Teambox is an interesting new project management tool that bridges the gap between real-time social media like Twitter and web-based project management solutions like Basecamp. Pablo Villalba, the creator of Teambox, found Scraster online a few days after a major write-up on the popular blog ReadWriteWeb. Too bad that Scraster’s video couldn’t have been live before that major press, but not to worry–Teambox will be getting its share of press very soon. In fact, just this morning, Teambox was featured on TechCrunch.

Teambox’s objective in creating a screencast was to minimize bounces and grab visitor’s attention for a viewing experience that would lead to conversions. Teambox came to the right place, because site retention is what Scraster screencasts are all about.

We’re happy to be associated with Teambox, who we consider to be a client with enormous potential. We’re also very glad that Teambox was 100% psyched about their delivered video from the moment they saw it. Since the ESL office of Teambox is in Spain, Teambox relied heavily on Scraster’s expert script writing to guide the process. We gleaned a cursory understanding of the app during a Skype screenshared walkthrough by the client, and within a couple of days, we were engrossed in the elaborate script.

Because of the collaborative nature of Teambox, the screencast script required not just a single user case, as is the norm, but a demonstrative scenario of an entire team of users. We decided that a small freelance web team would be a realistic way to communicate Teambox’s value and set a Project Manager named Frank at the video’s focal point. Frank and his team guide the user through a few multi-user scenarios to demonstrate Teambox’s major selling points. (One very fun part of creating a full-blown scenario like this? Hiding the Easter eggs.)

While the elaborate Teambox script and site set-up involved a lot of time and work, the effort wasn’t entirely on our end; the Teambox team made an invaluable contribution by being constantly on call to answer questions and to clear things out of the system when Scraster needed “a second take”. The results speak for themselves. Teambox was so pleased with their video that they blogged about their Scraster experience.

Like most of Scraster’s professional screencasts, the Teambox video was created in ScreenFlow with a handful of other tools. Thanks to Javier Saldeña, a Bay-Area based graphic artist, for his help bringing the Teambox logo to life in the AfterEffects bumpers.

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like the one Scraster Professional Screencasting produced for Teambox, please be in touch. You can get the ball rolling with a free quote. You can also email us at info@scraster.com or find us on Twitter.

We’d love to spread the word about Teambox, so please consider tweeting the following 128 characters:

Got 4:20? Check out the @scraster screencast for Teambox, a cool new Twitter-ish project management tool: http://bit.ly/9NuzYO

Thanks for reading. More soon.

The Visual Lounge, the blog of Camtasia’s parent company TechSmith, named Scraster’s video called Sunday Morning their “Screencast of the Week” yesterday. Part of what TechSmith appreciated about Sunday Morning was how it stretched their software to do something that it wasn’t particularly intended to do. Sunday Morning is more of a slideshow than a screencast, but if there’s no “Slideshow of the Week” honors and it was produced with a screencasting software, let’s call it a screencast! The video, which chronicles the pregnancy of a good friend in a “time lapse” kind of way, is viewable from the player to the left. It’s just one minute long, so please enjoy it before you leave.

As Scraster team leader John Basile explained to Betsy Weber of the Visual Lounge, “I enjoyed using Camtasia for Mac over other slideshow softwares with which I’ve worked because it allows for more control and detail when timing images to audio.” The drag-and-droppable transitions this blog has mentioned before are really tight and are a HUGE timesaver. The movies export nicely to a QuickTime format and there’s a ton of export options to get it to look just right.

As many readers are probably aware, ScreenFlow 2 is set to be released any day now and will have the same kind of time-saving, built-in transitions. Scraster attempted but failed to get its hands on a beta version of ScreenFlow 2 last week, but has been promised a copy to review here and at the scrast.net blog upon its release. Check back for that soon. (Soon? Hope so.)

Scraster is in the business of producing professional screencast tutorials, demos, and marketing videos. Although team leader John Basile produced Sunday Morning as a fun and thoughtful gift for close friends, it’s something we’re happy to add to our menu of services. If you have a multimedia project in mind and think that Scraster would be a good fit to make things come to life for you, please be in touch with Scraster at info@scraster.com of Get a Free Quote.

Until this week, Scraster Professional Screencasting had been using the online service Vimeo for the hosting of our website and blog video. We considered Vimeo to be the best of the various video hosts around for a number of reasons—the player was nice looking, branding was minimal, call-to-action links could be embedded at the video’s end, and the sharing features would enable the viewer to email, post, or embed the video elsewhere. Our Vimeo Plus account gave us great new HD capabilities that made our HD videos shine, and last but not least, Vimeo’s indexing provided Scraster some pretty strong Google juice.

