GHOP #9: Create A Short Administrator Screencast Introducing Views module

Claimed by kyl191.

Hi,

Original version way too big (~180MB), so I rar'ed it and put it on rapidshare: http://rapidshare.com/files/77658289/drupal_views.rar.html

Still trying to further compress it to post it on blip.tv.

Comments/Improvements?

This looks pretty good, thought I can't actually review the screencast because the audio makes a clicking or static sound about every second starting from 00:00:26. This noise continues throughout the screencast. It seems to come more frequently and lasts longer as the screencast progresses. I'm using QuickTime player 7.2 on WinXP. I will check to see if there is a more recent version of quicktime player and if so test to see if the audio is still a problem.

Also, I'm not sure if this is related to the above problem, but at 00:00:47 the volume of the voice over gets very quiet (but the volume of the clicking noise stays the same) such that even if I did not hear the clicking I don't think I would be able to hear you.

Yep. I see what you mean. For some reason, the source audio sounds fine, but I'm going to do the voiceover again just to be sure. Is there anything wrong with the video portion though?

As far as I can tell, the video looks good, but honestly I only watched the first 45 seconds or so because it's kind of boring without the audio and the clicking wasn't doing much for my pre-existing headache :)

Hi, re-did the screencast and the updated version is available at http://rapidshare.com/files/77916162/drupal_views_screencast.rar.html

Again, the compression still isn't good, but I'm not too sure it's going to get any better anytime soon. (FYI: Using QuickTime compression in Adobe Premiere 6.5)

If this version is good, I've got the script and a summary ready to add to a handbook page.

I downloaded the most recent version of the screencast and unfortunately there are still audio problems, though not as bad as before.

Overall, the audio quality is not great. It has a lot of hiss, and the signal to noise ratio is not great. However, it's not so bad that the screencast is unusable.

From 00:04:37 to 00:04:48, the audio keeps repeating the same few word phrase. Then, from 00:04:55 on to the end there are other similar audio problems with repetition.

It seems to me that the end of the screencast might be missing, because it seems to end very abruptly, though since the audio is messed up at the end I can't quite tell if you are finished or not.

In case you haven't seen it already, there is a handbook page about creating a screencast at http://drupal.org/node/62196

One thing you should add is the creative commons license (see link in page above). You can add it at the end or beginning so that you don't need to redo the screencast.

As for the style of the screencast/voice over, I think it would be helpful if you would pause for just a second after most of the points. I felt that the pace of the video was a bit too fast, and even though I know how to use views I didn't completely follow what you were saying, but I think that's because I think slower than the pace of the screencast. If you don't otherwise need to redo the screencast then you can just keep this point in mind for the future--I don't want you to have to redo the whole thing just to pause a little more.

So you need to fix the audio, add the creative commons logo somewhere, and create the handbook pages. I would recommend that you go ahead and create the handbook pages now instead of waiting until the video is perfect, so that you can work in parallel and hopefully wrap this task up a bit faster.

Ok. Think this version should be the best. The screencast is available at http://rapidshare.com/files/78037463/drupal_views_screencast.mp4 and http://blip.tv/file/553914

Also, the handbook page is available at http://drupal.org/node/202851

I think the handbook page would be better if you just put the script on the introduction page instead of having two separate pages. Also, if you could use header tags on the different sections of the script to make them a bit more obvious. If you can't do this just let us know and one of us will take care of putting in the header tags.

Also, can you upload your video and the script to the official google issue for this project. If it won't accept your video, just include a link to the video on blip.tv.

Hi kyl191,

I could still hear some disturbance in the screencast

Sree: Where in the screencast? HedgeMage reported that the section on the performance of views was really bad, and I've re-rendered the whole screencast, this time hopefully getting rid of any audio problems.

no kyl191, morning when i checked i was getting disturbance at 'performance' ... but now when i check back it seems to be fine!

Good! :) (I replaced the blip.tv version with the re-rendered version)

Looks good. I like the handbook page, and the video works and the audio is much better than before.

For future tasks, i would suggest wrapping up the video with a few sentences of what you've demonstrated, etc. so it doesn't seem so abrupt. But otherwise you did a great job!