Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html) lets you capture images and videos you see on your computer screen so you can share them with other people. You can add text and captions to screen images. You can also record whatever you are doing on your computer screen, along with your narration, in a video.
Next, John had to decide what to use as the subject of his video. The boys had recently revived their interest in Club Penguin so the answer was obvious.
As a general rule I don't like downloading unknown software onto my computer. It seems that whenever I download new software something evil happens and I start getting error messages or a virus hijacks my browser. Since one of primary activities I do on my laptop is write lectures and organize materials for my courses I always get nervous that my computer will stop working and I'll lose all of my work. At one point I instituted a policy of "no new downloads during the semester". Now that it's summer I'm feeling more adventurous about venturing outside of my comfort zone.
Our first step was to download and install Jing. Jing lives on the computer desktop so you can capture a screen or record a video on the desktop, in your browser or in any application you have launched. John opened Club Penguin and recorded the computer screen while he navigated the game and narrated his video. When he played back the video there was no audio (arrgh!) I Googled "Jing audio not working" and determined we hadn't selected our USB microphone as the audio source for Jing. Once we did that we were back in business. John narrated and recorded his new video and saved his file. He then uploaded the video to YouTube. Everything looked great until the end of the upload when YouTube announced the file was not compatible with YouTube (double arrgh!).
Have you ever heard of a .swf file? Neither have I but that's what Jing produces. I found out .swf stands for Shock Wave Flash, which is more commonly called Adobe Flash. Turns out there are a lot of different types of video files and YouTube only likes a small set of them. We recognized .avi files from the list of acceptable formats and set out to convert our .swf file to a .avi file. I Googled "convert .swf to .avi" and there were several programs available, many for free. I was hesitant just to start downloading a converter from any random website. I might inadvertently download a virus or some other source of evil. I decided to go with the "Free SWF to AVI File Converter" download from the CNET.com site because I have read what I believe to be reputable information on the CNET website. CNET also collects reviews of the downloadable programs and I read through a few of them for the "Free SWF to AVI File Converter". I crossed my fingers and hit the "Download" button. The download of the .swf to .avi converter went well and I declined all the extra downloads that were offered as part of CNET's ad-supported service.
We installed our "Free SWF to AVI File Converter" and launched the program. The CNET reviews said the program wasn't intuitive so we used the program "Help" to figure out how to use it. The first topic in the "Help" file is called, "How to convert Flash to Video?" Clicking the link takes you to a video with the instructions for the conversion. The video is available at http://www.swf-video.com/guide/How-to-convert-flash-to-video.htm. We watched the video and following the steps to covert our .swf file to a .avi file.
John was then able to upload his .avi file to YouTube. His 4 minute 21 second video can be found at http://youtu.be/MexTi8F0mvA. If you don't have time to watch the entire video, here are some highlights;
0:00 - How to become a Club Penguin secret agent
1:25 - John's younger brother annoys him during the making of the video
1:55 - Bonus footage of how to throw suds at someone in the hotel spa
3:34 - Unable to put dots in the blog address
We installed our "Free SWF to AVI File Converter" and launched the program. The CNET reviews said the program wasn't intuitive so we used the program "Help" to figure out how to use it. The first topic in the "Help" file is called, "How to convert Flash to Video?" Clicking the link takes you to a video with the instructions for the conversion. The video is available at http://www.swf-video.com/guide/How-to-convert-flash-to-video.htm. We watched the video and following the steps to covert our .swf file to a .avi file.
John was then able to upload his .avi file to YouTube. His 4 minute 21 second video can be found at http://youtu.be/MexTi8F0mvA. If you don't have time to watch the entire video, here are some highlights;
0:00 - How to become a Club Penguin secret agent
1:25 - John's younger brother annoys him during the making of the video
1:55 - Bonus footage of how to throw suds at someone in the hotel spa
3:34 - Unable to put dots in the blog address
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