LibCasting

Probably of interest to only a few readers, but just in case you have some Linux users in your organization or have Linux-using friends (mostly systems managers or other computer-intensive users with some mathematicians and physicists thrown in for good measure), take a look at 5 Ways to Screencast Your Linux Desktop from LinuxHaxor for some possible solutions.

I came across another screencast that only uses audio to add a music soundtrack. I was checking out the CrossLoop page which has a link to their demo video. Like the excellent CustomizeGoogle demo, the CrossLoop demo uses text within the screencast to communicate its main points. While I liked the screencast and watched most of it, I found that with this sound track I turned the volume all the way down part way through it. Is it more a sign of my musical tastes or do others share the opinion that the music at CrossLoop does not work while the CustomizeGoogle does?

Not to sound too negative to this screencast, I do like a couple of other aspects of the CrossLoop demo:

• Small size (video window about 320×240 pixels, delivered by default as a pop-up)
• The way it zooms in to the relevant section (it looks to me like it was created with Camtasia Studio 5 using the new SmartFocus pan and zoom feature.

For me, this is a good example of how adding music may turn out to take too much time and energy to find an engaging track that is not distracting from the information content.

I always enjoy reading others’ advice about screencasting. Today, I came across a post from earlier this week from Under the Raedar called My Rules of Screencasting.  I especially like finding advice that agrees with my own, and from his list of seven points, I’ll fully support 1,2 , 3, 5, and 6, at least. Here’s my abbreviated summary of the list of seven:

1. Sound interesting but do not speak too fast
2. Record the screen at sensible size
3. Publish in Flash
   
4. Use a good microphone
5. Go easy on the ’special effects’
6. Plan but don’t script
7. Aim for a standard format

While waiting for Techsmith to produce a Mac version of Camtasia, Mac users have more limited choices for screencasting software. But at least those choices are expanding. See, for example, a recent comparison of eight options at the TUAW Faceoff: Screencasting. The most advanced option reviewed, ScreenFlow from Vara Software has recently been upgraded to version 1.1.

While I cannot test this, lacking ready access to a Mac (and note that ScreenFlow requires one Leopard), based on its own screencasts, it has some interesting editing features and seems to take good screen video and audio. For general library screencasts, the lack of Flash output and the inability to easily add text call outs (as noted by Paul) are concerns.

So I’ve been playing around with some of the newer, free screencasting programs that including hosting. I created a quick and short screencast with each on the topic of finding the ERIC thesaurus from our library site. See what you think of the output. I’m using five different programs that all offer a free screenrecording program along with some level of free hosting: uTIPu’s TipCam, Webinaria, FreeScreencast’s Screencast Recorder, Jing, and Screencast-o-matic.

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This past weekend I was updating the WordPress software that runs this blog to the latest version, and I came across a screencast that shows some new features. The page hosting the screencast even notes that “This was my first screencast, but I hope we can have more on WordPress.org and our documentation in the future.” I like to evaluate new screencasts both to see the process others use and to see what they plan on demonstrating.

Intrigued by this one, I watched what looks like a Camtasia-created screencast, hosted locally, and embedded in the blog. What struck me right away was the narrator saying, “I apologize for sounding a little funny. I actually had five teeth removed. . . ” Now that is way more than I really cared to hear, and it almost made me stop watching. Since I did not know his regular voice, I would never have noticed that his voice was any more unusual than that of most other screencasters. Fortunately I watched the rest anyway, since it was demonstrating aspects of the software that I wanted to learn.

Musing afterwards about my reaction, I find both advantages and disadvantages to that approach. On the negative side, the comment distracted me from the content I wanted to see and made it take longer to get there. On the plus side, it did help make the audio track more informal, conversational, and less stodgy. I guess I’d rather have strange, personal comments than someone sounding overly scripted and pedantic.

While I have known for some time that Camtasia can output a video to an animated GIF, I never had need of it previously. But as I was updating my search bookmarklets page, I thought that it would be nice to have a visual example of how the transfer search bookmarklets work. So using Camtasia Studio 5, I recorded a short video (without audio), edited it a bit, and then generated it as an animated .gif.

Camtasia gave me several settings to choose from, including how many times to repeat the animation. I went with 3 and added ending title slide so that it would end on that description of demo. One great advantage of an animated .gif is that is is very easy to embed it in a blog post like this one or on a Web page like the search bookmarklets page.

The disadvantage is that viewers lose the controls of a standard video file. The stop, rewind, and replay functions are not easily available. I toyed with the idea of using a small .swf-based video instead of the animated .gif. But that takes much more work to get all the appropriate coding on the page, the JavaScript in the header, and all the embed codes working correctly. Despite their documentation’s claims, I did not find an easy way to use Camtasia’s ExpressShow to embed the small video on my page when I host it on my own site. If I use Camtasia’s option to upload to screencast.com, then I get a much easier embed code snippet to use. Trying that here in WordPress, it pastes fairly well, but for an unknown reason to me, it runs the 14 second video in about 3 seconds. Assuming that it ran correctly, I’m curious as to which version most people would prefer to see on a page like my search bookmarklets page.

Since my library launched a new Web site for this semester, I decided to use Demofuse to create a quick online tour of the new site. Take a look and see what you think. It seemed to work well for showing where key links had moved on our home page (although to reduce the external calls we set it up on a duplicate of our home page so that the Demofuse JavaScript would not need to be loaded every time that the home page loaded.)

I have been fairly pleased with the results of my second Demofuse tour. According to Demofuse, the tour has been viewed (or at least started) well over 400 times in the last month. Compared to the very sparse turn out we had for in-person new site tours, the online approach succeeded far better.

We will probably take this down soon, but I wonder if I will be using any more Demofuse tours. I am concerned that the Demofuse site still has a footer with a 2007 date, their toll free number now advertises a an adult phone number, and their blog link is dead. I’ve sent email to them to see if they plan to maintain and develop the site.

So you may consider using it for a short term project, if you do it soon. Or you might try a similar site I just came across called Amberjack. I have yet to try using it, but the example on their site is similar to Demofuse, although it seems a bit slower and less elegant.

And here is another free, Windows-based screencast recorder with audio and free hosting: FreeScreencast.com. The software download is Screencast Recorder beta 10. This is a Windows program that requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and the Windows Media Encoder. The hosted screencasts include linking URLs and embed code, but at this point, it does not include comment or rating functions.

I’ve not yet tried out the software, but you can see some of the hosted screencasts (68 at present) to see the end result.

Webinaria appears to be another free program for creating screencasts. I have not tested it yet, but according to its site  it runs on Windows 98/2000/XP/Me/2003/NT/Vista, is freeware, and  “contains NO SPYWARE or ADWARE.” It also claims that it “will not slow down your computer.” It has Flash output, can include audio, and has combined the software with its own hosting. The hosted screencasts follow the typical sharing model of YouTube and many other 2.0 sites. A few recent library examples include a Basic Search Demo and Another Simple Search Demo from the Rockingham Community College Library. Based on these examples, it looks like the Webinaria hosted videos have fairly poor video resolution (like most other shared video sites) and that they are supported by Google ads. The hosting also includes linking URL, embed code, and viewer comment and rating options. If you’d like to try Webinaria, it is available as a 2.5MB download.