Technology Someone with Computer knowledge & experience... help me??

[bulc9]

Hi,

I am doing my Final Year Project at Uni. I am studying computer science BSc. I am developing an Online training website for Police officers, (e-learning) using Dreamweaver, Flash (dont know how to use Flash yet) and a backend database will be used to store answers in using Access and ASP.NET.

However, i intend on creating Interactive user guides and documents for users to learn and to see how to use the system.

However.. this is where my question comes in...

Is there a program i can use that will enable me to record exactly what i am doing on the screen and save it as an AVI or Flash? This way i can open my system and guide them through it slowly and demonstate how to use the system and what to click and when?

You know like when you see new releases of products from such sites as Adobe and they show you a demo of its features with some guy doing a voice over of what to click and when etc etc.

Does anyone know what i need, and what the program(s) is/are called so i can do this??

Any help would be great as im struggling!
Thanks
Paul

 

[gravymonkey]

try this one - http://thesilver.net/

It's a pretty good program, I once used it to record a girl giving me a strip tease on her web cam. She had no idea i was recording it. rofl

 

[bulc9]

that was a great reason to record your screen activity, beats what ill be using it for ha!

I have downloaded a few of these programs now, and a 30second screen capture is over 150mb!!!!! Way to big.

These recordings are going to be placed into a web browser, so when the user opens a page the video will start to play eg for a user guide on a program.

If the file size is huge it will take AGES to open!!!
Does anyone know how to get videos like this on a web page that are fast loading?

 

[8InchMIKE]

You may want to look into live streeming video. This is how youtube and such work. The file is located at a server and is streamlined over the wideband and hence does not need to be downloaded to be viewd.

Peace

Mike

 

[gravymonkey]

I have downloaded a few of these programs now, and a 30second screen capture is over 150mb!!!!! Way to big.

150mb for 30 seconds is way too big. I'm not sure about the other programs that you were trying, but the program that I recommended can set it to capture just one window of activity or a small region of the screen instead of the whole 1024 X 768 desktop. Also you can change the compression quility and frames per second. Play around with the setting and see if you can get the file size down to something managable. Or you can take your video files into another program (Like Adobe Premiere or maybe Flash) to further compress your videos.
Anyway you do it, video files are going to be bigger then your picture or music files. You just have to play around with the recording to get the mb's down.

 

[ItsElectric]

The reason the files are so big is because they haven't been compressed into the proper video format you'll be using later.

 

[ItsElectric]

Oh, no I didn't.. Haha! Sorry! Oh wait, I just bumped it again, oops.

-ItsElectric