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Software Review: Frank Petrie picks up Boinx Software's new iRecordNow shareware to show you some pretty cool tricks you can do with iSite.
So you got that iSight that you've had your heart set on as a holiday gift. You quickly teleconference with your friends for hours on hours. But then, as with all gifts, the novelty begins to wear off. (What an age we live in, eh? FREE teleconferencing and we get bored with it!!!)
So what else can we do with our new toy. Here's something. Record yourself looking into your iSight and recording a message. Look like those tele-screens you see in Star Trek, James Bond, Austin Powers, et al. Now, that would be cool. You could be your own 'embed' but without the war. But how can we accomplish this feat?
iRecordNow from the fine people at Boinx Software.
iRN comes in the form of an installer package. A simple double click install, no restart necessary and it's time to go. The UI is based on the G5 tower - brushed aluminum with air holes. I wasn't aware that you had to cool software but there you are.
The layout of both the Menu Bar and the app is very intuitive. On the interface, you have two drawers where you can . One, "Camera Controls", lets you customize your image (hue, saturation, brightness, sharpen, focus) and your audio (gain level). The other, "Recorded Movies," takes you to a Finder window containing all your recorded exploits.
You can further control your file size by tweaking various options through the Menu Bar for your video (uncompressed, DV stream - NTSC, web, etc.) and which audio compression format you would like to use. The difference your choices make can be huge. It can be the difference between a file being 18.7 GB or 1.7 GB. You'll want to play around with that until your completely happy with the results.
Documentation is nonexistent. When you go under the Help Menu, you are directed to visit their forums which would be fine if any one had been there. Fortunately, since using this is a breeze, you would only read the Tips & Tricks forum anyway.
This app comes in very handy. You can send news bulletins of your vacation to loved ones. Or, as I did, make a video interview for your daughter's school project. We couldn't find the time to get together, so I recorded myself answering all the questions that she had forwarded to me. Burnt it to a disk and there you are.
The video is crisp and of very good quality. No jitters or dropped frames - unless you choose to record in that way. Any way you use it, iRN is a worthy and cost effective means for communicating.
Oh, yes and "Good Morning, Austin."
Frank Petrie
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