200K Views for Underwater Cycling Video

Well, who would have ever thought that one of my videos could get 200K views? This evening, Under Water Cycling passed this mark. Unbelievable.

Kdenlive Lost+Found: Some Split Screen is Muli-Track View Instead

Kdenlive lost+found is about these kind of things you wished someone had told you about Kdenlive years earlier. Those thing, where you should've read the Kdenlive documentation more thoroughly.

Today: Kdenlive uses a very convenient two monitor concept. The clip monitor is, you guessed it, for working with clips. In contrast, the project monitor shows what the final outcome of your clips+transitions chaos in the timeline will be: this is what will be rendered. Now, both monitors come with a «split view». So I would expect this to be the same functionality?

Well, both «split views» are actually completely different things. In the clip monitor, «split mode» splits the clip display into two halfs, one part showing the clip before effects are applied to the clip shown, and the other part shows the final result of applying all effects. In contrast, the project monitor in «split mode» instead shows four quadrants (instead of two halves). Each quadrant then parades one of first four tracks that are currently visible (unhidden).

Thankfully, when made aware of the misnaming, the Kdenlive developers kindly renamed the multi-track split view mode of the project monitor into, well, «multitrack view». In the future, this should hopefully avoid further confusion ... and not only on my side. Small UI changes, yet very important for an overall smooth Kdenlive experience to both newcomers as well as seasoned hands.

Kdenlive Lost+Found: How to Zoom In/Out in Monitors

Kdenlive lost+found is about these kind of things you wished someone had told you about Kdenlive years earlier. Things that you've missed and nobody knew Kdenlive even had them already.

Today: how to zoom in and out in Kdenlive's project and clip monitors. The mouse wheel normally simply seeks back and forward when the mouse is in either the clip or project monitors.

But, when holding both Shift+Ctrl when wheeling in the monitors then zooms into the frame and out again.

Extremely useful when dealing with slightly more involved affine transitions with several key frames and each such frame needs to be precisely placed on screen, for instance, for simple animations.

A Year of Surface Pen-Testing

Working for more than a year with the Surface Pro 3 in screencast production it's time for some real-use review. Not those boring paid quills reviews.

Screencast Recording on Linux

Recently I needed to record some raw footage for my screencasting projects, this time recording from a Linux system. This system happens to be my power-horse video editing station with a 27" screen attached, with 2560×1440 pixels (in 16:9). So the frame size is beyond FullHD, which is 1920×1080: the maximum my HD rocket can record.

Deep Down You Want the Best ... Address Planners

Please allow me to introduce a brand new PAYDI deep diver exercise: the /128 ft address planning expert. It's going to replace all those existing toy exercises.

Deep down you want the best ... address planners, that is.

Anyone who has done this on the surface will agree that's a hell of an impossible  exercise down at 128ft/40m with plain air. But then, I will never understand why anyone would do this at all even at 0m/0ft...?!

Maybe the IETF wants to step in with a new RFC...

E-Paper for Screencasting ... Sort Of

Real e-paper ;)

There are sooo beautiful things to be found in this dark, filthy, intelligence-ridden Internet, such as real paper textures at Lost&Taken. One out of the bazillions of uses for paper textures is in my screencast projects. So real paper goes «e-paper», at least sort of.

3x Speedup Transcode Job for Kdenlive

Somehow Ffmpeg is the Chuck Norris of video processing, not least for speeding up raw video footage. However, better tame it through Kdenlive's transcode jobs. This way, speeding up video footage is only a single click away. And it is neatly integrated into the Kdenlive project workflow.

Fast Forward ... Using Ffmpeg

In my screencast videos about technical things I regularly face this situation: showing slides is boring, so watching an illustration develop is more interesting. Yet developing an illustration in real-time is boring, similar to watching paint dry. Just using a swipe transition from beginning to end looks again like Powerpoint presentations, yuk. Luckily, speeding up the drawing process works much better. And Kdenlive does come with a speed effect, right...?

Shuttle Crash: X11 & Qt 5.4

I've recently upgraded my Kubuntu installation to 15.10 ... just to find out that pressing any button of the ShuttlePro crashes Kdenlive. After some digging I found out that Qt 5.4 in combination with X11 are the culprits here. The ShuttlePro gets integrated as a pointing device by X11, then Qt dumps core trying to dispatching Shuttle events happily into the great void...

Audio Post in Audacity for better Screencasts

Screencasting: audio works...

A good screencast is not only about good video, it's also about good audio too. So in post I do not only work on cutting raw footage into something pleasing. I also need to process my raw audio recordings, so they get pleasing too. Luckily, there's a great open source tool for free to do this: Audacity. But what audio processing needs to be done?

Win Apps: Share to ... Disk!

Since I purchased my Surface Pro 3 almost a year ago, I'm constantly pulling my hair at exporting data from Windows 8 Apps. In particular, I need to export PDF files from my illustration app Squid on a regular basis. For whatever reason Microsoft did totally miss to include a share to disk functionaliy: nope, how needs this anyway...?!"

Rejoice, there is help!

One Year on the Surface: Screencasting Resume

The first anniversary of my Surface Pro 3 for screencasting and note taking is nearing. So it's time for a real-world usage review.

Kdenlive 15.x, Kubuntu, and the Contour ShuttlePro

ShuttlePRO v2

Roughly one-and-a-half year ago I got myself a nifty ShuttlePro v2 for editing video. In the meantime, the video editor Kdenlive as well as the system platform (K)Ubuntu have both undergone a lot of updates and changes. In particular, Kdenlive has now moved to the recent KDE Framework 5 (KF5) platform (as of this writing). A recent disk hiccup allowed me to install my video & audio station from scratch. So how do I get my ShuttlePro v2 working again?

Recording Screencasts for Technology Training

So my Hauppauge HD PVR rocket HDMI recorder turned out to be a really useful little screencast recorder. Works like a charm without the need for a Windows host. I'm using the HD PVR rocket for recording illustrations for technology trainings. These are then used for my day job.

The HDMI recorder records raw screencast footage as H.264. I next do the voice over recording completely separately from the screen recording. I'm doing the audio recording in Audacity. My audio equipment consists of an analog Shure quality voice microphone connected to a Behringer QX1202USB mixer that doubles as a quality USB soundcard. Please, no USB podcaster microphones: they're ridiculous expensive, are often of questionable quality, and they often can't be used with a separate post. After the voice recording session I apply noise reduction and level normalization.

Raw screencast footage then gets edited in Kdenlive according to the voice over audio. That is, scenes of stepwise appearing illustrations with intermediate stills. One reason for this offline voice over recording is that I find it difficult to keep a good speaking performance while having to correctly draw illustrations at the same time. Doing it simultaneously heavily sucks, both in illustrative quality and voice.

There's even another benefit of doing video and voice separately. I can easily add in video footage later in case I recognize the need for it during voice recording. And I can also easily edit out voice sections when the overall projects turns out to get too long.