It's been well over a month since I started talking about Eclipse's Synchronize functionality, with not a word about my supposed followup. You might just assume that I'm lazy (and you'd be correct), but as always, there's more to it than that.
While preparing this second blog entry, I started staring at a folder full of a few dozen screen captures highlighting various features of Eclipse's Synchronize View. A few dozen is a lot of screenshots to post, but because the Synchronize view's big advantage is that it's so visual, it's hard to decide which visuals to cut out. And being a rather verbose guy[1], it's rather hard for me to edit.
So instead of unleashing a dozen screenshots on you in a long, rambling blog entry, I decided to do one better: make a screencast of Synchronize in action. This way I can still be long and rambling, but there's just one square of visual content on your screen instead of a few dozen.
If you look back through my posts, you'll notice that I don't have any screencasts online. This is because I've never made one before. In fact, I have absolutely no experience with video editing, nor audio editing, and when put in front of a microphone, I can barely manage to speak in full sentences.
Still, the entire concept seems pretty easy. I click around on a screen while I talk. I click around on a screen all day. I also talk all day. Combining these things shouldn't be too hard, right?
But pride goeth before the fall.
It started out well: I grabbed Snapz Pro to record with. It works exactly as advertised, recording your screen (or a subset thereof, in my case just my Eclipse window) as well as audio from an arbitrary source (my microphone.)
After that, all that was needed was some editing to remove my stammering, my "um"s and "duhhh"s, my false starts, etc. No problem right? My Mac came with iMovie HD, which is supposed to be "the fastest and easiest way to turn home movies into dazzling Hollywood-style hits." Surely, this amazing program will let me splice up this silly 800x600 video trivially, right?
To be fair, iMovie does seem really easy to use. Slow, but easy. After only a few clicks (and thirty minutes of it grinding away), I'd imported my screencast and split the audio and video tracks so I could see the waveforms easily and know right where I wanted to splice, which is also very easy.
Unfortunately, iMovie 6 does have a minor issue with stability. And by "minor issue," I mean it has a tendency to crash every 10 minutes. Knowing this, one might suggest I go find a new piece of software to do my video editing. But I'm the dreaded combination of lazy, cheap and stubborn, and thus came up with an ingenious workaround to continue using the free iMovie that I had already mostly learned: have a beer or two before using it (to remain calm enough to keep myself from stepping on my computer) and saving often. No problem, right?
Right.
Despite being slowed down by the constant crashes, I got about halfway through the process of making me sound like a human before iMovie - predictably - crashed for approximately the 714th time. But this time, it took my entire project file with it - somehow in that crash it had become corrupt. I googled for solutions, I tried various things to recover it, I checked permissions, I made a sacrifice to the software gods... I even rebooted. No love: iMovie continued to tell me it couldn't be read.
At that point, I just walked away, too frustrated with the process to even continue. I haven't touched it since, and given this delay, I thought I owed my one reader (who is, admittedly, probably Google's indexing bot) an apology. I will actually finish this article on Synchronize. I promise. It will probably consist of a few dozen screenshots, and I'll hate myself for doing that and curse at it every time I see it. But at least I'll be done with it.
I suppose I could attempt to finish this stupid screencast, but then I'd have to decide whether I want to suffer through using iMovie or if I should just buy Final Cut Pro. That is to say: being cheap, I need to determine if Final Cut Pro is less expensive than the quantity of oxycontin I'd need to take to be able to handle using iMovie or not[3]. (Beer just isn't going to cut it anymore.)
(If you're wondering, of course that oxycontin comment is a joke. I would never buy oxycontin. I'm way too cheap for that.)
- Perhaps you've noticed, as even my footnotes get footnotes[2].
- Often very similar to this one.
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