New demo movie

[OklaEd]

Fabulous movie Charles http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

This is exactly the type of marketing tool we have hoped you would produce.

MORE ... MORE!

[jens g.r. benthien]

Charles,

good movie, however, there are two minor glitches or inconsistancies:

Everything is interactive as demonstrated. But why the heck does the lady click the magnifying glass to zoom in? There is a shortcut (ALT+Z) which would be like magic in the demo.

The bitmap editor aka XPE: why didn't she just double click the picture to open up XPE? This would have made the demo much sleeker and truly interactive.

Just my two cents.

If I wouldn't use Xara for years now, this impressive movie would be the trigger to purchase it.

Maybe you should consider to offer a DivX version for the low bandwidth users. Version 4 is still available, ad free and cost free.

DivX 4.12 codec
is available here:

http://www.filemirrors.com/search.sr...vX412Codec.exe

http://www.pocketmatrix.com/guides/d...vX412Codec.exe

It's a small and fast dl even for modem users, and you could shrink the movie down to some 4 or 5 mb instead of 20 plus mb without compromising for quality.

[roman]

It's a great demonstration movie. Plus I agree with all Jens's points.

I wonder how would it look if there was a movie following complete process of creating of a complex poster using e.g. collage of about 50 images in 300 dpi.(it could be speeded up to be more "action") and then doing the same with Illustrator, Photoshop and Corel Draw). That could be a killer ;-)

[diniel]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>why the heck does the lady click the magnifying glass to zoom in? There is a shortcut (ALT+Z) which would be like magic in the demo.

The bitmap editor aka XPE: why didn't she just double click the picture to open up XPE? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
I think that this is so people can follow what is going on and so that things don't just "happen".

I often get told off by customers trying to watch me do something (not necessarily in Xara, perhaps teaching them how to do a mailmerge in Word) because I use keyboard shortcuts without explaining what I just did. They're natural for me, but they're not useful to others until they understand what they are shortcutting.

[Charles Moir]

Daniel's right - this movie is sort of aimed at new users rather than advanced users. To them there's nothing more confusing than things happening without seeing why or how - so the actions are very deliberate, quite slow with no short-cuts. The exception is that the document is pushed around with centre-button drags but we think that's OK.

Jens' I've tried the DivX4 and 5 codecs (and XVid and WMV and loads of others) and despite their reputation they are not as good as the one I used used - about the same in the best case. Screen recording is a really, really tough test for movie codecs. I can compress is down a lot more, but the image size has to come down, the frame rate come down, lower audio quality and the images get rather blocky - so you can't read menus. That might be a 10Mbyte movie or less, but I'm not sure it would be as effective.

[jens g.r. benthien]

Charles,

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> Screen recording is a really, really tough test for movie codecs. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

oooops, I didn't know that. To be honest, I wouldn't even know how to perform a screen recording. All I know is that DivX - using it for my 3D movies - shrinks the file size from i.e. 3 MB down to 128 k without any visible loss of quality.

But I can imagine there is a big difference between rendering a 3D animation and a screen recording.

[GroWeb]

What audio codec do I need in order to be able to hear this new movie's sound track? I was told by Irfanview (not by Camtasia) what video codec I needed, and I found it on the web and downloaded it. But neither of the players is telling me what audio codec I require. Does anybody know?

Glen

[AlexL]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by GroWeb:
What audio codec do I need in order to be able to hear this new movie's sound track? <snip> Does anybody know? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>Sure, you need an MP3 codec.

This comes as standard with Windows Media Player v7 and above, if that helps.

AlexL

[Charles Moir]

This movie should play straight off the bat in any reasonably recent version of Windows Media Player. It uses MP4 movie codec and MP3 audio. I can't point you at where to get the specific codecs (I don't know) but you can get the latest Windows Media Player form Microsoft and older versions (some people prefer) from various places on the web.

[cazza42]

Hi,

Just wanted to re-iterate my thanks to Daniel for sending me the CD he made of the downloadable movies. This new one is really great! I too couldn't get sound on one of my computers but luckily could on the other one.

Carol Leather