Podagogy

Anyone who creates a lot of digital media eventually finds themselves wishing they could record the audio from a Skype or other VoIP conversation. And, if you create video snippets or screencasts using your built-in web, you wish there was a way to compensate for poor lighting. Fortunately for us, Ecamm Network created a number of software utilities that come to our rescue.

The two Ecamm products I use most often are the Ecamm Conference Recorder, Call Recorder, and iGlasses. The Conference Recorder and iGlasses are simple, but elegant add-ons to iChat, while Call Recorder provides the same elegant functionality for Skype. They come in especially useful when I’m collaborating with my colleague in Australia, or simply touching base with friends in the state.

Once installed, the Conference Recorder interface is drop-dead simple. The images below show the basic conference recorder interface. The center button is the Start/Stop recording control. The button to its left opens the preferences panel for Conference Recorder, and the button on the right takes you to the “Saved AV Conferences” folder. Simply click the Record button to start recording your AV conference. The symbol on the button changes to the standard “Stop” symbol. Click the button again to stop the recording. You will be prompted to name and save your recording, which are always saved in QuickTime (.MOV) format.
The Call Recorder for Skype works exactly the same way. However, the interface can be expanded to show microphone and output audio levels as shown in the image on the right.

I always use iGlasses when using my laptop’s built-in iSight camera. Rarely do I find the lighting to be just right. Rather, it’s too dark, too bright, or there are hot spots in the video. iGlasses can’t fix serious lighting problems. However, it will help you improve on marginal lighting. When working at home the video preview window shows a darker image. Using the settings in iGlasses, I can bump up the brightness of my cam’s output. I guess it tweaks the gamma setting, or something like that. The two unaltered shots below provide some idea on the difference iGlasses makes. In this case the difference isn’t as dramatic as I’ve experienced in other settings. But, you can see how the enhanced video is brighter, and the shadows on my face have been greatly reduced.

Standard Cam Video

iGlasses Enhanced Video

iGlasses provides a number of presets you can use to augment or add interest to your video. Click the thumbnail image to view the list of presets available.

What’s more, you can tweak various components of each of the presets using the drop-down menu.

The best part of the Ecamm applications are their prices:

The Ecamm Network Web site contains many other useful apps and utilities.

Things have gotten a bit stale here primarily because of the high cost of internet connectivity (and everything else) in the UK. My good wife and I just returned from and extended tour of Scotland, Wales & England (strictly for pleasure!). Our first vacation in nearly a decade.

I will be jumping back on the blog-wagon shortly, picking up on my review of podcasting tools.