For years, people have been asking. They say, “Scraster, when are going to do a video for an online product that effectively eliminates the expenses associated with traditional off-site and on-site tape storage and tracking methods?” We were almost getting tired of hearing the question when we were approached by Rocket Software, the parent company of Servergraph and makers of a product called Tape Vault Expert. TVE does just this.

In all seriousness, when Rocket came to Scraster, we knew nothing about tape storage. We were familiar with the ubiquitous Iron Mountain trucks on the road, but that’s about it. One of the beauties of professional screencasting is learning about so many different areas of business… like tape management. In the course of a few conversations and the exchange of few emails with photo attachments, Scraster figured out the best way to approach the subject visually. Scraster’s lead animator Rory Campbell fired off some rough sketches to the client to make sure we were on the right track. A week or so later, we had transformed the client’s vision into an reality. The animation Rory creatively crafted would serve as the needed conceptual introduction to support the walkthrough of the Tape Vault Expert interface. The client will be the first to admit that the UI of the TVE interface is far from sexy, but in terms of function, TVE gets the job done better than anything on the market and this screencast effectively demonstrates exactly how for potential customers.

We’re happy to have learned something new and interesting about an industry we’d otherwise never come across and Rocket Software was/is very happy with their video. Scraster will likely be producing some videos for other Rocket/Servergraph products in the coming months. If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like the one Scraster Professional Screencasting produced for Tape Vault Expert, 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.

Scraster Professional Screencasting recently produced a screencast for World Politics Review, a premium provider of information and analysis on international affairs found online at worldpoliticsreview.com. The general manager at WPR approached Scraster with a familiar problem among paid-content websites: “We have all this great content behind our homepage, but we’re afraid people don’t know it’s there”. It was the objective of WPR to create a site tour that would show off the site, inside and out. WPR wrote most of the screencast script, and Scraster took control from there. The end result is an engaging screencast that servers two main purposes. First, the video is a introduction of WPR to new visitors who are unfamiliar with how to navigate the content-rich free side of the site. As well as giving unsubscribed visitors a cursory tour of the free content, the later part of the WPR screencast invites free users to consider the many benefits of WPR’s premium subscription service, which include a wealth of additional reports, downloads, and other exclusive content.

If you manage subscription-based website or have a premium online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like WPR’s, please visit Scraster’s Get a Free Quote page today. You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

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The current count of iPhone apps available for download is around 100,000. That is a remarkable stat that. Millions of people are downloading apps to their iPhones each day. How, then, is an app developer supposed to rise above the fray and distinguish their product amongst so many others? With a professional screencast demo from Scraster. Scraster Professional Screencasting is happy to extend its expert production services to the iPhone realm. Clients who are serious about taking the marketing of their iPhone app to the next level are invited to contact Scraster for a free quote.

Chris Strode, creator of the popular Invoice2go iPhone app, recently attempted to create a screencast demo in-house. He didn’t think it’d be difficult and was aware of the challenges of passing off an iPhone project. It didn’t take long for Chris to come to the point in the road that many others Scraster clients have come to before reaching out to us–he realized that his skills are best spent on the development end of things, and that the production of a professional-looking video that effectively demonstrated his hard work would be best left to a professional service that could do the app justice. Scraster was happy to help, and Chris was surprised to find that the roadblocks involving the privacy of his source code could easily be averted. Invoice2go ended up with a stunning video.

Producing iPhone app screencasts is, for many reasons, more difficult than traditional screencasting. First, it requires the download and installation of the enormous iPhone SDK and Xcode development environment just to access the iPhone Simulator. The next challenge is getting an app for demonstration installed to the Simulator without the source code. There’s a pretty good tutorial on this subject at thegadgets.net.

Since users of the Simulator can’t install and run apps for which they don’t have code, a lot of amateur scrasts using the Simulator look crumby–the iPhone looks naked and unnatural with no carrier and no apps. Atebits (creators of Tweetie, the popular Twitter client) provided the iPhone screencasting community a gift last spring with the public release a simple but handy tool called SimFinger, “a bundle of little tricks to make a screencapture of the iPhone Simulator suck less”. SimFinger allows iPhone screencasters the ability to load up the iPhone with “fake” apps and also creates the small white cursor effect meant to emulate finger presses, which you’ve probably seen in a lot of well-produced iPhone app scrasts recently. Scraster has hacked its way around several of SimFinger’s limitiations–such as its fixed white background and locked placement of the iPhone to the far left of the desktop–to create the perfect environment for slick looking iPhone video screen capture.

