It was supposed to be simple.....

First attempt to record: My daughter says, "I have to go potty."
Second attempt: The garbage truck drives by (very loud) and disrupts my audio
Third attempt: Oops, I forgot to set the Keynote presentation back to slide one.
Fourth attempt: The telephone rings about halfway through my recording.  My husband.  I got mad at him because he was "supposed to know" I was recording!
This is just not my day.  I finally got a recording that I was proud of on the FIFTH attempt.  Great!  The rest will be no problem!  Upload, get link, share.

Not quite.....
My Focus on Presentation was supposed to be simple.  I was to share a technology tool that I use in my library with my peers.  That's not too difficult, right?  Well, it shouldn't have been.  I was an expert on my topic, WikiSpaces, and I have recorded many videos in the past few years.  This time I wanted to try something different.  I wanted to use Jing to record my presentation.  I have heard so many good things about Jing, I wanted to give it a try for myself.  Capturing the video was simple and the product was good quality.  I was happy with it.  The problem set in when I attempted to upload to Screencast.  I kept getting an error message.  It would not work.  I contacted their customer service and got a response back a few hours later.  The technician directed me to several articles on their "help" page, all of which I had read PRIOR to contacting them.  I was disappointed.

So, I saved the movie to my desktop and tried to upload to YouTube.  That didn't work either because YouTube does not recognize .swf video files.  Bummer.  Third times a charm...right?

My third idea had to work!  I would just use one of the many free online video converters to turn my .swf video into a .mpeg.  No problem.  After downloading 5 different converters, I was still no further ahead.  It just wasn't my day.  I should also mention that I was now almost 3 1/2 hours into the process.

I was frustrated and mad.  I finally decided to go back to a resource I have used many times, Screencast-O-Matic.  I recorded my presentation again, clicked the "Upload to YouTube" button, and 20 minutes later it was loaded!  Wow!  30 minutes, start to finish!  That's all it took??

I wasn't sure if I should be jumping for joy that it worked so smoothly, or really upset that I wasted so much time trying to get Jing to work!

Thank you for listening to me vent,
Jill