Vidnik Works (Sort Of) Right Out Of The Box
Usability is everything to me. If something is hard to use, it simply doesn’t get used.
Today I saw a short post about Vidnik over at DownloadSquad and before I even finished the second sentence had already clicked over to the Vidnik download page to give it a try. So, I thought I’d record my very first moments with Vidnik to see if it was as easy as it appeared in the graphic on the DownloadSquad post.
I usually test without reading beyond a basic description. This is partially because I expect things to be easy on the Mac and partially because I want to see how intuitive the product is to use. In this case, as advertised, Vidnik was very easy to use.
Here’s my test of Vidnik, right out of the box:
Takin Vidnick For A Test Drive from respres on Vimeo.
As you can see, it’s easy to use… but I can’t get it to sync the sound properly.
Here’s the link to the finished Vidnik test on YouTube. Initially I thought the sound may have been off because I was capturing a screencast at the same time. But I did a second test and a third test and the same thing happened. Other Vidnik testers appear to have the same issue with Vidnik.
The videos that Vidnik automatically saved to the hard drive were perfectly in sync. So, I uploaded Test 3 again, only this time I did it directly to YouTube the old fashioned way. No luck, I encountered the Same problem. Finally, to make sure it wasn’t something happening on my end, I recorded a final video in iMovie and uploaded that. It uploaded just fine.
Unfortunately, while I like the simplicity and intuitiveness of the Vidnik application, the end result left much to be desired.
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Comments
Ah. Yep - seems to be the problem: YouTube is not coping with .mov files recorded with .aac format audio. Which is what Quicktime delivers. Which is what Vidnik is using. The fault is both YouTube’s for not supporting AAC - and Quicktime’s for not offering mp3 audio on .mov files.
Still a pain though. This should be easier.
I have exactly the same issues. Not sure what’s causing it, but I thought it might have been the QuickTime settings. I’m guessing Vidnik uses QuickTime as its engine.
So I tried a third test (after the same series of tests you went through) - and recorded a video using QuickTime Pro. Same results as Vidnik. And I think therein lies the problem.
My suspicion is that QT uses an audio codec (not mp3) that YouTube isn’t happy with. Does that make sense?
Doesn’t help, but it does leave clues.