Reading Radar

The beauty of change is that things don’t remain the same as they were. Simple enough, right? But when it comes to the Mac and options for screencasting or machinima recording, that’s both good and potentially expensive.

The History

When I first started messing around with Machinima, or videoing SL anyway, I was using Snapz Pro X. It’s great for screen capture stills, providing a few more options than the built in OS X screen capture tools (which are really usually more than adequate), and it can also do video. The video side of things, I wouldn’t really rate so highly. It’s ok. It seemed to affect the system a bit when recording while running SL, and if I recall correctly, I didn’t like how it had to output to disk immediately, so if you stopped recording, it could cause you wait time before you could record again.

Next, I tried iShowU, in it’s Tiger and lower incarnation. I had issues with it, namely performance and with soundflower not working and therefore not recording audio sometimes. It worked, but it was not reliable in my opinion.

Then I came to ScreenFlow, which at the time was owned by a small company which was basically the creator of the application, as far as I could tell. ScreenFlow was a game changer. ScreenFlow did not require you to select a part of the screen to record, as all the other apps did. It just recorded the whole screen, then you’d actually edit the video you shot in the program itself, including being able to set the viewing area. You can zoom in, zoom out, pan around, and generally make great screencasts where you are zooming all over the place, and all because ScreenFlow records the whole screen first and has you edit later. It allows for some very dynamic screencasts.

All seemed well, but my enthusiasm for the built-in ScreenFlow editor started waning for a reason. The reason is that I wanted to start using Final Cut Express 4 to edit videos instead of ScreenFlow’s built-in editor, or any other video editor for that matter. This really meant that for me, ScreenFlow went from mandatory to just one more option. This led me to … the FUTURE!! Er… the PRESENT!!

The Present

Oh, how time changes things. There are now three really solid screencasting tools which are more than suitable for machinima on the Mac, and two of those are products that I found inadequate in earlier versions.

In no particular order, the three contenders, the ones whose icons have a safe place on my dock (for now).

ScreenFlow

IShowU HD

ScreenFlick

I’ll cover each of these one by one in their own posts, coming up! Soon… really. And actually, I lied. These are in the order they are in for a reason, and I’ll cover that as well.

I posted about my tests with SLim a couple posts ago. Testing again today, I’m seeing that if I IM my alt from SLim, the alt’s name disappears and I get a message that he’s temporarily unavailable. Then his name reappears on the list.

If I IM from in-world to the account logged into SLim, however, it works fine.

Anyone else seeing this with SLim right now?

Last post I complained about how testing the SLim client would be hard with no one using it yet, then I woke up and created a SLim account for an alt that I use for building/scripting and getting stuff done (hence the blurred name in the picture below) and IM’d my Radar account while logged into SL as Radar, and into SLim client as the alt.

It worked really well for text IM, obviously I wasn’t going to be trying out the voice capabilities though. But for IM it was instant back and forth.

Then I noticed that Dedric Mauriac, while not logged into SL, was logged into SLim. I knew because of the icon next to his name in my friends list.

I IM’d him but got no response, so either he’s sleeping, wishing I was under the wheels of a bus, or SLim really only works to communicate with your alts. Hmmmm…..

Right now the downsides are still the requirement of a special client to use it, which 99.999% of the people won’t download, having to create an account with Vivox, which 99.999% of the people will find annoying, and all the normal considerations of the SL client, namely, I don’t think this will be an option for people who can’t have SL on a particular computer or need to get around firewalls that SL can’t. I think it’s useful if you aren’t logged into SL and don’t want to, but need to communicate with someone real quick, or if they aren’t, but are using SLim. I think it’s a nice to have, and I think for a few people, I may use it quite a bit. It would be nice to only have to deal with an IM window in-world, for example, than to deal with skype and in-world SL IM’s at once.

We shall see…. oh, yeah, the locals are still angry at the Lindens anyway, so they’re all claiming lack of interest in SLim based on that perspective too.

UPDATE:

I tried out the voice with Stuart Warf this morning while we were both out of world, logged into SLim. Once I pointed it to the correct audio devices, all was well and it worked fine. Sound quality was about what you’d expect from the Vivox/SL voice experience - not great. Vivox seems to be synonymous with “noise generator” in my experience, although in recent months it’s always worked well for conversations in SL. It’s nasty to record for podcasts though.

Also, SLim keeps wanting to default to the first account I logged into the IM client with rather than the last one. That’s annoying. Couple other annoyances with it not keeping my preferences saved, which I assume will get fixed over time.

I agree with Jane’s comment on this post, LL needs to make sure that the barrier of entry is low for people to use this. Obviously right now it’s only first look, but LL tend to gravitate towards complexity. Then again, the SL experience in general is pretty smooth compared to the Openlife Grid’s website and information for new users.

Ok, the SLim IM client thingy is out in first look form, as announced in the SL blog, but I can’t really comment on how well it works for a simple reason. In order for you to voice or text IM others using it, they also have to be using either SLim or else the new SLim compatible SL client for you to reach them. And in order for them to use the SLim client they have to already be using the SLim compatible SL client… confused yet?

It’s actually pretty simple, just not so great for getting initial impressions. To use the SLim client, you need a new version of the SL viewer. That allows interaction between the two. You need an account through Vivox to make the SLim client work. And then you need the SLim client itself.

Even though it’s really not a difficult process, it’s just difficult and annoying enough that all the people already fed up with LL (rightly or wrongly) aren’t going to be bothered to try it out. And that means no one to test it with, and that means no first impressions. At least until Saturday, which will be the first day I’ll be home and online at the same time as some people who maybe ARE trying it out.

It’s too bad the process isn’t a little more streamlined. Once it’s built into a mainstream viewer, if LL and Vivox can get the account thing ironed out so you do not have to create a separate one on Vivox, then maybe more people will use it. Right now I’m not sure how many people will.

I like the concept. I wish I knew if I liked the actual function.

BTW, can LL write even ONE blog post without people whining about “ok, that’s nice, now get back to stability” or “does vivox know that everyone is leaving SL anyway?” etc, etc? I get that you’re disgruntled. Posting OT on the blog isn’t going to fix it. Stick to the fucking topic. There’s plenty of ON topic places to post your anger that openspaces weren’t actually meant for your blinged out hair stores. I mean, I agree the price hike was bad, but I’m starting to feel a lot less sorry for the openspace abusers the more they open their mouths.