Updating Screencasts and Posts
January 30th, 2007 by Greg R Notess
Now that the new semester is underway and both our library Web site and catalog have changed their design, it is time to get moving on updating some of my screencasts. It is also a good reminder to update this blog. I’ve just published a number of entries that had remained as drafts for the past month or so. If you’re interested, see the Linux Guide, OpenID, Meredith Muses, and PowerPoint Screencasts posts.
For my library screencasts, I started the update process with What Floor is this Book on?. Using Camtasia Studio 4, I found that on Windows 2000, it sometimes would freeze after I cut a section of the video clip. I also had a strange situation where the produced video had black bars on the top and bottom, no matter how I changed the output dimensions. I ended up having to re-edit the video which somehow avoided whatever caused that problem.
If you’re interested, you can compare the new screencast (1.4MB, 1:52) to the old one (1MB, 2:32). I ended up increasing the size, but I decreased the length. Some of the changes include getting rid of the keyboard sounds and reducing the dimensions. I found that the update process was more time consuming that I had hoped, mostly due to the problems mentioned above. However, now that I’ve worked out some of the problems, I plan on updating the others over the next week or so.
I also created a few screencasts for Search Engine Showdown over the last month or so. See my Overlap Showdown and my News Search Showdown posts. Both of those screencasts are hosted on YouTube. I host them on YouTube so that I do not have to worry about paying extra for the bandwidth on that account, but it also is nice to have the YouTube statistics, comments, and ability for others to embed the video themselves if they wish. Both of those videos were recorded and edited with Camtasia. I tried to record using a 320×240 window since that is the maximum YouTube dimensions. I then “produced” them as Quicktime .mov files which were uploaded to YouTube. In the Overlap Showdown, I used several blur call-outs to mask the personal information of the person for whom I was searching. This seemed to work well, but it was a bit tricky to make sure that the blur call-outs lasted for exactly the right amount of time to obscure the search term.