totentanz

Best settings to absolutely crush the size of a screen cast video - when all you are showing is a presentation / slides changes, with no fancy transitions - these settings really shrink things down (using handbrake)!

Main Screen:
   Container: MP4 file
   Web optimzed: [checked]

Picture tab:
   Anamorphic: Strict

Video tab:
   Framerate (FPS): Same as source
   Variable Framerate
   Avg Bitrate (kbps): 20

Audio tab:
   Mixdown: Mono
   Samplerate: 32

Advanced:
   Reference Frames: 4
   Maximum B-frames: 2

A small hands-on project for me; where I work, I give Quarterly Town Hall presentations, but I know I can’t get 100% of my global staff to listen in live - so I’m recording the LiveMeeting and publishing on our SharePoint intranet.

Some FYIs about the video, and learnings for next time …

• I always tell folks to download the video to the desktop before viewing! Running a video direct from SharePoint will deliver a poor viewing experience, and bring down network performance for all of the neighbors.
• Some of my fast slide transitions don’t translate well to the shared / remote screen. They work great in person, but I may need to adjust my presentation style a bit

Tools involved in the process (it’s easy, but not incredibly easy)

• LiveMeeting records the meeting, but creates a folder full of files - difficult to “publish”
• To create a single-file “movie”, download the Recording Converter for LiveMeeting from Microsoft (free!)
• To edit the move - give it a title page and some helpful subtitles - download Movie Maker from Microsoft (also free!)
• This created a rather large file - so I downloaded Handbrake (free!)

Handbrake got the file size down a bit - I know our marketing folks use Adobe Media Encoder, but I don’t run Adobe Premier, so I don’t think I can use that.

But I’ve invested enough time into this experiment for the day, so I’ll take the savings (reinvest!), and move on to other projects. I can and will iterate on my video prep skills in the future - I’m sure we can leverage this technology for training / demonstration / explanation videos in the future! For now, time to publish and move on.

I don’t know … let’s see …

Had a strange thing start happening on the iPad - when I type a long note, the text did not scroll up and the on-screen keyboard covered what I was typing.

Solution: Using the little keyboard key in the lower right corner, drag the keyboard up to the top (splits it in two), and then drag it back down again.

It’s like the iPad forgets the keyboard is down there, so you have to remind it.

Wow, talk about huge time wasters - I upgraded to VirtualBox 4.6.2 and flipped the switch to use I/O APIC, only to see performance take a nasty tumble to the bad.

The only way to resolve this is well documented here. It looks old, but the process still works (and is still effective) in the current (Precise) version of Ubuntu.

And read things carefully - apparently you can really munge your Win7 VM if you don’t.

Plus - don’t forget that part of the problem is setting R/O on your Windows.xml file; if you want to make any other changes to your VM, you’ll have to take change the permissions back to R/W.