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Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

#13

Post by martian »

Aside from all the technology, it's crucial to get a solid, professional voice-over that tells a clear story about your product. My personal experience has been that even the best video production can be quickly tarnished by a voice-over that is casual, meandering, or inconsistent. For our demo video, we first sketched out what points we wanted to make in the video, wrote a draft script, then recorded nearly an hour of screen footage. My colleague then spent a couple of days locked in a room with iMovie and a microphone. We ended up with a five minute video that I think really captured what we were trying to do with our product. We used ffmpeg for conversion to mp4+h264 (and a fallback to flv), and the very respectable JW flash video player. I think Snapz Pro X was used for video capture.

Re: Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

#14

Post by zhyder »

apinstein wrote: post #5

We use Screenflow. Mac-only, but quite awesome: http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/overview.htm Has a/b editing, records lots of things as separate tracks and has a special-purpose video editing interface just for screencasts. Editing interface is a little quirky to get used to but the results are great.

Seconded. Definitely the best option if using a Mac. Make sure you get a decent mic: since you'll still be grabbing your voice from the old-fashioned analog world.

Re: Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

#15

Post by Edinburger »

ejs wrote: post #4

I use XVidCap, edited with KDENlive, then uploaded to youtube and embedded that. All free (using ubuntu)

Thanks - I think the only problem is the resolution on YouTube is not very good. I followed the link through your profile to your YouTube video and although it's nice, for my purposes I'd like the text to be clearer on the video.

Re: Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

#16

Post by Edinburger »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #9

Email Demogirl.com. She will do the job for you (assuming she likes your application) and get you a few beta users.

Interesting. I really like the way her videos zoom in and out on the browser to focus on the important area. Even though the video size is quite small, it works because of the zooming. I think I'll email her and also ask what software she uses!

Re: Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

#17

Post by timae »

Jing (jingproject.com) is the only free solution I know of. Wasn't exactly what we wanted, so we used Screenflow, which is $99 and Mac only as has been mentioned. It's very easy to use and the editing options are great.

Once you have the video, there's obviously still the decision of how to get it onto your site. After trying a couple different methods, I settled on YouTube. My primary objection to this originally was the video quality, however there is a way to force embedded video to play in either "High Quality" which I found acceptable, or in HD, which is great (and what we ended up using). To do this, you append "&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" for HD or "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" for high quality onto the back of both links in the YouTube embed code. (more here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/11/20/how-to-embed-and-pl...).

Lastly, we used lightwindow to diplay the video (http://www.stickmanlabs.com/lightwindow/). Just drop some js and css files into your site and follow the following example code (in the case of HD). Mess with the width and height as appropriate.

http://www.youtube.com/v/vifE3sBge8k&hl=en&fs=1&...;

Re: Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

#19

Post by rrival »

martian wrote: post #13

Aside from all the technology, it's crucial to get a solid, professional voice-over that tells a clear story about your product. My personal experience has been that even the best video production can be quickly tarnished by a voice-over that is casual, meandering, or inconsistent. For our demo video, we first sketched out what points we wanted to make in the video, wrote a draft script, then recorded nearly an hour…

We worked with MostlyLisa.com on PriceAdvance.com's video demo (http://www.priceadvance.com/demo_video) - she did a great job and is up for more work like this I'm sure.

Re: Ask HN: How do you produce product demo videos?

#20

Post by sh1mmer »

martian wrote: post #13

Aside from all the technology, it's crucial to get a solid, professional voice-over that tells a clear story about your product. My personal experience has been that even the best video production can be quickly tarnished by a voice-over that is casual, meandering, or inconsistent. For our demo video, we first sketched out what points we wanted to make in the video, wrote a draft script, then recorded nearly an hour…

Do you have a link?
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