For Scraster’s most recent iPhone app screencast, we were psyched to get our hands on the new ScreenFlow 2. The much-anticipated software update released on October 26th includes the promising feature of being able to speed up clips on the timeline. This has always been possible in advanced video editors like FinalCut, but is unique to screencasting software. It’s clutch for things like iPhone screencasts, where the viewer shouldn’t be made to sit through your screen actions in realtime.

Unfortunately, Scraster found ScreenFlow 2′s clip speed feature to be severely… maddeningly… buggy, and very close to the point of completely dysfunctional. The actual clip speed feature itself worked passably, but when speed was applied to clips on the timeline, audio processing would be effected. There would be either an unacceptable delay in the audio during playback, or the audio would be dropped out all together. The upshot is that ScreenFlow 2′s support team and developers were very responsive to the issue and Scraster has a beta version of the v2.0.2 that proves the known issue will be remedied with the next update. Although the speed transform feature wasn’t ready for prime time at ScreenFlow 2′s (delayed) release and nearly did our heads in, we ended up creating one of our nicest videos to date and the client was ecstatic. And at the end of the day (or week), the client’s approval and the size of their smile is all that matters.

Scraster’s tagline says, “You’ve got better things to do. Scraster does screencasts”. This has never been more true than in the case of professional quality iPhone app screencasting, which throws a couple more monkey wrenches into an already challenging process. Scraster Professional Screencasting offers a cost-effective way to bring our client’s premium iPhone apps into the limelight where they belong. If you’re frustrated with how your in-house iPhone app screencasting is going or you’d like to leave demonstration production to the pros from the get-go, contact Scraster for a free quote today. You’ve got better things to do. Scraster does iPhone app screencasts.

Dreamforce 2009, the Cloud Computing Event of the Year, is taking place November 17 throught the 20th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. If you’re attending, you know what an important opportunity this is. If you’re a vendor, it’s even more important.

At salesforce.com’s seventh annual user and developer conference, 12,000 customers, partners, and employees will be in attendence for four days with a similar goal in mind: maximizing an investment in salesforce.com and learning from the best how to use the cloud to stay ahead of the competition.

Scraster Professional Screencasting produces high-quality screencast video tutorials and software demos and has experience producing videos specifically for salesforce.com AppExchange applications. Our screencast videos, which can live on the client’s own homepage or as an embed on the AppExchange page, are the most effective way to show off the capabilities and value of a software. A Scraster video is also ideal for presentation scenarios, such as meetings or loop-play from a conference booth. Like Dreamforce 2009!

If you’re a vendor who has something to share with the Dreamforce community and you don’t have a screencast to demonstrate your product or service, you have a problem. Fortunately, Scraster Professional Screencasting has the solution. There’s not a lot of time left, so contact us today to learn how the highly-effective medium of screencast video can capture customers’ attention in what is sure to be a fight for eyeballs at Dreamforce 2009.

Scraster Professional Screencasting is pleased to introduce its most recent satisfied client, LiveChime. LiveChime is a Seattle-based start-up that creates an easy way to add live chat to online classified, auctions and marketplaces “to bring you the best buyer-2-seller results on the web”. Scraster bumped into LiveChime’s Erik Bergsagel on Twitter, where Erik asked his tweeps if they knew of any good professional screencasting services. A few tweets and a phone call later, Scraster was on its way to writing, recording, and producing the screencast for LiveChime’s tight Friday deadline. The video was delivered Friday and will be featured on the LiveChime site soon as the beta product gets closer to its official launch.

Working with LiveChime was a pleasure, but perhaps the coolest thing to come from our new business relationship is that Scraster now has a live chat link on each page of its website. LiveChime was as easy as could be to set up, and we’ve already had a trickle of inquiries–one of which led to a close. Although LiveChime is (for now) primarily targeting the online classifieds market, users of all kinds (like Scraster) can register and stick the chat link wherever they’d like. I’d highly recommend the service to anyone looking for a way to increase their accessibility. Visit the LiveChime website at http://livechime.com for more info. If you’d like to learn more about Scraster, and how Scraster helps companies like LiveChime engage, sell, and educate their site visitors, contact us today via our Get a Free Quote page.