Category Archives: things

Improve Your App’s Demo Video with a Virtual Finger

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Steven

More and more webOS developers are starting to include video demos of their apps, which is great.  Unfortunately, capturing your app on video can be somewhat difficult.  One way around this is to use the emulator on your PC to run the app and screen recording software to record the emulator running your app.  While this works great, it has one major limitation: you can see the mouse cursor.  This looks strange to people who are not developers, and it looks even more strange when you view the video on your phone and see a little mouse cursor running around on an app.

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Adding Youtube Output Profiles in Windows Movie Maker

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Steven

After cropping my videos to a 16:9 format using the previously mentioned How to crop a 4:3 video to 16:9 with Windows Movie Maker tutorial, I was left with a puzzling problem. Since Youtube disregards pixel aspect ratio (PAR), and widescreen DVD resolution files do no have square pixels, the only option was to encode the movies in HD 720p.  Now this is great if you are dealing with HD video, but then why did you want to crop it in the first place.  It is a waste of file space and bandwidth to use an HD output format on an SD video.  So, I set out to create some custom output profiles for Windows Movie Maker.

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How to crop a 4:3 video to 16:9 with Windows Movie Maker

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Steven

Since Youtube started using the new widescreen 16:9 video format, I have been trying to figure out how to make my videos fill the player.  Trouble is, I only had a 4:3 camera, and used windows movie maker to do all of my editing.  as it turns out, windows movie maker has no build in cropping feature.  It does, however, allow for very easy creation of custom effects.  This msdn site was used as the basis for creating this custom effect.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb469712(VS.85).aspx

Turns out, it’s very easy to create your own custom cropping tool.

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