FC2Video

9-year-old builder Gordon Muhlestein briefly talks about using Second Life and OpenSim to explore what he wants to be when he grows up. We imagine with him on a machinima tour of ISTE, ThinkBalm, Eiffel Tower, Sistine Chapel, NASA, and the Globe Theatre.

You probably have been one. We all have. Here is how to tell if you are and prepare not to be before an event. It also makes you care more about the performance of what you create and buy.

Put applause, bravo, and brava all on F2. Pushing F2 selects from randomly. 'Did you know?' tip from Debbie Rau during Mo's Mentored office hours.

Gestures bring emotion to that bored avatar and keep everyone laughing. Understand them. Use them. And most importantly for male avatars, FIX one that is very wrong by default.

Get around with Teleport. Save favorite spots with landmarks. Set or change your home position. Follow a SLURL from email or web page. [Second Life and OpenSim]

Do yourself and others a favor with a good Second Life or OpenSim profile. Learn how to get the pictures in correctly (aspect ratio, resolution, format) without Photoshop or any image editing software, for now.

Find and join Second Life groups. Change your title. Get more help from http://forums.secondlife.com

Three minutes of searching for groups, avatar profiles, locations, wiki pages, and events by tabs.

Change the basic way your Second Life / OpenSim avatar looks. Learn how to recover from bugs affecting appearance with rebake. Adjust light with environment settings. Why a good skin is most important.

Preserve Second Life and OpenSim memories and locations with snapshots. Learn when saving to disk and when to send as postcards. How to share them on Flickr and Snapzilla (slpics). Learn the secret of taking quiet snapshots without the animation or shutter sound. Take high resolution snapshots when you need them.

Life is about relationships. Get started right and know how to be a good friend, or at least a polite bad one. Read profiles. Take notes. Use calling cards to organize. Plus, learn ways to find those hiding.

Avoid trouble by learning to chat right. Chat in private with friends. Take part in public forums. Woot up a party. Add voice. Set Busy to be polite. Be notified by email. See past chats with logging. Remember 20m normal, 100m shout and when in doubt always private IM instead of public.

Get sound, video, voice chat, and web page on a prim working. How NOT to use voice.

Four ways to look around in Second Life and OpenSim plus how to disable camera constraints to experience an entire island from one spot.

Three ways to move around in Second Life and OpenSim explained including one method even most have not tried but might well be the best method of all. Learn the secret early and develop skills that will pay off well in the long run.

Just installing the Second Life viewer and turning on 'Show Start Location.'

How to create a Second Life account with tips you might not have considered.

Install, build, and connect to your very own local standalone OpenSim running from your Windows desktop. Create and preview content without Second Life upload fees or lag. Better even than using the SL preview beta grid, which is often unavailable.

A candid comparison of twelve of the video sharing sites available from TubeMogul including an explanation of why I prefer Blip.tv and iTunes as primary sites above YouTube and the rest.

TubeMogul is a powerful tool providing analytics and upload-once deployment to dozens of sites saving you a lot of time otherwise uploading to them. We run through a basic setup of TubeMogul and how to upload your video.

Use PCM (uncompressed CD quality stereo) audio format. Do NOT use Lame MP3 or any audio compression. Watch to understand why.

Learn NOT to set 30 50 25 under CamStudio video options, like I did. Set 30 50 20! Otherwise your audio and video will go horribly out of sync. Watch this if you want to see what I mean.

Another segment in making a video tutorial for free. We use MediaCoder to make an MP4 from the AVI file captured with CamStudio and altered with VirtualDub. MP4 format is suitable for web site distribution, playing on iPod, and iTunes subscriptions.

Another segment detailing how to use VirtualDub to add a logo to your video tutorial AVI file first captured with CamStudio. VirtualDub is a powerful video editing tool that uses filters to many things you would pay much more for in other tools.

An overview of one work flow for creating and distributing a video tutorial for free using tools available for windows. This overview is intended to tie together the similarly named tutorials with details.

Review of CamStudio Audio options using Lame MP3 and focusing on the windows audio settings for microphone and speakers with 'Stereo Mix' unmuted to allow system and application sounds to be heard with voice over.

Quick review of the CamStudio video option settings using Divx and the regions outlined earlier. We assume some post processing (logo, mp4 convert, etc.)

Some suggested Second Life and OpenSim Hippo viewer graphics settings for producing good videos that include the interface (as opposed to machinima) from those virtual worlds.

Before we get into recording, we review the CamStudio Region, Autopan, and Cursor settings and discuss why 640 x 480 resolution is generally preferred.

Quick look at a FireFox plugin called Better YouTube to help ensure you see high quality versions. Also gives ability to download mp4 directly from YouTube.

Are you getting the speed you pay Windstream for? Maybe not, here's some things to check and troubleshoot. Save yourself some time talking to India.

Part one of a short series about making video tutorials for windows using tools that are all free, as in no-cost and without licensing restriction. This part focuses on what and where to get everything we use later in the other parts of the tutorial.