with new textures and backgrounds. They are one of the first things visitors see when they go to your site so it’s always vital to have designs that won’t scare them away before they get to the content of your site. If your devoid of some backgrounds or textures, there are some great tutorials to get you going.

Liquid Blood

Folds

Silk

Vista

Rock

Bubbles

Plaid

Water

Something I found surprisingly difficult to find on the net is how to add custom 404 pages to your main and sub domains. A lot of people are scared of customising their pages due to the complicated nature of regular expression matching and .htaccess files.

So, what are 404 pages? If you try to browse to a non-existent page, this will cause a 404 error on the server and you will be directed to a 404 page. The problem arises for some when the server redirects your visitor to a 404 page they want to see rather than the one that you want. Take a look at a hostgator 404 page:

Not pretty, is it? This is a clever way for hostgator to make money on your sites and even direct traffic away from your site. Read on to see how to create your own custom 404 page and keep visitors at your site.

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If you haven’t heard, google has been updating their indexing of websites lately. This does not affect the page rank of your site, but it is having a drastic effect on some unsuspecting sites traffic. Many sites are experiencing a free fall in their rankings to a point where their business’ are been wiped out.

Google does this if believes that a site has been naughty in it’s marketing techniques. It is not just spam sites that google now targets, but any site could become victim of the google curse.

How do you know if your site is a victim of this latest round of blood-letting? Check your index stats in the google search engine “site:yoursite.com”, and do a search for your targeted keywords in google. If you find a dramatic drop in your rankings or index pages, then the almighty google has purged your site.

This seems to be happening to the most unsuspecting sites. I have heard from Eamonn, the webmaster of telcojobs.eu, that overnight all his marketing efforts since he started the site have been for nought. “I noticed my traffic was way down this morning, but when I checked my keywords, they were nowhere to be seen!” said Eamon. “I’ve been working solid with article marketing for 6 months and now it’s down the tubes”.

It is the sort of news that makes a webmasters’ blood run cold or wake you in the night in a screaming cold sweat. I suppose the moral of the story here is never entrust you websites success in the hands of the google gods. Always look for diverse traffic from many different sources like banner ads, social networking and the other search engines like MSN and yahoo.

So, what do you do if your site is slammed by google? Well, you might have to bite your tongue and follow googles own guidelines.

Determine whether your site is still in our index – site:www.yoursite.com
Verify your site ranks for your domain name – if it ranks poorly in the results, then google probably has penalised you. if this is the case, then you will be sent an explaination to the Message Center area in your webmaster tools, if you have set one up.
Request Reconsideration – This will allow to post a rant directly to google, but your probably better off banging your head off a brick wall as it can take many weeks for google to respond. And don’t expect the gods to lift their curse.

jQuery is a very impressive way to add a touch of professionalism to your site and has really taken off with the advent of the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Here, I’ll show you how to add Collapsible Divs to your site AND to your wordpress blog.

Have a look at the Collapsible jQuery Example for wordpress we are going to use here.

jQuery WordPress Example

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So, how to add this magic to your blog?

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