Screenshot videos and more - making a product of them as a single package

Once you get a Redneck started doing something, the thing almost immediately becomes an addiction. When I began to play with making little screenshot videos I did not realize what I was letting myself in for.

When I hit the sack last night it was not all that easy falling asleep. Instead, the thought of "doing something useful" with these screenshot videos kept running around in my head, keeping me a bit wide-eyed.

I had tuned in to that "Shark Tank" TV show last Friday evening, and I suppose that is what started this whole video thing. One of the investment seekers guested on that show described his new business to "the sharks" - the folks with money to invest in businesses that smell profitable to them. This presenter, a young man, said that he got his business idea from doodling on a pad as he attended to some less organized business in his potty ("water closet" for those who adhere to English-English). He claimed that he was no sort of artist. His doodling resulted in production of caricatures of cats. His cats did many things, whatever you and I can think to do, and they went onto his doodling pad, one after another, complete with text captions and little text scribbles inside those comic strip "speech balloons." He said that whenever he sent one to a friend who had inspired a particular cat drawing, crude as those drawings were, his buddies enjoyed the cartoons and asked for more.

He made a business of crudely drawn cat pictures. His advertising is mostly word-of-mouth and by use of his personal presentations on social media that essentially direct prospects to his marketing Web site. His pitch - "I want to draw a cat for you." Each sale he makes of a crudely drawn cat figure with some text brings him $9.95. He has sold a lot of cat pictures, all scribbled onto simple pieces of paper. The Shark Tank investor folks could scarcely wait a minute to invest in his business.

Well, you can see why I might have remained wide awake. I wish that I, too, had understood why at that hour, but understanding had to wait until breakfast time. I think that I see the possibilities now.

Here I am, one of the more ripened Rednecks, well into my dotage, so to speak. Why would I throw away a slender claim to wisdom and dignity to want to become involved with any kind of product, particularly one that would require competing with stick figures of weird cats?

My many shortcomings concentrated into a single, short question: "Gus, just what kind of a nut are you?" The answer is perhaps less than obvious to most: "This Redneck likes to have fun - and that also means that he likes the idea of money."

If some guy can peddle third-grade-quality" stick drawings of cats for ten bucks each, how would it work to develop a product that customers would want, that would be easy enough to produce, that would cost little to make and would sell for significant prices? My guess is that "it would work."

This can get a little tricky, for "the product" is really lots of different products. They are all produced the same way, using the same materials, and the same sorts of labor, but each one is different from the other ones - much like those stick-figure cat sketches.

So, what are they?

Physically, they combine the attributes of eBooks, paper-page books bound within covers, and video recordings on CD/DVD media.

Other than that, the subject matter and its treatment differ from one to the other. Let me explain that somewhat further.

As I have only just become involved with learning to produce short "screenshot" videos, there is no way that I can tell anyone how best to do that. I am learning video things, all of which are very new to me. The fun of learning video is in the growing realization that, when you combine video with other sorts of text and imaging production, the video becomes much like icing on a tasty cake. The other parts of the whole - the text and images along with the bound book or booklet - are the cake parts. When you and I look at a book, a big one or a small one, we know what it contains - words and pictures. When we look at a CD/DVR we hope it contains pictures, probably text, and sound. Put all of those things together and you probably have everything you might like to have in the way of reading, viewing, and listening.

The subject matter may be advertising - any kind. It may be instructions - any kind. It may be a museum tour, a visit to a Web site, a ceremony, a childbirth, a classroom session, your kids growing up (or cutting up...), and so on, and on. It could be most anything.

I started messing around with this video stuff by making some screenshot videos using several different text-and-photo slide shows as the subject matter. You can see what I did the first time into video-making by checking out this Hub right here on HubPages. The first video used four PowerPoint type slides, and the second video was a two-pager. The voice was mine, hobbled a lot by both inexperience and a very snotty nose.

Both videos were then sent to one of my Web sites so that they would "stream" into any computer that accessed them. The videos were streaming-playable on your computer or my computer using the "Adobe Flash Player" program, software that handles "SWF-format" video. Both functioned as planned, but the "streaming" was not what I'd call super-duper pretty. There were some pauses in the displays on my computer while my computer's video buffer downloaded another swat of video from the Web site.

The video production program that I use generates a video that is "AVI" formatted; that is, the video plays on a computer using the Windows Media Player or its equivalent. Although there is no problem with placing an AVI video file onto my Web site, those files must be dowloaded all at once. They are really big files that take forever to download. So I have to convert "AVI" video to "SWF" format before sending it to my Web site. The video-making software handles this, too.

I found out early on that I would have to learn how to synchronize the voice tracks with the video image track. My SWF streaming videos did not synchronize the two very well. As you can surmise, there were problems caused by my lack of experience and by my using less than optimal software.

After messing around with those early video production and replay attempts I wondered if there were really special requirements for video/audio recording and playback with my desktop computer system's CD/DVD player as opposed to continuing with video streaming from the Web site.

It turned out that all I had to do was to "burn" the completed video files onto the CD/DVD media - no special software (or "smarts") was needed. That was fortunate, for I don't have any special software, nor was my "smarts" gene well-sized, either. When I told my computer to play the videos back for me, they came through as though they were manufactured by RCA or by whoever constructs those fine Ken Burns history-type videos we watch on PBS television.

Rednecks can dream bigtime dreams, right?

Back to those crude stick drawings of the voiceless cat. Aha, thought I, "I just made two stick videos. They are my new product. Gus, you really did a good one this time. Move over, Cat! You, too, Ken Baby!"

Here's what I came up with. I'd really like your opinion of it, too.

My little eBook-bound book-video CD, all produced and packaged together right here on this little computer system is "the product." Here is how everything was glued together.

First, the photos I had selected from one of our old photo albums were scanned into my computer as image files using my combination printer-scanner. (The photos could have been computer-stored digital photos, but the photos I used were made before the day of the digital images.) Then I put some caption text with the pictures using Open Office's Text program. That included the booklet cover as well as inside pages. Once done there, I told the program to convert everything to be an Adobe Reader (PDF) publication. The several pages were then printed at the system's printer, and that included the somewhat heavier-weight front and back covers.

My best friend had given me a "VeloBind" machine that I now used to fasten the booklet together. You can see the simple binding that I used to make a neat package of the booklet. It has a pleasant appearance, so my bride tells me. Displayed with this article is one image that shows the cover and binding strip.

Then, using the front cover content and that of each of the several inside pages, I invoked my "Cam Studio" video production program and, with it, produced the video's visual and audio voice tracks, one page at a time. I advanced page by page until all were recorded. Then the AVI-formatted video was used to make a video that had the SWF format for upload to my Web site. I saved both the AVI and the SWF videos in a file along with everything else I had produced - text, images, Open Office Text pages, and PDF pages, too.

Once I had the two types of video, I "burned" them onto a blank CD - and there was lots of space on the CD medium for more if I had had any more. Once the video and its audio were on the CD, I played both videos back on my desktop PC. The video images and the sound track were nicely synchronized.

Then I put the binding on the paper-page booklet and stuck a CD copy inside the back cover - a complete package if there ever was one.

The resulting booklet, "The Annie Book," has been given to my oldest daughter, Annie. She is going to really enjoy it. I'd bet you a nickel or a penny that she is going to show it to her friends and the people where she works. If this were a going business, that would amount to free advertising.

Here is the URL for the SWF-format version of "The Annie Book" video file. When you are through checking it out, if you do, you can return here to HubPages by clicking on the "Return" arrow atop your computer screen.

I'd be most pleased to obtain your comments, below, about this whole product idea along with any suggestions you might have toward "doing something with it."