[Dave Johnson]

I use TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and SnagIt products and haven’t seen anything that comes even close. However, TechSmith’s products are pretty feature-packed and, therefore, not cheap so, if you don’t need all of that functionality, you might try something like DeskShare’s My Screen Recorder Pro … I haven’t used it personally, but it looks to have similar features and is cheaper.

[Dave Johnson]

Hmmm .. does anyone remember the FCP “The Price Is Right” thread from a few weeks ago?

[Dave Johnson]

I agree with Zane … you shouldn’t have space issues with 60% of a drive free so perhaps you’re interpreting the message incorrectly.

With that said, to more directly answer your question about freeing up space …

Yes, you can delete anything in your “Autosave Vault”, IF you are certain the primary project files for each of the projects in there are the version you want to keep and not corrupt. My Autosave Vault is empty most of the time since I only leave stuff in there while I’m actively editing a project.

Yes, you can delete everything in your “Render Files” and “Audio Render Files” folders, IF you are fine with having to re-render each project if you need to go back to it. I trash my render files after I complete and master each project since I don’t trust render files after they’ve sat around for too long anyway.

Only delete things in your “Capture Scratch” IF if you batch captured them (correctly) and can, therefore, redigitize without affecting your edits AND if you’re willing to spend the time to redigitize.

Thumbnail Cache and Waveform cache are not really worth talking about, in my humble opinion.

[Dave Johnson]

Two other issues you’ll want to keep in mind when using PowerPoint slides in video: aspect ratio and safe title.

PowerPoint is intended for computer viewing only so PowerPoint slides are square pixel … video is generally rectangular pixel so watch out for distortion.

Again, because PowerPoint is intended for computer viewing, it doesn’t conform to video standards like safe title and safe action. So, if you don’t leave ample space surrounding all of your PowerPoint slides, you will either have to shrink them down in your video or accept that some text/info will get chopped off by the video safe areas.

It’s fairly easy to build a PowerPoint presentation that takes the above and similar issues into account and will, therefore, transfer to video relatively easily, but that’s very different from taking any PowerPoint presentation and converting it to video.

[Dave Johnson]

Although PS now allows you to customize menus and other interface features, it is still not possible to change the tool button palette.

[Dave Johnson]

I knew I had the name wrong so I opened up AE and i was way off … it’s the “Live Update” button and it’s in the timeline window, not the comp window. Sorry.

[Dave Johnson]

I’ve forgotten what it’s called, but it sounds like you accidentally turned off one of the buttons in the comp viewer window … it’s something like “fast preview”.

[Dave Johnson]

On2 Technologies Flix Pro and/or Flix Exporter … although its not cheap software, its the only software I use for FLVs for the same reason I use After Effects instead of some freeware wannabe … a cheap solution is not always a good solution (in my humble opinion).

With that said, because I don’t know whether “high quality FLV from almost any media file” is just loose wording, I’ll also mention …

As with any web video format, FLVs are highly compressed so by “high quality”, I hope you mean much better quality than the poorly compressed files on some websites, rather than expecting quality even remotely comparable to truly “high quality” video.

As far as “from almost any media file”, remember garbage-in-garbage-out. So, the quality of the media files you put into any software is equally (if not more) important to the quality of the output file as the compression software you use.

[Dave Johnson]

I don’t recall the details since it didn’t apply to me … see the December 10, 2008 article here:

https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/

And, of course, be wise and bookmark that site!

[Dave Johnson]

You could:

[1] lower the resolution of your comp viewer from full to half
[2] do a SHFT+ RAM Preview and set it to skip 1 or 2 frames
and/or
[3] buy more RAM (and make sure you don;t have a bunch of other stuff running and eating up resources while working in AE)