Start and End Slides, Take 2

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Jan 23, 2007, at 6:54 AM, Ubuntu Clips wrote:
>
> On 1/20/07, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> ...
>> I suggest you have only one slide at the start, not two, and make the
>> title the biggest element of that slide. That way it will work better
>> in environments where the first frame is used as a preview -- for
>> example when it is being streamed over the Web, and people are staring
>> at the first frame while the rest of it is buffered.
> ...
> Thank you for the feedback. If we did this, we could either move the 
> starting slide (with the k/x/ubuntu logo) as the second slide or 
> remove it altogether as you suggest. Does anyone else have any 
> preferences or thoughts about this?

I suggest making a combination slide for the first frame:

                               Ubuntu logo
                          Ubuntu variant+version

                                  Title

                           originating Web site

Fade it out starting at about 0.5 seconds in and finishing about 1 
second in, then start the screencast itself.

> More fundamentally, can we assume that the web stream version of the 
> videos will always be accompanied by a web title or text that will 
> include the information on the starting sequence slides?

No. For example, every page for a video on YouTube invites people to 
embed the video on their own site using HTML code that presents no 
extra text.

> I know that Youtube doesn't seem to use the first frame as the static 
> preview and I just checked Google Video and it looks like it also uses 
> a random frame. Thoughts, ideas?

YouTube uses the middle frame as the preview. Google Video seems to use 
a frame from about 5 seconds in, unless that frame looks like text, in 
which case it uses a later one. So in neither case could you put a 
slide in the preview without it being a non-sequitur during playback. 
But when you click Play you get the first frame until enough has 
buffered to start playing the rest, which is why the first frame is 
important.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/