[Roderick Lavallee]

I’ve worked with Camtasia, Snag-it and Adobe Captivate (v2 through the most recent CS6).

Camtasia was one of the first to do this well. It inserts captions signalling screen events, making sequencing in your final edit much easier. Snag-it is less expensive, and accordingly does not have as many bells as whistles, but it’s AVI output is far better than the cost belies.

Captivate is really one the best out there for doing high-end educational content. There’s nothing you can’t do with it, but there’s more of a learning curve. Also in that mix is a tool called Lectora, which is equally powerful but it’s UI is not as intuitive.

From what you were describing you are looking to have the HD video embedded within the educational piece, not having the PPTs or other content within the HD video, correct?

Another plus for Captivate is the ease of ingesting PPTs, and adapting them to the timeline. Captivate also exports to many formats including HTML5.

You have a lot to consider, and there are other variables to consider when choosing your tool, which I’d need more info for to help you discern the best one for your project.

Hope this helps a little.

[Roderick Lavallee]

It sounds like instead of leveraging already existing delivery tools like YouTube / Vimeo, you’re talking about locking down the playback format in a mobile platform to control the content and how it’s consumed (i.e. portrait v. landscape in order to maximize real estate to showcase apparel).

Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong, but you would need to create an app for that. Thinking out loud, you could create a response-design-oriented webpage from HTML 5, which will automatically know what kind of platform is viewing your page and adjust what video is served accordingly. In that scenario you’re talking about hosting the site and videos in your own site hosted through a service like https://www.cirtexhosting.com/.

And the real reason I think you need to build an App instead is that in order to lock down the accelerometer — keep the screen from flipping — you’d have to have the app (video player) control the device somehow. I’m fairly confident you cannot do that through some simple web coding.

The little I know of the delivery side, I don’t know that there’s a simple solution to what you’re asking.

[Roderick Lavallee]

All fantastic answers above. I’ve noticed that no one really talks about rate — as you also asked — and I think that’s because of a few reasons: no one really wants to tip their hand, it’s insanely competitive out there, and if you’re like me, you don’t always charge the same rate. I’ll charge significantly less for non-profits trying to get off the ground than I will for one of my Fortune 500 clients. I also charge more for the one-time, nit-picky long sales-cycle clients than I do for the folks I really hit it off with, who appear to want to build a relationship, not just get a job done.

It’s a maddening field that’s also a ton of fun. Good luck.

[Roderick Lavallee]

Polycomm systems are the only corporate systems that I know of that do that very well. There also HIGHLY proprietary, and often only installed by third party vendors, but they know their stuff and have a total lock on the industry.

You could try some Cisco telepresence stuff too, but I don’t know how they integrate multi-media.

[Roderick Lavallee]

Chris is right about Keynote versus PowerPoint. I’d add that most anything is preferable to PowerPoint. Returning to the Adobe Captivate application, it also exports to f4v files, windows .exe files and Mac .app files.

[Roderick Lavallee]

There are so many ways to skin that cat. Use your original price as a starting point. I’d reference stock sites and see how their price schedules change based on audience size and duration of use, which are the typical metrics, then multiply your original price using a similar scale…but not so much that you give your client a heart attack and insure that they never use you again (a lesson I learned the hard way), assuming of course, you’d like to retain the client.

[Roderick Lavallee]

The corporate standard for presentations like this are either a prodcut by Lectora or Adobe’s Captivate. I use Captivate extensively. You can export to a SWF and then it’s easy to convert from there. Captive is also INSANELY easy to integrate all of the functions / features on that video. You can also release it as a self-contained executable, or as a SWF within an HTML, giving it actionable, clickable regions sending the user to other URLs, or doing other functions.

[Roderick Lavallee]

If you like that look you’re looking for something heavier on the post-production side. I’d be happy to help you with your project, but, obviously, have many, many questions to ask you before moving forward, as I’m sure you’ll have many questions of me. You can contact me directly RJ… editor [at] bentspoonmedia [dot] com

[Roderick Lavallee]

Thanks for helping me focus my search. Obviously I was off in my perception.

[Roderick Lavallee]

SSDs (Solid State Drives), are going to give you your fastest response time without spending the money for a 10k rpm typical hard drive, but as you probably already know, SSDs aren’t cheap.

RAID is great to have for data protection (after all, what a RAID set up is doing is saving your data to multiple places at once). I’ve run without any RAID arrays for years, but am also overly cautious about insuring I have multiple back ups — in different geographic locations — of my current working files. Then I offload data onto archive drives.

Down to what you’re really asking, however, given the system configuration you’re talking about, even if you go with a 7200rpm standard External Hard Drive set up (iOmega, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, or others), spending the extra money on an SSD or 10k drive is not going to really buy you that much extra time in the editing. What’s really doing the heavy lifting is your CPU and GPU. An i7 processor will do fine. With only 8GB RAM, and a GPU not optimized for the Mercury playback, make sure you shut down all of the other apps when you go to render. You may even want to get an app that shuts down all of the unnecessary background applications.

I recently built a new machine with a i7 processor, 24 GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 4 series GPU, a 256GB SSD boot drive, and a 10k rpm data drive. I have three other data drives migrated from my last machine tied in. I do notice a difference between the 10k and 7200rpm drives when accessing video files, but we’re talking about a 5% difference in processing time versus the close to 500% gain in reduced processing time by now leveraging a faster GPU. The difference has been that dramatic. In many cases, even when layering a lot of effects onto the footage, rendering happens in practically real-time even with heavy compression. (i.e. 30 minute sequence takes 30 minutes to render / export.)

But back to the drives, I’ve personally had a lot of great luck with much of the Western Digital line of products, and even used a Maxtor drive in the same scenario that you’re discussing.

Sorry if you already know all of this, and if I’ve just been blathering.