shinywhitebox : When asking for help, what should I include?

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When asking for help, what should I include?

Neil Clayton Mar 17, 2009

When you can't get an application to work, it's understandable that you might send it a help request with "aaaaarg! it doesn't work" as the subject line.

For us to help you effectively, we usually need a *little* bit more information than that. Here's some tips on how you can help us help you:

Let us know what you're trying to do. Do you want to get footage into iMovie? Record full screen?
What size is the movie you're trying to record? Is it full screen (your desktop)? Or small (say, 640 x 480).
For iShowU HD / Pro users - what is your output movie? HD can capture at a different size to the output movie, but it's the later that's important. To find this out, look at the summary bar just above where the recordings go. You want the bit that says something like "Video size: 1280 x 720...".
What compression method are you using? Common methods are Apple Intermediate H.264, MPEG4 and Apple Animation.
What kind of machine do you have? G4? Intel? 1GB RAM? More?

Sending us a screenshot can also be a good way to communicate this info (as long as, er, it's actually IN the screenshot).

Sending Crash Logs

If the machine you're using isn't on the internet, it's going to be difficult to submit crash logs automatically. In this case, you can find them using the Console applications (it's in Applications/Utilities). Here's how you can find them quickly:

After you've loaded a crash log, you can then use the Reveal in Finder option to bring up the folder that they are in. From here you can then more easily drag all of the iShowU HD (or other app - we're using iShowU HD as an example here) crash logs directly into an email, or save them to a USB stick for transfer to a machine that's on the net. Send these to support@shinywhitebox.com with a brief description of the problem.

That'll help us lots!