Explain Everything: Time Lapse Notes Capture Process

Over the last two weeks I made some time-lapse notes in Explain Everything during keynote talks at a couple of conferences (ISTE 2016 and iPadPalooza). Several people have asked about my process so here is a quick version. If there is interest I'll produce a more detailed series of posts both on how I actually take notes and capture the process.

Hardware:

• iPad Pro 9.7"
• Apple Pencil

Software:

• Explain Everything for iPad (White UI)
• iMovie for OS X El Capitan

Steps:

• Create a new project from Template
• Choose or create a template with a grid overlay (this helps me to stay in-line)
• Mute the microphone
• Press record
• Start taking notes. There are all sorts of ways to do this and I am still learning. Check out the works of Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown, and Dan Roam for inspiration. And look up Brad Ovenell-Carter.
• Pause recording and save the project at logical points in the talk. I have not had any iPad crashes etc., but I also know that creating hundreds of objects AND recording can sometimes cause issues (in any app) so I just do it as a habit/practice. You may have to mute the microphone again when you start recording.
• When done, export the movie to Explain Everything Discover (so that it can be converted to MP4 in the cloud rather than waiting for a 45-60 minute highly active file to compress).
• Download the mp4 from discover on to a computer with iMovie. I like the Mac OS X version because you can manually set the speed multiplier to custom speeds. 130-160x will reduce a 1 hour recording to 2-3 minutes. I also added music.

I think we should add the ability to speed up and slow down clips/sections in the timeline in Explain Everything which will eliminate the need to use iMovie for the time-lapse effect.  Below are the two videos I made earlier this month.