Down here in Bristol, we’ve been putting more bones on the video project and talking to lots of people who want to be involved, so we thought we would give you an update on how things are progressing and what we need from the community at this point in helping developing the plans for the future.
We’ve now assembled 10 complete videos to cover discrete simple actions in CiviCRM and you can see links to these on the wiki. Our aim was to produce finished videos around 2 minutes long, but as you'll see they range from about 1 to about 3 minutes.
We've also been documenting the creation process which will probably be familiar to anyone who has done any video production in the past, but will hopefully be useful to contributors new to this activity. We’ve had some good tips from professionals (thanks Sam Alderslade) and have incorporated them into the write-ups of our more trial and error approach. The free video editing tools available are quite intuitive though and one can get up to speed on producing small reasonably polished relatively easily if you have some time available - allow a few hours for learning on your first attempt.
We've been using the Seven theme on Drupal with some minimal modification to bring in some CiviCRM branding across the top. Seven works well with Civi and gives it a clean modern look and the modified theme is available on https://github.com/circleinteractive/civicrm_seven. We plan to modify this a bit further in future to bring some elements a bit more in line with the look of the CiviCRM site.
You can find the Wiki Project page at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Training+Videos
There are sub-pages covering Audio, Screen Capture, Editing, Scripts and discussion about what videos to add and how to store and host them. The tracking page (moved from the Google spreadsheet showcased at London CiviCON) shows the current status of the project, with links to the video elements and first 10 completed videos, which are currently streamable or downloadable from Dropbox although the streaming quality is not great.
It would be great to get feedback on the work to date, offers of help to produce more videos, or just chat about the direction of the process and how it fits in with overall CiviCRM project.
All the best
Sean
Comments
Having 'available anytime / anywhere' learning resources is super important to the growth and success of the project and helps ensure that organization staff and volunteers can really benefit from the power of the tools. Thanks for your hard work on this!
This is an excellent start to a very important project. Well done to all at Circle!
One comment I would like to make is that once the video page has loaded in my browser (but before I click to play the video), a static civicrm screen shot is displayed first of all. Instead of this, I think it would be better to display a static image of the splash/intro screen first of all, as this will provide for a smoother looking introduction once the viewer clicks play.
Andrew
HI Andrew,
thanks for your feedback. That intro screen seems to be picked at random by Dropbox, I'll try to find a way round it, as well as trying to find an alternetive for dropbox (which for ease of use is brilliant, but for delivery is not the best). It might be a good idea to start formerly developing the CiviCRM YouTube channel?
We'll be hosting a Google Hangout at 10am (GMT) today to discuss editing, hosting, next videos and anything else people would like to talk about, I'll post back the URL nearer the time
https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/7acpippd73vd5a4j39r86t4u54?hl=en-GB
Hi Sean,
Generally speaking the finished videos look and sound good - well done. However, a couple of of them (numbers 4 and 9) do not seem to have any audio included in the finished version (or perhaps this a problem with my computer?). Also, for some reason, where a male voice is used, I can hear additional background noise/interference, which is not the case for those videos that have a female voice.
Thanks for checking through them Andrew, I'm not completely happy with them myself (I'm hoping to improve some of them w/c 9/12 and think about new ones as well ). As far as I know there is audio on all of them though, but I will check that. There is audio FOR all of them.