So I spent a good deal of time over the weekend making a few Help Builder videos that demonstrate how Help Builder works. I managed to throw together 3 videos, but man what a job <g>... The first is an overview of feaures, while the other two are more specialized towards the new Visual Studio .NET integration features.

I use CamTasia, which is just an awesome tool for creating these sort of demos quickly - well, not quickly but to no fault of CamTasia. Techsmith has a knack for the capture business. Both CamTasia and SnagIt are thoughtful products that have just the right feature set to make it one of those no-brainer products. I've used the hell out of both of these products over the years - SnagIt I use everyday (in Help Builder, since Help Builder integrates with it for screen captures).

I've demo'd Help Builder lots of times and I can pretty much do it in my sleep but doing these demos for videos were decidedly more complicated. I enjoy giving demos to a live audience, but the process is very, very different when doing it with 'the camera on'. No not stage fright <g>, but I think it's the lack of interaction. Usually when I do a demo I talk and demo at the same time and even though it's usually not an interactive sort of thing, there's still a rapport with the audience. This is missing when doing a demo for the camera. In fact, I got distracted a couple of time and had to just stop and patch things together later on.

Long story short, I choked a bit <g>. The demos are OK, but they're certainly not a fully polished demo. Which is OK - makes for a more real demo than the full on 'corporate' demos with fancy video effects. These demos are more like a live training session and the format actually works, but I sure wish I would have been a bit more consistent. Ultimately I didn't have time to take another day or two to get it just right <g>.

The first video is pretty long - 45 minutes or so which is roughly a short version of the normal demo I run at conferences minus some of the detail topics I plan to cover with separate videos. I broke the whole thing up into sections, but most sections still ended up 10-15 minutes a piece which is pretty long to go. Screwing up in one of these is a bit of a pain - you can probably see how easy it is to piss away a day.

When I demo anything - whether it's product or doing a session at a conference - I never really go by a script. I never do the same session twice and even these short 10-15 'takes' ended up being different every time I ran through them.

Oh well, what they lack in polish they have in content I hope. I've tried to make these demos practical rather than just a flashy show of 'here it is', so these demos are intended to give you a pretty good idea how the product works and possibly let you go back to check things out with the product installed. It seems like this is one of  the best sales tools you can put out for getting people interested in a product.

Maybe another day when I have a little more time I will go over these again. Ah heck, by the time this happens there are probably enough new features that everything must be redone anyway <g>...

I'm getting ready to release Help Builder 4.0 this week, so tonight I spent a few hours updating the Web site, the store and making sure everything is up to date. I also added a new ScreenShot area to the Help Builder site which is sort of a flashy walkthrough of features as well.

Ah, the things we do for promo... but it's fun. Help Builder 4.0 has seen so many improvements in the last few months that it's actually cool to show off some of this stuff <g>...