Demo Video

Yesterday, I set out to create a demo video for Flight Odyssey. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but I expected the tricky part to be the video editing. You see, previously I had tried screen recording directly from a device using adb, but since I was getting frame rates around 0.2 fps (5 seconds per frame), I decided to just record the simulator. It turns out that wasn't much easier.
The first thing I tried was CamStudio, a free, open source screen recording software that I had used previously for a demo. I knew that it was a bit clunky (as free software tends to be), but I did not realize one crucial difference between my past use and this one. The last time I had used this software, I was demo-ing a piece of UI heavy business software. Frame rate was nearly irrelevant as I simply clicked on buttons and typed in text. By contrast, Flight Odyssey runs at about 30 fps, and at any speed slower than 20 -25 it looks unacceptably laggy. CamStudio recorded at about 10 fps, not to mention that there was no obvious way to hide the cursor and record audio.
So, I did a quick Google search and came up with two alternative screencasting programs, ZD Soft Screen Recorder 5.4 and Screencast-O-Matic. ZD Soft started off badly by recording with an odd codec (Xvid MPEG-4 Codec). After I had wasted about an hour trying to view the files it produced (which wouldn't open in QuickTime or Windows Media Player in their default configurations), I finally was able to view them using Aiseesoft Total Video Converter Platinum. They ran extremely smoothly at just about 30 fps (perhaps the odd codec helped?), but of course it was too good to be true - there was a watermark. I didn't want to spend $40 to get the full version of ZD Soft, and I didn't feel it was morally right to remove the watermark (though it wouldn't be too hard, if you left enough whitespace around the part of the screen that you're capturing), so I tried Screencast-O-Matic. Same story.
Finally, I thought I'd go back to CamStudio and give it one more shot. A little bit of searching revealed that even though the "Record Speaker" option wasn't working, this could be easily worked around by using "Record Microphone and setting the speaker as the only input mechanism in the Control Panel. The annoying cursor could be removed with the Cursor Options command. So, all thenmimor annoyances were resolved and only the main problem remained. Suddenly, I realized that there was a menu command called Video Options that I had been overlooking (I'm not sure why). It contained an option to reduce video quality and increase maximum frame rate (set by default to 10 fps for unknown reasons) which I quickly took advantage of.
All was not yet resolved, though. The resulting video, though taken at a whopping 40 fps, was a complete mess. The graphics were blurry and any movement left long artifacts trailing behind. Furthermore, any attempt to increase graphics without decreasing frame rate led the game itself to lag. Ultimately, I found a happy compromise at 20 fps and switched to recording on a desktop computer for better performance. Finally, I had my video, right?
Of course not. iMovie wouldn't recognize the file format that CamStudio produced. So, one last step was necessary - back to Aiseesoft Total Video Converter to convert .avi to. m4a. At last, all was well.
Hopefully that was helpful to anybody else hoping to make a video demo of an app - the video I made is available here on YouTube. Thanks for reading!