What's the best way to compress and show technical videos in your website?

SyncViewS

Hi guys, I've got a quite specific question: what's the best way to compress and embed TECHNICAL videos in your website?

What's different from this thread is I need to publish a number of short videos showing screen records of IC.Shape instruments. I'd like them to be as small as possible, of course.

I don't really want to use any external site like YouTube or Vimeo. I don't like to be there, bare with me. I just want to host them on my own web site.

I've tried JW Player and liked its functions and customization, but the major issue is the supported formats. It is Flash based and share all Flash limits. I loved the idea to play mp4 h264 videos, they're small and streaming friendly, BUT that format does seem to support YV12 4:2:0 color space only. It means that it doesn't like flat simple colors, like those in a modeling viewport. You can see the results here. Green is badly washed out and red is not good, while white is fine. Original recording was perfect.

In previous IC.Shape documentation I edited every video in Flash and published it as .swf. But I don't want to go through that pain again. Do you know of any viable solution? Thanks.

Slum

polyboost and textools both just use small .gifs that seem to work rather well.

SyncViewS

PolyBoost has those tiny animated gif to remind what each tool do, but you hardly get the behaviour of every key combination (they're a lot in PB) and functions.

I'd like something more placid and informative, like old IC.Shape videos or current IC.Tools. I'm afraid such gifs would start to grow a little too much.

Eric Chadwick

I really liked the way you did your original flash videos. They were very clear and concise, made the features super easy to understand. I can see tho that it might get annoying for you if it takes too long to compile new ones.

You could still do GIFs, since they're usually very small, and there's no need to push "play". You just need to overlay the Ctrl / Alt indicators. Some vid capture tools will overlay keypresses automatically, I think.

SyncViewS

Thanks Eric, the issue is I dreadfully remember almost two weeks spent recording and editing all those videos, and about a month putting together the full documentation for the whole IllusionCatalyst package. It is what have kept me from writing down the new docs and record new videos, but I feel like they really are needed because I'm afraid even regular IC.Shape users don't know all the possibilities the tools offer and it is a pity.

If I can cut the editing part even a little bit, I'm for it.

Eric Chadwick

Well if you're cool with GIFs, I would recommend GIF Movie Gear. Just $30 and very very good at making animated GIFs, from AVIs and other sources.

You could capture your vids as lossless AVIs, edit them in a video editor like VirtualDub (to overlay the keypresses, trim down, whatever), then load them into GIF Movie Gear.

renderhjs

I chose gif for TexTools because I can embed and reference them on places like here. I can't do that with flash driven custom hosted solutions. I usually capture videos using cam studio and then optimize the frame rate in virtual dub and export them as gif from within there. It keeps the file size down and I can embed or share the animations everywhere.

Eric Chadwick

Oooh, I haven't updated VirtualDub in awhile. It loads/saves anim GIF now, cool!

mLichy

I use Camtasia, but yeah, the gif thing is better for shorter stuff.

CodeFather

this is one of the best programs to squeeze down the video file size without affecting the quality, but it has price:

http://www.sorensonmedia.com/video-encoding/