Here at Digital Dazzle, the free vlc media player has long been our major work-horse for video playback. QuicktimeX is way too limited and Quicktime 7, while pretty good, is still no match for vlc.

With the release of version 2, vlc has even gotten better. Most importantly to us, we can now use Apple’s Magic Trackpad as a secondary input device for vlc (we’ve long used a wired mouse as the main pointing device to the right of the keyboard and the trackpad as a secondary device to the left of the keypad.)  It requires a change deep down in vlc’s preference settings (Preferences -> Show All -> Interface -> Hotkey Settings -> Hotkeys, then set Mouse Wheel to “Position Control”), but once it is set, you can use the vertical two-finger swipe to scrub through a video.  Even better, it is touch-sensitive - the faster you swipe, the faster you scrub through the video. Awesome!

The only downside so far - when starting a new video, it resizes the interface to the native video size without taking anamorphic settings into account.  A quick press of cmd-1 fixes this, but it would be great, if that wouldn’t be required, like it wasn’t in version 1.  I’m sure there’s some settings buried deep down in the preferences to turn off this behavior, so if you know what the setting is, we’d appreciate a quick note.

Overall, though - a great program has gotten better.  We’re happy!

Apple just revealed in private briefings to select journalists and bloggers that it is updating OSX from Lion to Mountain Lion in the summer and that going forward, it will support an annual upgrade cycle similar to what they do on iOS.

So what?

We’re still on Snow Leopard and, according to our own published software upgrade policies, will start evaluating the Lion upgrade in the spring.  A summer release of Mountain Lion does not make a difference, except that we might wait until the end of the year and go straight to Mountain Lion.  We’ll see how Mountain Lion will handle legacy software in our test environment before we decide when we will upgrade.

To us, the upcoming Adobe Creative Suite 6 upgrade is much more important than Lion vs. Mountain Lion.

p.s.

I’m sure, Corporate IT managers were less than thrilled when they heard the news given that these guys are typically on 3-year upgrade cycles.

As soon as viewers click Play, the race is on. If your video takes too long to capture viewers’ interest or doesn’t know when to call it quits, you could lose more than viewers’ attention — you could lose their business.

Telestream’s blog, The Screening Room, points out that the length of your video should depend on your target viewer’s place in the buying cycle.

• 30-second videos have the greatest likelihood of being watched in their entirety. Shoot for this length when viewers are unfamiliar with your company or message.

• 1 to 2-minute videos work best when viewers know your company but need more information to pique interest. Tip: Create concise, focused overviews or high-level demos.

• 3 to 10-minute videos should be saved for viewers who are already aware of and interested in you or your product. At this point, you are either aiming to create a desire to act or promoting the action itself. Tip: Offer valuable content and make it easy for viewers to act (e.g., by embedding links, buttons or contact info) while viewing that content.

Narrow your focus — and your video’s length — and watch viewer engagement rise.

How Long Is Too Long?

Here are some general guidelines for length, depending on the type of video:

• Advertisement: 30 seconds to 1 minute
• Landing or intro page: 1 to 2 minutes
• Demo or Promo: 4 to 5 minutes (6 minutes at the absolute maximum)
• Training: 20 minutes per segment

Apart from the big EULA hubbub that broke out yesterday over Apple’s restrictive End-User License Agreement terms for their newly released iBooks Author software, there’s another reason why we cannot use it in our creative process.

From Darrell Etherington’s post on GigaOm:

iBooks Author won’t be as appealing to those users since it creates a file that is not quite epub2, not quite epub3, and not quite XHTML5, according to Vook’s blog which makes it “one channel only,” or essentially proprietary.

Our customers always want our work in standard formats (PDF or epub), since they never know what their customers need.  Thus, they will have to cover their bases and make our work available on more than just Apple devices.  And that’s the reason why, no matter how slick iBooks Author is, we cannot use it in our creative process.

Do you need to create something on your computer? Write a paper? Or do you want to edit a gantt chart, but you don’t know what software to use?

Why don’t use ask your fellow computer users?

BestVendor.com keeps a list of the most popular software tools. Once you go there, simply name your top three software tools, then access their database to find out what others are using.  While their results might reflect certain biases, they will at least give you some starting point when picking a good tool for the job.