Screencast - Set Up SpinXpress

Part one of Video Distribution Workflow

This tutorial can serve as a general introduction to SX.

This is completed screencast

Outline:

1. Here’s what we’re going to do / Quick explanation of SX
2. Download and install SX on PC
3. Up the bandwith in the preferences
4. Create a group and invite the Mac
5. Switch to Mac, see group
6. Drag & Drop a file into the group from the Mac
7. Add a note to the file
8. See file uploading
9. From the PC, see Mac, see file downloading
10. Animation - P2P vs Computer > Server > Computer
11. These computers can be anywhere (same room or across the globe)
12. PC open and view file.

Script:

(Animated illustration)

Have you ever tried to send a large file like a video or some CD quality audio tracks to a group of people you're collaborating with? It can really be a pain in the butt. If the file is larger than 10 megabytes, email is probably out of the question. You could use an instant message program but you have to do the transfers one at a time while you and the ohter person are at your computers. And you could also try one of those big file transfer services but they make you upload the file to their server first before people can download them.

(SX website)

I’m going to show you how to use SpinXpress to send things directly from your computer to the all the people you are collaborating with, without first uploading things to a server or worring about whether people are on a Mac or PC or behind a firewall or something.

(Zoom through installation)

So the first thing we need to do is go to spinxpress.com to download and install the software. It's pretty straightforward and it works the same way on a Mac or a PC. Just save the setup file to your computer, run the installer, and follow the onscreen prompts.

(Start going through steps in the screencast)

When SpinXpress launches for the first time, you will have to enter an email address that will be used to identify your particular computer. If you are going to use SpinXpress on more than one computer you will need a seperate email address for each one.

Now, click next and create a password.

Once you've done that you have to specify the location of the computer and it's type of internet connection.

And finally, you'll need to enter the activation code that gets sent to the email address you entered. So here I'll switch over to my email program, select the code, right-click and copy it, then go back over to spinxpress, right-click in the entry field and paste in the code. Then I'll click next and finish and there's SpinXpress!

(hightlite group section)

Okay, really quickly, here's the basic layout which you'll understand more as we set this up to share files. Up top here is the group section where all of your, you guessed it, groups will show up.

(hightlight members section)

Over here is where members of the selected group will show up.

(highlight files section)

Files that the group is sharing go over here.

(highlight comments section)

And down here you can attach comments to individual files.

Now before we start using the program I want to show you one more thing. Go up here and click the Settings button. Here you can adjust your upload and download bandwith. You can adjust these to whatever makes sense for you. In my case because I'm trying to transfer a large file as fast as possible, I'm going to jack both of these all the way up to unlimited.

So now that SpinXpress is all set up we're going to create a group of computers that we want to share files with. Basically this is peer2peer technology but instead of being open to anyone on the Internet, you are creating a private, secure, invited network. One thing to note when you create a group is that it's best if the computer that creates the group is one that will be online all the time. That's because it's the one that manages the group and new members or files won't be added unless it's online.

So let's start by clicking the Add button in the groups section. Next we'll give the group a name. For this sample group I'll just call it Big Video and then I'll click next.

Now here I have an opportunity to add files to the group by clicking the "add files" button but I'm not going to do that right now. I'll just show you the way you'll usually do it once the group is setup.

Here I can add the email address of the other computers I want to add to the group. If I don't know them I can always add them later in the Members panel. In this case I'm going to add my Mac to the group. That computer is using michael@michaelverdi.com. So I click Add and I can see that it's now a member of the group.

Next, you can pick a license for the files in the group. You can choose traditional copyright or click the drop down menu and select a Creative Commons license. In this case I'm going to select Attribution-Noncommercial and then I'm going to click the finish button.

When I do that I get a message that asking if I'd like to send an email with a link to the SpinXpress software to the person who I've just invited to the group. If you need it, this is a helpful feature. I already have Spinxpress set up on my mac so I'm going to say no here.

Now I've got my group set up I can see the group listed up top and with it selected I can see that the other computer has been invited. So I'm going to switch over to my Mac and see what it looks like from there.

Over here on my Mac you can see that I'm already part of a bunch of groups. Here at the top is the Big Video group. When I click on it I can see that my PC is connected. Now let's get some files into this group already.

I'm going to click the add button in the files section and I'm going to select a video on my hard drive. This is kind of like adding an attachment to email. So here's my Rough Draft and it's just about 100MB. Now I click open and what you'll see is SpinXpress is adding the file to it's cache and when it's done it will start to transfer directly from my computer to the other computer.

While I'm waiting a few second for that to happen, I can go down here to the comments section and click the add button down there to attach a note to this file.

And once the video is added you can see here that it's available to the other computer and in just a second it will start downloading it. If I go up here to Uploads, notice that it says 1 now. If I right-click on it I can see that the roughdraft video is tranferring to the other computer. Now let's go back over to the PC to see what's happening over there.

I can see here that my Big Video group has a green arrow next to it to let me know that there is something new in the group. So if I click on the group I can see that my Mac is connected and I see that there is a new file and it's available because it's done transferring to this computer. My Mac and my PC are on the same wireless network so this file transferred really fast.

Now when I click on the file I can see that there is a note attached to it. I can preview the note by mousing over it or I can double-click it to open it up in a window.

So let's look at this video. I'm going back to the file and I'll click Save as and I'm going to put this on my desktop for now. Once it's done saving, I can go to my desktop and open up the video.

(note to replace the video with something better looking)

Then I can go back to SpinXpress and I can add another note to the video.

And those are the basics of setting up and using spinxpress. The cool thing is that these two or really any number of computers can be connected whether they're in the same house or across the globe. What's more is these files are going directly from one computer to the other with no server in the middle requiring that I transfer the file twice - once to the server and a second time from the server to the other computer. Also, if for some reason the connection drops it will resume where it left off when connected again. And even better, as long as one other computer in the group gets the file, then it's still available to the group even if the original person to share the file is no longer online.

So give it a try. Spinxpress is great tool for collaborating over the Internet.