Andy Budd's dashboard

Andy Budd set one of Sophie Barrett's replies as an official response to "Purchase Orders?" in Clearleft

Andy Budd replied on October 15, 2009 10:06 to the problem "Silverback won't register!" in Clearleft:

Hey Stockmarr, just wanted to check that you managed to register Silverback in the end?

Andy Budd replied on October 14, 2009 19:16 to the question "Export to secondary HD leads to crash" in Clearleft:

Hi Kosta,

We've had a few other people mention similar problems and it appears to be based on the speed of the drives. Basically some drives don't seem capable of keeping up with the speed of export, causing the system to run out of memory. This appears to be a fundamental OS/hardware issues so it's not something we've been able to find a software fix for. However if you can send over the specs of your system and external drive, along with your system and silverback crash logs, we'll take another look. My contact details are andy@clearleft.com.

Out of interest, are you using Firewire or USB, as most of the issues we've had so far are coming from the slower USB connections.

Andy Budd set one of Andy Budd's replies as an official response to "Silverback won't register!" in Clearleft

Andy Budd marked one of stockmarr's replies in Clearleft as useful. stockmarr replied to the problem "Silverback won't register!".

A comment on the problem "Silverback won't register!" in Clearleft:

Hey Stockmarr,

Sorry to hear you've been having problems registering your application.

Sometime an applications preference file can get corrupted. These are files that contain things like your licence information or application defaults. As such, if you experience problems with an application, a good first step is to close down the application, delete the preferences file and start again.

Preference files can be found in Library > Preferences and the Silverback preference file is named com.clearleft.Silverback.plist. So as a first step I'd try deleting this, launching the application and then trying to re-register.

There are several ways to use the registration file, from double clicking it or dragging it onto the Silverback dock icon, though to dragging it onto the the licence pane in the preferences panel.

Hope this helps, but feel free to let me know if you're still having problems. – Andy Budd, on October 06, 2009 13:06

Andy Budd replied on October 01, 2009 22:56 to the problem "Silverback won't register!" in Clearleft:

I'd recommend trashing your preferences and seeing if that has any effect.

Andy Budd replied on September 11, 2009 08:19 to the question "Marking a chapter without increasing audio" in Clearleft:

The way applications wrest control of the remote is rather strange, so I'd make sure that you have no other applications that use sound (especially iTunes) running in the background.

A comment on the problem "Exporting a long session fails after many hours" in Clearleft:

Thanks Justin, can you send them via email to andy@clearleft.com and we'll try to track down the problem. – Andy Budd, on September 09, 2009 09:39

Andy Budd replied on September 07, 2009 07:57 to the problem "Exporting a long session fails after many hours" in Clearleft:

I have to admit that we've never tested such a long session as the majority of usability tests last between 45-60min. Theoretically the size shouldn't matter, but in reality a 3 hour movie is going to be huge and thus involve considerable processing power and RAM usage. As such, it's highly possible that your machine is running out of memory before the export completes.

So we can see what's going on, can you delete your Silverback crash and export logs, try the export again and then send us the logs if it crashes again.

A comment on the question "Compatibility with Snow Leopard" in Clearleft:

Thanks Robbie. I know this may be a bit of a pain, but would you mind grabbing the actual crash logs (in Library > Logs > CrashReporter) and email them to me as they contain more info than the one that gets automatically submitted on crash. Thanks – Andy Budd, on September 01, 2009 10:22

Andy Budd replied on September 01, 2009 09:12 to the question "Compatibility with Snow Leopard" in Clearleft:

We've had a few reports of issues with Snow Leopard, but so far we're not able to replicate the problem. If you are experiencing crashes, can you please send me (andy@clearleft.com) your crash logs and we'll try to get to the bottom of the problem.

Andy Budd replied on September 01, 2009 09:06 to the problem "Audio is not being captured" in Clearleft:

Do you have any audio extensions installed, like SoundFlower?
Sometimes these extensions are installed by other programs - if you look in the Audio System Preferences, in the Input and Output tabs, do you see any additional devices, apart from your Internal Microphone/Line In/Speakers listed?

Is the audio being captured but not exported or is it not being captured at all. To tell, go into Library > Application Support > Silverback and then one of your recorded sessions, open up the .mov file and see if the video has audio.

Andy Budd replied on August 19, 2009 16:09 to the question "How does silverback capture system outputted audio?" in Clearleft:

It only pics up audio from the mic at the moment, but we're looking at adding system audio at a later date if possible.

A comment on the question "How to use the usb web camera instead of the MacBook Pro's iSight camera if testing with another monitor." in Clearleft:

Silverback is a video capture application we sell and this is the support forum. If you're having problems with amsn, I suggest you find a support forum for that particular service. Best of luck with your search. – Andy Budd, on August 17, 2009 19:28

Andy Budd marked one of charlotte's replies in Clearleft as useful. charlotte replied to the question "How to use the usb web camera instead of the MacBook Pro's iSight camera if testing with another monitor.".

A comment on the question "How to use the usb web camera instead of the MacBook Pro's iSight camera if testing with another monitor." in Clearleft:

Unfortunately if you can't get the camera working at all, it sounds like it's a problem for the camera manufacturer or Apple. If however you can get it working with other devices but not with Silverback, let me know and we'll look into it. – Andy Budd, on August 17, 2009 13:57

Andy Budd replied on August 05, 2009 10:51 to the problem "Synching issue with Vimeo makes video unusable - codec incompatibility??" in Clearleft:

Hi Leisa,

Silverback uses h.264 and AAC for medium and low quality as it provides the highest compression levels while still retaining image fidelity.

For "best quality" we're using the animation codec which produces extremely high quality images but at the cost of large files sizes.

For "high quality" be use MPEG4 and AAC as this produced the best quality vs compression during our trials.

While we do have the ability to include custom export setting, our research showed that most people didn't understand the setting so ended up creating inferior results to the presets. However if there is demand for fine grain control, we'll consider putting it back in.

I'm unsure which export setting you used for your Vimeo videos, but I'd recommend trying the medium setting. If that works in Quicktime but doesn't play correctly in Vimeo, it sounds like it's a problem may be with the Vimeo engine.

Andy Budd replied on July 13, 2009 16:25 to the problem "One of my captured videos is unreadable." in Clearleft:

Hi ihatemornings,

Really sorry to hear about the problem. To be honest, we've not encountered data corruption since the initial release, so I am surprised. Would you be able to send me the Silverback logs, along with the corrupt video and we'll look into things. My email address is andy@clearleft.com.

Corruption should only really occur when your system is critically short on memory and/or disk space, so were you experiencing any of these issues during capture? Maybe you could send me your system profile so we can get a better look at the specs on your machine. Also, were you using an external HD at all, as that can contribute to performance issues under serious load?

Incidentally we've just pushed a release that includes improvements in the capture mechanism and fixed a few bugs we've discovered in Quicktime. This probably won't help as your problems sound unrelated, but it may be worth downloading and trying the new version.

A comment on the question "Video is lagging behind the sound?" in Clearleft:

Hey nefibach. Can you send an email to me at andy@clearleft.com and I'll send you a copy straight back.

Cheers – Andy Budd, on July 08, 2009 13:56