Finished Pill Puzzle Video

I finally finished the demo video for the Pill Puzzle game.  Things did not go smoothly as I needed to show the action of the accelerometer.  No matter how I tried to video the iPhone I would always get reflections or some kind of shadow on the screen that made the game hard to see.  I tried filming outside and inside.  But no matter what I tried as the phone the was moved to roll the balls I would get a reflection.  In the end I used still photos and angled them to get the appearance of motion.  I then used iShowU to record Pill Puzzle in the iPhone Simulator.  The iPhone simulator however does not use the built in accelerometer that the MacBooks have.  Instead I used a simple app called AccelerometerSimulation by Otto Chrons.  It allows you to broadcast accelerometer info from your iPhone onto the network.  The Pill Puzzle game in the Simulator then uses this data to mimic the real phone.  It was a little more complicated but the images are clear.

iMovie was the next stumbling block.  It could not handle a handful of video clips that I had trimmed.  It kept on lagging and would freeze on a frame and then playback a few seconds later.  That was a major hassle especially when you are trying to be precise with your editing.  I hoped that an upgrade to the faster Snow Leopard would help but it did not.  Instead I had to install xcode again as the old iPhone Simulator had been removed.  The next step was having to recompile Pill Puzzle as the old version would not run in the simulator.  A handful of issues then cropped up that did not exist with the older 2.2.1 code.  After finally fixes the code issues I created the final video sequence and did the voice over.

Once again the lagging in the video was problematic.  I essentially had to time the script and read it knowing that what I was seeing on the screen was not syncing correctly.  A final publish from iMove and now it is on YouTube.

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