Here to for, I’ve generally built videos and tutorials with the unorganized approach of recording some video while I do something and then going back and editing it into something useful.

Today, I was working on a viral video for a client and actually built a story board of the video before I put it together attempting to plan out how I would present the video.

This actually worked pretty well for me, even though the story board turned out to be very rough.

Here’s a quick video showing the MindManager map I used for this situation.

Plus, here is the resulting viral video that I created from the story board draft.

Note. there’s a technical sound glitch in the final product that is the result of a problem with Camtasia’s ability to render 2 tracks of sound and a slow motion video clip at the same time.  I’m hoping to resolve this by reworking the clips in Pinacle.  If that succeeds I’ll add a third movie with the corrected result. For now, there are a couple sections where the volume level is a little buggy.

So now, I have to crack open this new software, get it installed and start learning some advanced techniques.  Coming soon, I will have my office on the fishing dock converted into a green room studio, you won’t even be able to see the patio furniture when I’m done, but I’m not sure what I’ll do when the occasional duck flies through my office.

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Journey to Create Video Tutorial for Internet Research with MindManager Pro 7

I do not work in the worlds of Macro writing or testing or even in the world of browser plugins and add on’s, but I would really like to see someone that is versed in this area tackle this issue with a tool that makes it easier to gather information from the web and map it out faster in a mindmap (MindManager being my preference, but if someone else figures it out with a different tool, I will definitely use it even if I have to run the thing from the command prompt.)

I often times have to do a deep dive investigating a topic of information with web research.  Once I have a large number of links for further review, I like to start pushing them into a MindMap.  MindManager has a useful tool for doing this one page at a time from Internet Explorer.  However, MindManager falls short in the following areas:

• Doesn’t work with Firefox, Opera, or Safari
• Doesn’t have the ability to send multiple tabs, bookmarks or favorites into a Mindmap all at once.
• No longer has the ability to send highlighted text on a web page into the mindmap with the topic name and link
• I’d like to see the highlighted text of a web page either become a sub topic or at a minimum get pushed into the notes section of MindManager.

Plus, Internet Explorer is just plain tedious for doing this work as compared to other browsers. 

That said if you have to use Internet Explorer then you have to so I put together this video tutorial to show you how to use it.  Its a manual process but can get the job done.

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This morning my family and I woke up early and headed to a local park in Gastonia, North Carolina where there was a short 5K run for cancer scheduled.

I didn’t think about it much at the time, but I woke up and threw on the MindManager T-shirt I received from Mindjet a couple months ago.

My wife and I and our oldest 2 children, Zoe 4 and Corbin 9(yellow shirt above and behind me a bit-just after the end of the race), all ran in the event.

We were standing around after the event awaiting the awards ceremony. 

No awards for us, we were there just for the race, cause and fun.

There was a guy wearing work boots and jeans in the park with the other participants.  There was a band stand playing some seventies disco.

My youngest daughter who had been hanging out with grandma and grandpa, was thinking about dancing but not quite swaying yet.  Mya is 2 years old. 

The guy in jeans and work boots was smoking a cigarette and dancing to the disco.

Now this was an event to raise money and awareness for cancer treatments and cancer survivors, so smoking a cigarette seemed a little out of place bordering on taboo.

The guy may have been a workman, he might have been homeless.  He might have spent the night in the park and called the park home, pleasantly surprised at the celebratory music and free donuts in his living room that morning.

As I sporadically watched the guy dance a bit and looked down to my daughter to see if the mood was taking her too, I thought that the guy dancing in the park possessed an insight that many of the runners for the event had gained and then lost.

We runners had experienced a good time and had lived in the moment of the race.  Then we seemed to lose the moment, even though the memory of the positive feelings lingered with us as we awaited to cheer on the people that had won an award, trophy or medal in recognition that we had all tried hard.

The man dancing and smoking a cigarette was living in the moment however, while the rest of us watched it slip by.  I thought of these things while I was standing there.

I thought momentarily at that moment about the t-shirt I was wearing.  Not just a piece of corporate advertising passed out to spread the message about a product, but also something that represented the achievement of a family that had survived cancer multiple times a decade earlier.

