Posts Tagged ‘video tutorial’

a professional BlackBerry screencast for 5Touch

Monday, January 4th, 2010
image from http://www.aiga.org

image from http://www.aiga.org

It’s rumored that at Scraster, we only wear black turtlenecks and jeans. That’s just not true. While we adhere to the Steve Jobs dresscode most of the time, Fridays are casual, when Scraster employees are free to wear any color tutrleneck they choose. Likewise, it’s important to make clear that we aren’t all Mac screencasting at Scraster. We produce the same great looking videos we do for Mac and iPhone apps for Windows-based applications. We’re proud to now offer BlackBerry app screencasts as well as screencasts to demonstrate mobile apps on the Android platform.

Our most recent client was a San Jose/Toronto-based mobile software firm called 5Touch, whose new 5TEG mobile platform enables conference and event attendees to access live information such as agenda, map, exhibitor and speaker profiles on their smartphones and use social media channels to share and connect with others. 5Touch tapped Scraster to create a vid that introduced the 5TEG platform using sharp imagery and titling and interactive screen capture from the BlackBerry Storm. Scraster used the finger cursor to create a short, realistic demonstration of how easy and effective the app could be for event attendees. The screencast also illustrates the value of the 5TEG mobile platform to event sponsors, who are part of the target audience as well.

Bob Vaez, CEO of 5Touch, provided Scraster with this glowing testimonial upon the project’s completion:

“Scraster literary saved us 3-4 days of work trying to create a marketing/screencast for our mobile platform. Scraster… was extremely professional, cared about the quality of the work and was responding to our requests around the clock. The process was very well organized, and the result was way beyond our expectation as Scraster was able to tap into its marketing/artistic creativity and go beyond our basic requirement for an online marketing video. I highly recommend Scraster to anyone thinking about doing a screencast to showcase their software, mobile app or website online”.

Thanks, Bob! The pleasure was ours!

If your organization has a mobile product–Blackberry, iPhone, or Android– that you would like to demonstrate through the effective medium of professional screencasting, no one does it better than Scraster. Get a free quote from our website.  Also, feel free to contact us with any questions you have about creating your own mobile screencasts. We’ve got all the kinks ironed out here and would be happy to share what we know. You can email us at info@scraster.com or find us at Twitter, where we’re @scraster.

If you’d like to let your friends or colleagues know where they can have professional BlackBerry screencasts produced, please share the following text via a tweet or a status update:

Looking to do a BlackBerry screencast? @scraster does iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and regular web scrasts: http://bit.ly/5eMMmr

Valgen gets a major push with a professional screencast from Scraster Professional Screencasting

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Valgen screencast by Scraster Professional Screencasting

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 <<

an introduction to tr.im: a professional screencast by Scraster Professional Screencasting

Friday, June 12th, 2009
A Video from Scraster Professional Screencasting

Scraster Professional Screencasting is happy to add the Nambu Network to our roster of happy clients. The Nambu Network is a technology group developing some great software and services concentrating primarily in social media. Their newest service, called tr.im, is a tool for shortening URLS (for Twitter and elsewhere). With an account at tr.im, the user can log in and track their links via a rich set of analytics.

Scraster Professional Screencasting is happy to help the Nambu Network get the word out about tr.im with this overview video, which will live on the tr.im homepage. We’re also looking forward to producing a few more videos for the company’s signature app called Nambu, which is in our opinion the best Twitter client available for Mac. Nambu has changed the way Scraster uses Twitter.

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast, we invite you to get a free quote from Scraster Professional Screencasting today at scraster.com/quote. You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

Welcome to scraster.com v2.0!

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

scraster-logo-20It’s been a quiet month or so at the scraster.com blog, but we’ve been keeping busy. Our office has again moved and is now settled in yet another time zone. Our professional screencast work for clients continues and, perhaps most importantly, Scraster has just rolled out the first major update to our website since we began. Having been impressed with the viability of WordPress as a website content management system, Scraster team leader John Basile coded and designed the new Scraster.com website based on the popular K2 WordPress theme.

You may have noticed that Scraster.com v2.0 employs a Lightbox video player. While the Lightbox player was not easy to configure for WordPress and our chosen video hosting site, we are really happy with the end result. Scraster Professional Screencasting now strongly recommends the use of Lightbox 2 or similar technology to all our clients, as it’s a great way to share large videos (especially HD videos) without having a video player taking up valuable webpage real estate.

What do you think of the new site? Is there anything we’ve overlooked or could be doing better? Let us know by commenting below or by emailing info@scraster.com. If you’re interested in talking to Scraster about the creation of a professional screencast for your organization, please be in touch by using the Get a free quote form. Thanks for visiting. More soon!

Using transparent PNGs for a more professional ScreenFlow screencast

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

For the moment, the professional screencasting software ScreenFlow doesn’t allow for titling in the user’s screencasts. Also, the options for incorporating a user’s keystrokes* into ScreenFlow videos leaves a lot to be desired. Both titling and keystrokes can be achieved with little effort by introducing overlayed transparent images (PNGs) into the timeline. Scraster Professional Screencasting has put together a short HD video to explain this work-around. Please watch in full-screen for best picture.

*Visit keyboardicons.com to download a FREE set of Mac keyboard icons.

Do you have any topics you’d like to see covered in future tutorials from Scraster Professional Screencasting? Do you have a product or service online that could benefit from having a professional screencast? Email info@scraster.com, leave a comment below, or use the Contact form on our website. Thanks.

UPDATE: As of the recent release of ScreenFlow 1.5.1, ScreenFlow now offers titling natively.