Monthly Archives: July 2014

A few weeks ago, I had done an example for Articulate’s E-Learning Challenge #42: Smartphone Video Training. The point of the challenge was to use a Smartphone to record some tutorial, which was easy enough to do.

But what if I needed to screen record an app, rather than using a phone as the recording device? For iOS devices there are some neat tools available that let users mirror the phone screen onto a desktop screen, which can then be recorded with tools like Camtasia, Storyline or ScreenFlow. For Android devices, the choices are much more limited. Sure, you can take static screenshots or use an Android emulator, like BlueStacks to run apps on a Windows desktop and then record them. Also, newer Samsung devices can use SlideSync to display a phone’s screen on a desktop. For older devices, like my ancient Galaxy SII the only real choice is to ‘fake’ the app interface and make it look like an app is running on an actual device. As an example, consider the Freeflight app for a Parrot ARDrone. This app not only lets you control a drone from a Smartphone or tablet, it also displays a video stream from the drone’s camera.

Since the video stream is also recorded on the drone’s onboard FlashDrive, I thought it should be possible to import the video in Storyline, overlay a ‘fake’ app UI and synch user actions to the video. The phone image I used for this Storyline project has a transparent cutout to show the video and UI elements underneath The semi-transparent UI elements are Storyline objects, which I styled to look like the real app UI.

Offstage objects are used to change the state of the controller buttons in synch with the video.

Here is a portion of the finished tutorial. I hope you don’t get dizzy watching the rather shaky video, it was a windy day (not ideal for a novice drone operator)! This portion of the demo was done in one slide without any layers. It’s a pretty accurate simulation of the actual Android app (including the fullmotion video) and another example of how versatile Storyline is when it comes to building real-world eLearning and simulations.

This weeks challenge in the Articulate e-Learning Heroes Community was to create an instructional video using only a smartphone. I had done video shoots before, but they involved a green screen, lighting rigs and all sorts of other professional tools.  I have been using the camera function on my Samsung Galaxy SII, but never really considered it for videos. So, I was curious to see how the video quality would turn out. First, I looked for a location that had some halfway decent natural light, without a lot of shadows. Shooting outside wasn’t a good option. It was just too bright (and too noisy). I ended up using a work table in my garage of all places. The lighting could have been better, but at least I had some control over the scene. Unfortunately, I couldn’t control the outside noise, and decided against including an audio track in the recording. Since I was both ‘actor’ and camera operator, I had to improvise and fashion a tripod out of a ladder and some clamps. Not a pretty setup but it did the trick and made a big difference compared to a shaky handheld recording.

For the subject of the video, I picked a quick demonstration of the required steps to prepare a Parrot ArDrone for flight. My phone’s recording software doesn’t have any editing functions beyond a handful of lighting options. Once the video was shot, I did some very basic editing with ScreenFlow, a neat screen recording and editing tool for Mac and PC. Finally, I imported the video into Storyline and added some captions to it. The whole project took about an hour to complete.; not too shabby considering I used a four-year old phone with a scratched lens!

The key ingredients for a decent smartphone video are:

• sufficient, even lighting
• some sort of tripod or at least video capture software with a stabilization function
• if you do use audio, low background noise.

Here is the end result of my attempt.