I thought of the book, The Cancer Code.

I thought a bit how mindmapping had changed my perspective on a number of things and how it helped me to capture the moment, the now inside my head on a visual static snap shot on my computer screen.

These days I live in the moment much more than I have for many years.  By mindmapping out my thoughts and plans, experiences and knowledge, I have gained a new found confidence, appreciation and understanding of who I am and where I am going and that enables me to focus on the here and now just a little bit better.

Sometimes, my here and now is online or in a computer screen and that is a bit of a weakness or flaw, but its also an opportunity for me to move on and do better in the future.

All of these thoughts went through my brain in the park today and some of them trickled in the rest of the day.  Clearing out the BS, a kind of neural colon cleanseing like experience.

I think all in all, it helped me recognize something that I had been missing the last couple of weeks.

The shirt, my family, the guy dancing carefree in the park, it all mapped out in my head a clear knowledge or understanding of that particular point in time.

For that point, I was connected to myself and that made the day perfect.

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I wanted to follow up on a point I made earlier in a different post. When you do a lot of mind mapping, or when you are actively involved in a number of meetings, a projector is usually present in your home office. I’m referring to your main office not necessarily the office in your actual home.

Sometimes you have to travel and you can always take those projectors with you. Sometimes you’re traveling for off-site meetings with customers and sometimes it’s with your own team just in a different setting. Sometimes it’s for personal reasons.

I have known executives to take a company projector home to use it for personal reasons. I wouldn’t advise this, however you could rent your own projector for personal reasons. For example a few years ago I use my own personal projector that I own for my company, to show a movie for my son’s birthday party. We set up a screen outside, and we displayed the movie on the screen like a dark. I used a computer surround sound system for the sound of the movie.

It worked great and it made for a good theme for the birthday party too.

Sometimes is not entertainment, but you may need a projector to deal with family meetings are complex discussions with your own family members. In these cases you can use tools like MindManager and other planning software and display the plans upon a blank white wall with a projector. Now if you didn’t happen to bring a projector with you when you went to see your family a detail of a long ways away, you can turn to Projector123.com.

They provide projectors around the country, and are recently branching out into new areas such as their Denver projector rental offices, or their Colorado Springs projector rental options, or even their Salt Lake City projector rental programs.

Regardless there is no reason why you shouldn’t be only use the skills and talents and technologies that you’ve learned to use in the office in many situations outside of the office without having to invest the money that your office did in that equipment.

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There was a great gadget at CES this year that really showed how convergence could bring out the inner super geek in attendees.  It was the R2-D2 DVD Projector from Nikko Home Electronics, a specialist in RC Cars and vehicles.

This is a very functional little droid.  It offers a built in projector that displays an image right out of R2-D2’s eye socket.  Instead of a semi transparent, holographic image, this projector instead provides a more terrestrial flat image on a wall or a projection screen.  The display image can range from 24 inches to 80 inches.

But that’s not all, this droid also packs a CD/DVD player that will play music or a video through that projector. 

You can control your droid with a remote control shaped liked the millennium falcon even with a pop out/slide out keypad.

And not even the rebel alliance can get by without making their droids compatible with an iPod.  So R2-D2 has a little docking bay that hides or pops out of the belly of the unit so that you can play your iTunes or even see the video display of MP4 videos through the projector.

Now this isn’t just some shaped like a robot type of device that you might see in Radio Shack, this little guy is actually pretty functional.  The remote control can make R2go forward, backwards, right turn, left turn and pivot turns and the head of the unit (with the projector) can swivel 90 degrees to the right and 180 degrees to the left.

The unit plays 11 different random R2-D2 sound effects, and one of the effects plays each time a compartment opens.  The device even has a memory card reader that will let you project images with the unit anywhere in the house.  When I say anywhere that includes the ceiling as R2 can recline his legs so that the projector will point at the ceiling at a 65 degree angle.

R2 has a built in 20 watt stereo system and an Fm wireless audio transmitter as well.

It looks like a toy and is a lot of fun, but really you getting a lot of functional electronics components converged into your Star Wars fantasy gadget for just $2500 (which isn’t too much more than a decent projector in the first place)

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