Just finished a series of videos showcasing how to create a mainframe adapter with LegStar for JBoss ESB.

I have become a fan of video demoes. I find them a lot easier to follow than reading paper documentation.

So I embarked in doing my own video demoes.

There are 2 things that I found amazing while doing this:

1. How difficult it is to get something as obvious as a product demo video done
2. How much data you can store on YouTube for free!

I had 3 choices when I started:

1. filming myself doing the demo
2. doing screen captures of the demo and recording my voice
3. doing screen captures of the demo and adding subtitles

I ended up doing option 2. I ruled out option 1 for aesthetic reasons and 3 because I couldn't figure out how to do it .

I have been told that it would have been much easier on a Mac. Unfortunately, I am still a Windows user (Although I have one machine running Ubuntu, another running Fedora core and several other unixes running in VirtualBox).

I started by using Microsoft MovieMaker which is quite easy to learn, but the result was disappointing. I couldn't get the quality to be acceptable once the video was uploaded.

One of the issues with such product demoes is that you want the GUI to be readable. This is impossible with small frame sizes. Typically MovieMaker would not allow me to pick up 1024x768, which is what I ended up needing for the Eclipse GUI.

So I turned to these free products:

• CamStudio for video recording
• Audacity for audio recording
• Virtualdub for video editing

I also had to bring in the Xvid MPEG-4 Codec for compression. It turns out this is a codec that YouTube supports very well so there is very little quality loss when you upload to YouTube.

The result is not too bad although it still feels quite amateurish.

I have spent several days doing this, but feel I would need a lot lot more to make it look professional.

Hopefully this will be enough to help people learn the product faster.