Quick WPF/Silverlight tips to make great videos of your apps 8/2/11
Hello there!
Have you ever developed a great WPF or Silverlight app with lots of smooth animations, but when you tried to capture it in video (using software like Camtasia and Expression Encoder) the animations are jumpy and slow? Have you tried to zoom in to some part of your app only to see that your beautiful UI gets pixelated?
Well this tip is for you! In this post I’ll give some tips from my experience recording the video for Skedle, our newest WPF app. Take a look at the Skedle video below:
You can see that the animations are smooth and the resolution is crisp, even when the video zooms in the application. Also, did you know that the opening “Skedle” animation was actually captured directly from the WPF app?
So let’s jump on to the tips!
1. Slow down animations and then speed up the video
No matter what PC you have and how optimized your app is, you’ll almost never be able to capture animations with the same smoothness and fluidity as the real app. To overcome that, the solution is to slow down all your animations by a factor of 10 or 20 (using the SpeedRatio property), and then speed up the video accordingly in those specific parts.
“But”, you might say, “does that mean I’ll have to change the SpeedRatio of each Storyboard?”. The answer: No for WPF, unfortunately yes for Silverlight! WPF allows you to override properties like SpeedRatio by using Dependency Object metadata overrides (unavailable on Silverlight as of v4 and WP7). Here’s an example that slows down all the animations by a factor of 10 (you can use it on your App.xaml, for instance):
static App() {
Timeline.SpeedRatioProperty.OverrideMetadata(typeof(Storyboard),
new FrameworkPropertyMetadata { DefaultValue = 0.1 });
}
Of course, this tip won’t work if you specifically set the SpeedRatio of any of your animations.
One last point: don’t use this to cheat or lie about the fluidity of your app! If your app is slow and you make it look smooth, users will notice that the first time they try it, and it won’t look good for you.
2. Use Viewbox or RenderTransform to zoom in without losing quality
The next thing you’ll want to do is to record your screencast in a huge resolution in order to enable crisp zoom-in effects on your video. The easiest way to achieve that is to wrap your main layout panel on your window or page in a Viewbox (available on WPF and Silverlight 4) and set its Width and Height to a fixed size, or simply use a ScaleTransform as your panel’s RenderTransform to scale everything up to a fixed factor.
For example, if your app looks good on a 800×600px window but you have a 1920×1200px monitor, you can record your video at double size (1600×1200px), which will allow for zoom effects in a hi-res (720p) video. In WPF or Silverlight, this could look like the following:
<Window>
<!-- ... -->
<Grid>
<Grid.RenderTransform>
<ScaleTransform ScaleX="2" ScaleY="2" />
</Grid.RenderTransform>
<!-- old content goes here, with fixed size -->
<Grid Width="800" Height="600" x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<!--more stuff-->
</Grid>
</Grid>
</Window>
This tip won’t work if you have images on your UI, but you would lose resolution on those anyway when zooming. At least you’re getting the best of the vector-based parts of your interface.
When recording videos for WP7 apps this tip doesn’t apply too well because you’re constrained by the size of the emulator. My recommendation is to record on the maximum size of the emulator (click the magnifier icon, select 100%), which will give you a 800×480px screen – usually more than enough for YouTube videos.
Bonus tip: If you use this to zoom in, try setting the Windows cursors to “Windows Aero (extra large)”, which will give you a mouse pointer that is proportional to your huge interface!
You can also use this tip to record title screens and other animations for your video (for example, the Skedle title animation was zoomed in by a factor of 5). In fact, by combining the two tips, you could create the video entirely in Expression Blend!
So that’s all for today. If you create a cool video using these tips, please post it as a comment!
See you next time!
Roberto
This post is also available on CodeProject.
9 commentsCategories: .net, Dicas, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone
My first app on the Windows Phone Marketplace: Periodic Table 24/11/10
Hey there!
Now that the Windows Phone 7 devices have been released and the Windows Phone Marketplace is live, my brother Eduardo and I wanted to develop an application to experiment with WP7 and evaluate the Marketplace validation process. So here it is!
Our first app is a Periodic Table for Windows Phone 7 that contains chemical and physical information of all chemical elements. Available for US$0.99!
Screenshots:
Features:
- List view where you can order elements by name, symbol, atomic number, group or series and jump between categories
- Table view that displays the elements in a color-coded periodic table
- Details panorama view with chemical and physical information for each element
- Integrated with Windows Phone themes
Trial limitation: in the trial version, you can only see the details for elements in Group 1 (H, Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs, Fr).
If you like this application or if you have any comments, suggestions or corrections, please review this app on the Marketplace!
Thanks!
Roberto
Categories: Silverlight, Windows Phone
Learn how to use the Windows Phone 7 Turnstile Control with Victor Gaudioso! 19/10/10
So you’ve seen the WP7 Turnstile Control but don’t know how to use it?
Victor Gaudioso, MVP, has published a cool 13-minute video explaining all you need to know to download the source, rebuild it for WP7, and use it in your apps. The video is available at:
Thanks Victor for your awesome video!
Cheers!
Roberto
Categories: Artigos, Dicas, Silverlight, Windows Phone
New article: Windows Phone 7 Turnstile Control for Silverlight 12/10/10
I’ve just released my third article on CodeProject: recreating the Windows Phone 7 Turnstile Effect on Silverlight (for desktop and Phone). This article explains how to recreate the 3D effect we’ve seen so many times in the Windows Phone 7 videos (or for some lucky ones, on the devices themselves). Then, it shows how to refactor the effect into a reusable control that you can apply to any layout.
Here’s the link:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/windows-phone-7/WP7Turnstile.aspx
You can see some demos of the effect at http://bit.ly/wptiles and http://bit.ly/wptiles3c .
If you like this article, please sign in and vote for this article (on the right corner, “Rate this article”), and please leave your comments and suggestions.
All the source code is also being released in CodePlex under the MS-PL licence, to facilitate future improvements and distribution. The project page is at http://turnstile.codeplex.com/.
If you like this kind of article, I also recommend my other articles on CodeProject:
- Creating a 3D book-shaped application with speech and ink using WPF 3.5
- Multi-touch development with WPF – A multi-touch RSS reader
Thanks!
Roberto
Categories: Artigos, Microsoft, Open Source, Silverlight, Windows Phone