Our submission video was a hassle, to be sure. I ran into a huge problem when the FlipVideo files I dumped off the camera decided to no longer be accessible on the Flip editing program. I fought them for quite some time before trying a host of different conversion programs. I was eventually able to get all the MP4s over to AVIs and set off with good ol' Windows Movie Maker to put them all together.
Our demo day yielded a whopping 4 hours of raw footage, even with the battery dying unexpectedly and it was quite a job to edit that down. There were approximately 11 minutes worth of decent video to pick from when all the picking and choosing went through. I set that all aside and worked on doing our screencap video. Using Droid@Screen, I was able to show click-throughs of all of our available functionality on both my personal Droid2 and a fellow staff member's Samsung Intercept. Due to this computer's rather dated integrated graphics, it wasn't smooth or pretty, getting about 2 FPS at best, but it did what we needed. I also grabbed some screencaps of the emulator for things that it could handle and set about to put them together the most efficient and demonstrative way possible.
Originally, I had planned to narrate as I went through the demo, but after a dozen failed attempts, I found it easier and more time-efficient to merely go through and add a separate audio clip afterward. In truth, next time I will record the audio all at once if at all possible, as there was quite a variation as the day went on between my voice volume, quality and enthusiasm level. Volume went up, quality went down and I really started to feel what I was saying, not that there's any correlation between any of that, ha!
Once I went through all that, it was time to put together the demo and the comments. I had 6 minutes to fill, and tried to keep the pacing as even as possible. There were only a few spots I ended up feeling rushed or awkwardly slow, and with the deadline nearing, I needed to call it a day.
The intro and outro were the last thing I did, and of course, skewed everything else I'd done prior. With a minute left to do both, I fell back to my boss' idea. Several months back, he went to a presentation where he fell in love with the idea of showing children dreaming or wishing for smartphones and apps and then growing up into them, fitting the 2015 motif. I made no promises, but with the remaining time, I did my best to incorporate the ideas.
With a little googling and a bit of Photoshop work, I put together an intro. It went fairly quickly and without too many changes to the rough 'script', went smoothly into the existing meat of the video proper. The outro was a bit more complicated to hammer out, but was a great deal easier to edit. I saved and exported, waiting the hour and some odd for it to process.
Lucky for me, I previewed the video before submitting. When I added the audio for the intro, it skewed all of the audio further down the timeline. Instead of just filling the space, it left the space in, throwing all of my cues out of whack. To make matters worse, all of the subtitles I'd added in were no longer synced with the dialogue or what was being shown on screen. I hastily set out to fix all of this.
About an hour later, I was spinning in my chair again, waiting for the video to compile and output. The resulting file was a whopping 1.08GB compressed in WinRAR. Our store was closing, so I dropped it onto my pen drive and resumed working at home. I spent several hours hunting down the best converter and running it on the mammoth file before dropping it off in the NACS submission server.
So! There's the short and the long of it! Let me know what you think, if you read this far!
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