[IAEP] Read Etexts Videos available

[Jim Simmons]

Dave and David,

Yesterday I did a screen capture of Read Etexts in action, then fired
up Kino to edit it and add title cards.  The results are not awful,
but perhaps could be improved with better editing software.  I have
posted the original capture in Ogg Video format, plus my finished
product which is an AVI using Xvid and Mp3 for video and audio
encoding.  The URL is:

http://people.sugarlabs.org/jdsimmons/

My original capture was of Sugar running at 800x600.  I had originally
tried capturing at 1000x600, but when Kino imports the Ogg Video it
resizes everything to 640x480 (I think) and does not preserve the
aspect ratio.  As a result the Activity ring becomes an ellipse
instead of a circle.  I had to modify Read Etexts to work better in
800x600 than it did originally.  Unfortunately, when Kino resizes the
capture it makes the text on the captured screens hard to read.  We
could probably live with this if we had to, but I'm hoping that Dave's
Final Cut Pro might do a better job resizing the video.

I think my editing job is reasonably good.  I had originally had a
"The End" title card on this that got lost somehow.

If Kino would support it I would have liked to have added a musical
background.  Ever since I saw Flash Gordon serials as a child I've
been partial to Listz's "Les Preludes".  The music is in the public
domain, but I doubt I could find a performance of it that is.  I could
get around this by recording myself playing it on a kazoo.  I think
you'd need more than one kazoo to really do it justice, though.

Anyway, have a look at the two videos and see what you think.

James Simmons