Understanding that Vimeo’s service is meant strictly for non-commercial use, it was admittedly unprofessional for Scraster to be using (or abusing) Vimeo. It was just so enticing because the product was so perfect. Plans had actually been in place for some time to migrate our content to another service. We just… hadn’t gotten around to it.

The priority of of our migration from Vimeo to another video hosting service came to the fore last week when a high-profile Scraster client disrespectfully embedded a Scraster video in their homepage code. This public sharing of an overtly commercial video hosted by Scraster’s own Vimeo account was pretty quickly followed by the dreaded email saying our content would be removed in 48 hours. Vimeo’s email suggested we quickly find an alternative. I’ve seen and read others online complain about the injustice of the removal of their content, but Scraster understood the risks and we’re happy to move on. We’ll miss Vimeo, but web is constantly in flux, right?

Since January, Scraster has had its eye on screencast.com, the file-hosting end of screencasting giants TechSmith. Screencast.com has become a lot more visible through the huge success of Jing, the free screencapture and screencasting tool for Mac and PC. For Jing users at the basic level, screencast.com is a free storehouse of content captured from the desktop. Screencast.com is actually much bigger than Jing, though, and has developed into a viable CMS for video and other content. With its slick integration with the Camtasia Studio and new Camtasia for Mac screencasting softwares, users can upload their videos straight from the software to the web. And we’re not talking about YouTube-looking video. Let’s get into player details.

Screencast.com plays video as it’s uploaded—no compression or transcoding. This could be a benefit and a drawback. The benefit is stuff looks great in its original form and what you upload is what you get–no lame surprises after twenty minutes of uploading. The drawback is that Mac users have to convert to a Flash format so as not to alienate those users without QuickTime installed. (Exciting note here: Flash 10 can read QT files. When users are up to speed with Flash 10, QT will be fair play for all).

We thought the actual video player from screencast.com was aesthetically perfect for Scraster.com. It wasn’t free, but there was a much larger roadblock–the screencast.com player embed code wasn’t working with Videobox, the unfortunately-named video lightbox script Scraster utilizes at our website and blog to get our vids to jump off the page to be viewed at dimensions much larger than the page could afford. The Videobox script (which is available as a WordPress plugin here) is based on Lightbox v2 and uses swfobject to embed flash. We presume that this was the hang-up for the screencast.com player to work in the plugin.

Fortunately, the development team at screencast.com volunteered to provide Scraster with custom code to get our video lightbox to work. Perfect. We are happy to share the code with you, which gets placed into the “videobox.js” file (which lives within the folder called “js” in the Videobox code) :

else if (sLinkHref.match(/content\.screencast\.com/i)) {
    this.flash = true;
    var hRef = sLinkHref;
    this.so = new SWFObject("http://content.screencast.com/flvplayer.swf","flvvideo",
    this.options.contentsWidth, this.options.contentsHeight, "0", "#000");
    this.so.addVariable("content", hRef);
    this.so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true" );
    this.so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");}
  

With the .js code updated, you’d only have to change the video URL in the code where you want to put the lightbox on your webpage. This URL is not the video’s browser URL. You’ll have to get the link from the screencast.com embed code from the content server. It should look something like this (janky as hell) link:
http://content.screencast.com/users/scraster/folders/scraster.com/media/30fdc023-3034-4d7b-a5b5-32fd18c4cb32/valgen-intro-720.flv

A few notes about the screencast.com player in your lightbox: The allowFullScreen parameter is optional. If it’s set to “true”, then it will allow clicking the full screen button in the player. To set the player to autoplay when the lightbox opens, you can add this param to the .js code above:

this.so.addParam("autostart", "true" );

The screencast.com team doesn’t officially support this Videobox hack, so please try not to bother them with questions about it! Contact Scraster if you don’t understand how this all works and we’ll do our best to help you.

The screencast.com player is great for what it is: a fairly priced platform for easily video content manage with a nice looking delivery system for Scraster’s videos, but there are a couple ways in which we think the service should be improved. One major downfall of screencast.com is that they do not index the contents of the site with search engines. As it’s been thoughtfully described to us by Dirk Frazier, screencast.com’s product manager, this is a complicated situation. Basically, it wouldn’t be fair to the service’s free users–who come to be charged when their bandwith and storage exceeds a certain threshold—if their content was easily searchable. Likewise there are privacy issues. On the other hand, premium account owners like Scraster– who want their content shared as much as possible—don’t get any Google love. And there are no personalized links. To further minimize sharing, there are no “share” options when a video concludes similar to how there are on other web video hosting players like YouTube or Vimeo.

