Andy Budd's dashboard

Andy Budd replied on August 05, 2009 10:51 to the problem "Synching issue with Vimeo makes video unusable - codec incompatibility??" in Clearleft:

Hi Leisa,

Silverback uses h.264 and AAC for medium and low quality as it provides the highest compression levels while still retaining image fidelity.

For "best quality" we're using the animation codec which produces extremely high quality images but at the cost of large files sizes.

For "high quality" be use MPEG4 and AAC as this produced the best quality vs compression during our trials.

While we do have the ability to include custom export setting, our research showed that most people didn't understand the setting so ended up creating inferior results to the presets. However if there is demand for fine grain control, we'll consider putting it back in.

I'm unsure which export setting you used for your Vimeo videos, but I'd recommend trying the medium setting. If that works in Quicktime but doesn't play correctly in Vimeo, it sounds like it's a problem may be with the Vimeo engine.

Andy Budd replied on July 13, 2009 16:25 to the problem "One of my captured videos is unreadable." in Clearleft:

Hi ihatemornings,

Really sorry to hear about the problem. To be honest, we've not encountered data corruption since the initial release, so I am surprised. Would you be able to send me the Silverback logs, along with the corrupt video and we'll look into things. My email address is andy@clearleft.com.

Corruption should only really occur when your system is critically short on memory and/or disk space, so were you experiencing any of these issues during capture? Maybe you could send me your system profile so we can get a better look at the specs on your machine. Also, were you using an external HD at all, as that can contribute to performance issues under serious load?

Incidentally we've just pushed a release that includes improvements in the capture mechanism and fixed a few bugs we've discovered in Quicktime. This probably won't help as your problems sound unrelated, but it may be worth downloading and trying the new version.

A comment on the question "Video is lagging behind the sound?" in Clearleft:

Hey nefibach. Can you send an email to me at andy@clearleft.com and I'll send you a copy straight back.

Cheers – Andy Budd, on July 08, 2009 13:56

A comment on the question "Video is lagging behind the sound?" in Clearleft:

Hey Phil, I couldn't find the email I'm afraid so would you mind sending it directly to andy@clearleft.com and I'll send you back an updated copy of Silverback straight away! – Andy Budd, on July 08, 2009 13:55

Andy Budd replied on July 06, 2009 20:42 to the question "Video is lagging behind the sound?" in Clearleft:

Hey Guys, I think we've worked out a fix for this, or at least managed to reduce the drift as much as possible. If you can send me an email in the next day or two I'll send you a link to an updated version.

It looks like the problem is a memory issue, so the drifts were occurring on machines with low memory or when the machines were using a lot of memory transferring data to an external USB drive. However it doesn't seem like the same problem is occurring with Firewire drives as they don't seem to use as much system memory.

Andy Budd replied on July 05, 2009 13:03 to the question "Painfully slow render time?" in Clearleft:

So far we've been working on reducing the native render time and have managed to get it down by around 200% which we're pretty chuffed at. Once we can't get any more native speed increases we'll probably look at adding support for hardware optimisation like the Elgato Turbo.264 HD. However this will probably only improve performance by around 30%, so it'll only be useful for a small number of people who have the hardware and are doing a lot of video rendering.

Andy Budd replied on June 29, 2009 12:23 to the question "Will Silverback work with Uservue?" in Clearleft:

People have had success using Silverback with iChat screen sharing. However we've not tried it with other services. If you give it a go, let us know how you get on!

Andy Budd replied on June 10, 2009 16:41 to the problem "Exporting sessions on other Mac" in Clearleft:

There are some problems moving files from a Power PC to an Intel and vica versa due to the differing system architecture. However you should be OK moving between computers with the same or similar chip/OS.

Andy Budd replied on June 08, 2009 09:25 to the question "Provide Feedback when adding task markers" in Clearleft:

Thanks Roland. We're going to add an option to disable in a future version if you feel it is going to be distracting.

Andy Budd replied on June 05, 2009 15:47 to the idea "Great Ideas for your product" in Clearleft:

Nice idea. Thanks for that

Andy Budd replied on June 05, 2009 15:45 to the idea "Eye tracking" in Clearleft:

Thanks for the links Gustavo,

There are a couple of ways of doing eye tracking. You can either have a head mounted camera that fixates on a single eye, or a webcam that is sensitive to UV lights and a couple of UV lamps. You can buy these from commercial companies but they cost a lot (thousands). You can also make them but they're quite fiddily and require some technical experience.

I have seen experiments with unmodified webcams but they aren't very accurate and you need to keep your head perfectly still, which means they are great for research projects but not really suitable for commercial projects at the moment. Still, as web cam resolution increases, that may change.

Andy Budd replied on June 05, 2009 15:13 to the question "Mouse Click Data?" in Clearleft:

Thanks Joshua,

Just to clarify, the application already plots the mouse clicks on screen, so I'm curious to know what you'd use the X,Y co-ordinates for? Is it to create click-maps or some other reason?

Andy Budd replied on June 03, 2009 09:05 to the question "Japanese localisation before Web Directions East?" in Clearleft:

Finally. Thanks for all the help with that!

Andy Budd replied on June 01, 2009 22:08 to the problem "Audio Capture Problem - Loud Hiss Only - Details / Log file enclosed" in Clearleft:

Awesome. Glad we got it fixed for you

Andy Budd replied on May 18, 2009 15:01 to the question "Mouse Click Data?" in Clearleft:

Silverback is mostly aimed at qualitative rather than quantitative testing at the moment. However we'd definitely consider the addition of more quantitative metrics if there is good cause and it won't overly complicate the interface. So I'd be interested to learn more about how you'd use this data and what kind of conclusions you'd hope to extract.

Andy Budd replied on May 18, 2009 10:17 to the question "Camera Horizontally reversed in screen capture window." in Clearleft:

Hi Phillip,

As Silverback is intended as a usability testing tool rather than a more general screencasting tool, the inversion is actually intended. So it's a feature rather than a bug :-)

We do this so that the direction people are looking in the video reflects the activity they are doing on screen. If we didn't invert the video, people could be interacting with the top right hand portion of the screen, but the video would show them looking top left.

Of course this does mean that text on t-shirts or written on card and held up to the camera will be inverted. However as this isn't usually a problem in usability testing, we felt the simplification of the preferences pane outweighed any potential benefit.

I hope that help explain the reason for the inversion and lack of preference options.

A comment on the problem "Audio Capture Problem - Loud Hiss Only - Details / Log file enclosed" in Clearleft:

Unfortunately (but understandably) getsatisfaction doesn't give us access to your email address, so can you email me on andy@clearleft.com and I'll send you the updated version. – Andy Budd, on May 07, 2009 14:45

Andy Budd replied on May 07, 2009 12:15 to the problem "Audio Capture Problem - Loud Hiss Only - Details / Log file enclosed" in Clearleft:

Hey Calum, we've built some extra logging into the next version of Silverback to help track down the problem. If you can let me know your email address I'll send you a copy of the next release so we can help get to the bottom of your problem.

Andy Budd replied on May 01, 2009 12:26 to the question "Provide Feedback when adding task markers" in Clearleft:

Great minds think alike, so we've already got that scheduled for the 1.1 release, coming soon.

Andy Budd replied on April 29, 2009 10:44 to the question "Best export settings for Vimeo?" in Clearleft:

Actually we haven't played around with exporting for Vimeo, but let us know how you get on :-)