What's next step?
 

Jim, what's the next step now? (if Edgar manages to fix the last multimonitor problems). Is it to fix the website and then release, animate some more background, redo a fish, or something else?

Retreat into a monastery? - Relocate to another planet?

Taking over from Ross Anderson? :D

I've been working on the website for a couple of days. Well, not so much working on it as grinding my teeth while trying to find a decent low-cost screen-recorder program to capture a Lionfish animation. I've downloaded and tried about 30 of them. The cheap ones are all junk, but I can't bring myself to spend $300 for Camtasia, when I'm only going to use it once.

FRAPS is the #1. It won't work?

I need something like BB Flashback or Camtasia, where I can draw a rectangle around the area to be captured, record a few seconds, have it automatically come up in the frame editor where I can delete unwanted frames, then save as a highly-compressed Flash video file with the HTML for embedding it into the website. The demo versions of both those programs work great.

What I've always wished for is a software-rental agency. There are so many times when I just need to do something once, and can't justify spending a huge amount of money on the software. In the real world, if I need to dig a trench, I'll rent a trencher for $40 - not buy it for $1000 and have it sit in the garage for the next 30 years. Why can't I just rent Camtasia for two hours? Or Dreamweaver if I just want to put together one website? Or Lightwave if I just want to build one scene? Or Adobe Premiere, if I just want to create one video clip?

Dreamweaver and Adobe Premiere are available as 30 day trials.

Unrestricted?

I have not checked them out in detail, but I believe they function for 30 days.

So does BB Flashback, but it puts a huge advertisement on all your frame-captures.

Maybe multiple tools. Some free or cheap avi capture program. Some utility to export the frames as jpeg (maybe lsmaker which is a specialized free utility for lightsaber effects but will import frames from an avi file and export jpegs). Then import the frames into movie maker or something, edit or delete them, etc then use some cheap or free wma to flv converter?

Not elegant but for a one off with a low price tag might not be too bad.

Yeah - I think I'll need to do something like that.

Jim,
I have Camtasia on my computer (I use it for creating software training videos at work). If you tell me what you want, I can try and capture it for you.

~Ralph S.

Thanks for the offer, but that wouldn't work. I need to be the one going back and forth between modifying MA3, capturing a sequence, trying it out against the background of the website, adjusting the animation and colors, etc. As with anything I try, there will literally be hundreds of failures before I get something I can use.

On the bright side I just found out that Adobe Premiere can export Flash, even though it is not on the list of file formats supported. I just downloaded a capture program called Taksi, which looks like it will do the job of capturing raw frames. I should be able to re-write MA3 so that a Lionfish will stay in the same place and go through a repeating "treading-water" move. Then I need to make the surrounding window tightly cropped around the fish, and cature one swim-cycle. I can then use Premiere to edit the frames and save it as a Flash animation. I still need do figure out how to incorporate that animation into the web site.

Depends on what format of Flash it is saved in. I do a fair number of Shockwave-Flash based slide show videos on some of the web sites I build. Here's a sample of the coding I use:

http://webpages.charter.net/rlsimon/object_code.txt

See if Premiere will output the video as a web page, then take a peek at the code it generates. Pay special attention to the CLSID code as that identifies the specific ActiveX component IE will need.

Have you tried Bulent's screen recorder? I liked it enough to pay for it...
There's a free, but old, one:
http://johnbokma.com/software-recomm...llBSR_v15a.exe
or the full one with a trial:
http://www.thesilver.net/

Sound like a new bussness for some one to start!