There’s always something new to learn in digital scrapbooking, and a software-specific tutorial is just the way to get me to scrap a page that’s outside my normal style. There are plenty of places you can find them, and more and more people are putting them out on YouTube.
Unfortunately, I hate video tutorials because they take forever. I’m fairly familiar with Photoshop, so I don’t need a lot of explanation. With a written tutorial, I can skim the text looking for the parts I need to understand the process. But with a video, I’m stuck listening to the whole thing, even if what I really want to know is buried in the middle.
This week I found a program that just might change my mind: MySpeed. This little bit of software from enounce.com has changed my approach to video tutorials.
All you do is download and install the software. It starts at $29.99, but there’s a 7-day free trial available so you can try it out first.
Once you have the software installed, it will start up whenever a video shows up in your browser. A little panel appears on your screen, which you can drag out of the way. Once you start playing the video, you can drag the slider to the right to speed it up, or to the left to slow it down.
Because this works on-the-fly, you can speed through the parts you don’t want to hear and slow down for parts that are complicated. The best part is, even when speeded way up, nobody sounds like a chipmunk. The program modulates the audio, so that it sounds the same, just faster. When you slow it all the way down it’s a little funny, but for the most part it just sounds like they’re talking faster or slower.
My husband laughed when I first showed it to him, and he said it would never help. But I love it! I can set it at about 1.5 and still understand everything perfectly. For long introductions or other slow spots, I kick it up to 2.5. When it gets to the meat of the tutorial, I’ll slow down to 1.25 and it’s just fine. I timed myself, and I watched a three-and-a-half-minute video tutorial in two minutes and sixteen seconds! Doesn’t sound like a big difference, but when you get to five- and ten-minute videos, it saves all sorts of time.
If you like to watch TV shows and other videos online, you can use this to rush past the commercials! You can’t exactly skip them, but at 3x the speed, they go right by yet you can still hear when to stop and go back to the show.
At $29.99 for Mac or Windows, the basic version of MySpeed isn’t cheap. This version works with online videos only. To speed up or slow down videos you have saved to your computer, there’s a more expensive option for $99.99. I decided the basic version is just fine for my needs, as I imagine it would be for most of you.
If you watch a lot of videos, or if you are like me and get frustrated with their slowness, check out the free trial of MySpeed and leave me a comment telling me what you think.
