I’m presenting you my very first attempt at recording the screencasts of the editing sessions in ART. I wish my English was better and my speech was clearer but for now - no speech, only text captions.
I hope it will be helpful and/or interesting, as I personally absolutely love to see how people actually work, it often reveals some little tricks or just general workflow which is often being overlooked in specific tutorial videos.
First episode is about the cat under the streetlights which was already mentioned here recently:
Congrats on your cat cast. If I didn’t say this before, this cat’s pose is meme worthy: you will get the views. I wish I had a friendly neighbour cat. The ones in mine play mortal combat on our fence and release their smelly waste fluids and solids in our yard on the daily basis.
Nice! You seem to be using an old version though: may I ask you if there’s any specific reason? Is it because of the random crash that is still happening for you with more recent versions? I hoped it was solved, but I can try again if not…
Yes, I’m staying on an old version mostly because of that crash (and because of another zooming bug), but I haven’t tested recent versions - I will give it a try. Of course it’s a pity, but to be honest, feature/performance/stability-wise - even the old 1.5.4 version completely satisfies me. At least for now Thanks for your work, Alberto
Question regarding the screencasts: do you folks find that the captions, which I put at the bottom during the screencast, are a bit distracting? I feel like they compete for the visual attention. While I want to look at the sliders and the effect they produce, captions are, at the same time, trying to catch my attention. Seems like the vocal explanation would be the best choice, but another alternative is to pause the video for a moment and briefly show the black screen with short text explanation. Such approach is used by @s7habo in his awesome videos.
What would you say? Do you find that the captions I use are a bit distracting to the editing process itself?
Thanks for any input.
I like the captions as you explain each individual step clearly and because there is no audio I can watch and read the video at a slower playback speed like 0.5 or 0.75.
Assuming for the moment that these screencasts will stay silent I personally think that the following works best:
Explain what you are about to do in a terse way. Do this the way Boris does it: An in between text only section. You only have to do this when needed, some actions might be rather obvious.
No explanatory text during the edit itself, the only exception being: show key/mouse presses that we as a viewer cannot see (Shift-X, ctrl-Y, left mouse click etc). I do believe that there are some tools for showing this in a nice unobtrusive way.
As someone who use ART for most of my edits, it’s always good to see how others use this software. Firstly, your caption use is good and adds to the video (for me).
I’m guilty of getting excellent results from my preset, so that the edit only requires minor adjustments, that I have neglected looking in depth at what certain modules can achieve, in this instance the colour/tone correction.
So many thanks for opening my eyes.
I can try and do my best to address specific requests and record some “mini how-tos”. They won’t be fancy (just screen recording, no audio, no overlay textual descriptions), but if people think they might be useful I’ll give it a go…
We can use this thread to collect requests and share the videos, would that be ok for you?
From three photos I make a DNG file (with those handy user commands). I try to get the exposure right with the log tonemapper. The tone equalizer is not optimal for DNG files, so i play around with color/tone correction. The result is not quite to my liking yet, but we are moving in the right direction!
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but I suppose you refer to DNG files resulting from HDRmerge. In that case, I would play with the exposure compensation slider to bring the tones in the range that is suitable for the tone equaliser.
Here is a demo, using the files from this play raw.
Thanks agriggio, that is indeed what I mean. So first adjust the exposure and then try something with the tone tools. What I also wonder is the choice between tune curves or log-tonemapper (Dutch translation). Not both at the same time I guess? And for HDRmerge files the log tonemapper is probably better?
Why not? On the contrary, they are meant to work together: log tone mapping for general management of the dynamic range and brightness, and tone curve for fine-tuning
but for now - no speech, only text captions.
I wish I had a friendly neighbour cat. The ones in mine play mortal combat on our fence and release their smelly waste fluids and solids in our yard on the daily basis. 
Thanks for your work, Alberto 
