On screencasting

15 June 2006

Screencasting is hard. The individual components of screencasting are not particularly difficult, it’s that “deer in the headlights” phenomenon that makes it tricky–stick a microphone or video camera in my face and I become a blabbering idiot.

For my screencasts I’m using CamStudio, which is free software (free as in beer and speech). I have an older vesion of Camtasia, before it offered the export to Flash feature, and while it might be a little more user-friendly, I wanted to try using just CamStudio. The results aren’t so bad: here’s one of importing content in Blackboard and one of deploying a survey in Blackboard.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned:

  1. Change the resolution of your display to 1024×768 or even 800×600 if you can. I noticed that with the resolution set really high, the movies become huge when you switch to a computer with a lower resolution.
  2. Scripts are for wimps. :D
  3. Practice and capture only the part of the screen you need. For example, I resize my browser and run through all the steps I plan on demonstrating, trying to minimize scrolling while at the same time avoiding the need for a full-screen presentation.
  4. Toy with the settings. Right now I modify the Flash export settings to: Sample/playback rate: 15 fps; Keyframe rate: 15 fps; Encode Audio: tick (ADPCM); Add Player controls: untick; Loop: untick; Add Preloader + Progress Bar: untick. These settings seem to give me a nice combination of quality and file size.

However, there are some issues I’d like to resolve.

  1. The progress bar is broken, which is why I disable it in the export.
  2. The player controls are not very pretty. Petty? Yeah. I read some of the documentation on changing the controls, but I haven’t attempted to change them yet.
  3. I don’t want the movie to loop, but I would like it to rewind when it’s done playing. There is no rewind button, so the user has to right-click on the movie and choose rewind. Or refresh the page.

Not being a Flash guy, is there an easy way to fix any of those issues using FlashMX?

3 Responses to “On screencasting”

  1. Debi
    June 15th, 2006 - 12:36 pm

    Try using Wink (free software from Debugmode http://www.debugmode.com/wink/)There is a new version that allows you to add audio and save in more formats than the first version allowed. The only way I used the first version was to capture tutorials and export them as pdf files. The new version is still not quite as good as Camtasia 3.0 but it is getting there and, of course, the price is right!

  2. todd
    June 15th, 2006 - 2:40 pm

    Thanks for the tip, Debi! You’re right, Wink has improved a lot since I last looked at it, but I’m having a problem with it capturing audio and the screen simultaneously. Definitely worth keeping an eye on, though!

  3. Debi
    June 16th, 2006 - 12:39 pm

    You are better off doing the screen capture first and then going back and doing the audio. Otherwise, it sounds muffled to me at least.