Andy Budd's dashboard

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

Hey Phil, I couldn't find the email I'm afraid so would you mind sending it directly to andy@clearleft.com and I'll send you back an updated copy of Silverback straight away! – Andy Budd, on July 08, 2009 13:55

Andy Budd replied on July 06, 2009 20:42 to the question "Video is lagging behind the sound?" in Clearleft:

Hey Guys, I think we've worked out a fix for this, or at least managed to reduce the drift as much as possible. If you can send me an email in the next day or two I'll send you a link to an updated version.

It looks like the problem is a memory issue, so the drifts were occurring on machines with low memory or when the machines were using a lot of memory transferring data to an external USB drive. However it doesn't seem like the same problem is occurring with Firewire drives as they don't seem to use as much system memory.

Andy Budd replied on July 05, 2009 13:03 to the question "Painfully slow render time?" in Clearleft:

So far we've been working on reducing the native render time and have managed to get it down by around 200% which we're pretty chuffed at. Once we can't get any more native speed increases we'll probably look at adding support for hardware optimisation like the Elgato Turbo.264 HD. However this will probably only improve performance by around 30%, so it'll only be useful for a small number of people who have the hardware and are doing a lot of video rendering.

Andy Budd replied on June 29, 2009 12:23 to the question "Will Silverback work with Uservue?" in Clearleft:

People have had success using Silverback with iChat screen sharing. However we've not tried it with other services. If you give it a go, let us know how you get on!

Andy Budd replied on June 10, 2009 16:41 to the problem "Exporting sessions on other Mac" in Clearleft:

There are some problems moving files from a Power PC to an Intel and vica versa due to the differing system architecture. However you should be OK moving between computers with the same or similar chip/OS.

Andy Budd replied on June 08, 2009 09:25 to the question "Provide Feedback when adding task markers" in Clearleft:

Thanks Roland. We're going to add an option to disable in a future version if you feel it is going to be distracting.

Andy Budd replied on June 05, 2009 15:47 to the idea "Great Ideas for your product" in Clearleft:

Nice idea. Thanks for that

Andy Budd replied on June 05, 2009 15:45 to the idea "Eye tracking" in Clearleft:

Thanks for the links Gustavo,

There are a couple of ways of doing eye tracking. You can either have a head mounted camera that fixates on a single eye, or a webcam that is sensitive to UV lights and a couple of UV lamps. You can buy these from commercial companies but they cost a lot (thousands). You can also make them but they're quite fiddily and require some technical experience.

I have seen experiments with unmodified webcams but they aren't very accurate and you need to keep your head perfectly still, which means they are great for research projects but not really suitable for commercial projects at the moment. Still, as web cam resolution increases, that may change.

Andy Budd replied on June 05, 2009 15:13 to the question "Mouse Click Data?" in Clearleft:

Thanks Joshua,

Just to clarify, the application already plots the mouse clicks on screen, so I'm curious to know what you'd use the X,Y co-ordinates for? Is it to create click-maps or some other reason?

Andy Budd replied on June 03, 2009 09:05 to the question "Japanese localisation before Web Directions East?" in Clearleft:

Finally. Thanks for all the help with that!

Andy Budd replied on June 01, 2009 22:08 to the problem "Audio Capture Problem - Loud Hiss Only - Details / Log file enclosed" in Clearleft:

Awesome. Glad we got it fixed for you

Andy Budd replied on May 18, 2009 15:01 to the question "Mouse Click Data?" in Clearleft:

Silverback is mostly aimed at qualitative rather than quantitative testing at the moment. However we'd definitely consider the addition of more quantitative metrics if there is good cause and it won't overly complicate the interface. So I'd be interested to learn more about how you'd use this data and what kind of conclusions you'd hope to extract.

Andy Budd replied on May 18, 2009 10:17 to the question "Camera Horizontally reversed in screen capture window." in Clearleft:

Hi Phillip,

As Silverback is intended as a usability testing tool rather than a more general screencasting tool, the inversion is actually intended. So it's a feature rather than a bug :-)

We do this so that the direction people are looking in the video reflects the activity they are doing on screen. If we didn't invert the video, people could be interacting with the top right hand portion of the screen, but the video would show them looking top left.

Of course this does mean that text on t-shirts or written on card and held up to the camera will be inverted. However as this isn't usually a problem in usability testing, we felt the simplification of the preferences pane outweighed any potential benefit.

I hope that help explain the reason for the inversion and lack of preference options.

A comment on the problem "Audio Capture Problem - Loud Hiss Only - Details / Log file enclosed" in Clearleft:

Unfortunately (but understandably) getsatisfaction doesn't give us access to your email address, so can you email me on andy@clearleft.com and I'll send you the updated version. – Andy Budd, on May 07, 2009 14:45

Andy Budd replied on May 07, 2009 12:15 to the problem "Audio Capture Problem - Loud Hiss Only - Details / Log file enclosed" in Clearleft:

Hey Calum, we've built some extra logging into the next version of Silverback to help track down the problem. If you can let me know your email address I'll send you a copy of the next release so we can help get to the bottom of your problem.

Andy Budd replied on May 01, 2009 12:26 to the question "Provide Feedback when adding task markers" in Clearleft:

Great minds think alike, so we've already got that scheduled for the 1.1 release, coming soon.

Andy Budd replied on April 29, 2009 10:44 to the question "Best export settings for Vimeo?" in Clearleft:

Actually we haven't played around with exporting for Vimeo, but let us know how you get on :-)

Andy Budd replied on April 22, 2009 22:39 to the question "Goodies for spreading the gosple?" in Clearleft:

email me (andy@clearleft.com) your address and I'll send over some badges, stickers and moo cards for you.

Andy Budd replied on April 20, 2009 09:05 to the problem "Audio Capture Problem - Loud Hiss Only - Details / Log file enclosed" in Clearleft:

Hey Calum,

Sorry to hear you're still having problems. I've raised this as a ticket with our developer and we'll look into it ASAP. However it's going to be very difficult for us to track down and fix if we can't reproduce the problem ourselves, but we'll do the best we can.

Andy Budd replied on April 17, 2009 19:05 to the question "How to use the usb web camera instead of the MacBook Pro's iSight camera if testing with another monitor." in Clearleft:

Hi Kitty,

Silverback is really targeted towards usability testing so I imagine you'll be able to find a more general screen capture application that will do the trick better.