Taking the good with the bad, Scraster is very happy with our new hosting at screencast.com and we now have the peace of mind that our content is not in violation of terms, which is a major relief. We’re once again trading absolute control of our videos (gained only by self-hosting) for the convenience of a nice CMS, but we’re comfortable with that for now. What are your thoughts about screencast.com’s hosting? How’s our new player look? Aside from self-hosting and using a Flash player like JW Player, what are some other options you’d recommend? Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Afterthought: Vimeo also helped Scraster with coding our Videobox lightbox plugin back in February. If you’re using Vimeo (for non-commercial content) and would like to learn how to get Vimeo to work with the a lightbox video player like Videobox, you can read that Vimeo support thread here.

Scraster Professional Screencasting’s latest screencast introduces another bright new cloud-based software firm called Valgen. Valgen is a business intelligence (BI) company headed by a really sharp guy named Parth Srinivasa. Parth tasked Scraster with creating a professional screencast that would distill his complex predictive analytics product into an engaging few minutes of casually narrated video. The subject matter of the Valgen Productivity Suite was at first intimidating, but through Scraster’s collaborative script writing process, our team was able to work with Parth to hone in on the most important aspects of the platform.

Scraster was on a tight deadline to deliver the video in time to be entered into the Force.com Forty Innovation Showcase, a software challenge put on by CRM giant salesforce.com. We’ll find out next week whether Scraster has helped Valgen move a step closer to getting a coveted seat among 39 other leading SaaS app developers. Because this video has the potential to be viewed by a group that Scraster considers its target clientele, we were happy to agree on a lower price for the client in exchange for an extended credit at the video’s end. This kind of branding is something we’ve been doing more and more of with the understanding that 1) times are tight for our clients and 2) creating public awareness of the Scraster brand is as good as gold to us.

A few words about the production of the Valgen screencast. We reverted from Camtasia for Mac back to ScreenFlow for this one simply for reason of ScreenFlow’s kind of cursor effects not being available in Camtasia for Mac yet. Mouse callouts were important to the us and the client, and because we were on deadline, we didn’t want to deal with the Mouseposé mouse highlighting work-around. The sharp motion graphics of this screencast were created by Scraster’s newest team member, Dale Nabeta. We look forward to seeing more of Dale’s work in upcoming videos and are glad to have him on board.

If you are the developer of a salesforce.com app or have an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like Valgen’s, please visit Scraster’s Get a Free Quote page today. You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

Thanks for sharing this Valgen video with others. Here’s some short text handy for tweets:
>> Check out the new screencast from @scraster at http://scraster.com/valgen <<

The newest professional screencast by Scraster demonstrates Fluid, a great app for Mac users who rely heavily on web-based softwares like Google Docs, Basecamp, and Pandora. Fluid.app is a software that creates apps out of online tools so that they can be launched from the Mac OSX dock, be kept in their own windows, and controled with Preferences similarly to how other regular applications can be.

Scraster Professional Screencasting produced this Fluid screencast using TechSmith’s new Camtasia for Mac screencasting software. It was Scraster’s first serious experiment with Camtasia for Mac and we’re really happy with the end result. As you may or may not know, Scraster has been ScreenFlow-based since we opened our shop. While we haven’t dumped Telestream’s ScreenFlow, we definitely have a growing *crush* on Camtasia for Mac!

We were asked to hold off on posting this vid until the proper release date of Camtasia for Mac, which is today. Now you can DL a free trial of the app at TechSmith.com, where you can also buy a specially-priced copy for $50 less than its normal $150 price tag. John Basile, Team Leader at Scraster Professional Screencasting, is in the process of writing a full review of Camtasia for Mac which will be published by scrast.net, the screencasting website, in the next day or two. The scrast.net Twitter feed has mentioned that the site will have several copies of the software to give away in the coming days, so be on the lookout.

Well, this post came to be more about Camtasia for Mac than about its original subject, which was Fluid. If you’re on a Mac, you should check out Fluid asap. Download it for free at http://fluidapp.com and then collect some great looking icons for your new Fluid apps here on Flickr. You’ll be glad you did. If you come to enjoy Fluid, please forward this video on to your friends via the “share” tool on the player or tweet this URL: http://scraster.com/fluid Thanks!

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast, get a free quote from Scraster Professional Screencasting here. You can also email us at info@scraster.com. We’re @scraster on Twitter.