LibCasting » Process

Music Only Screencast

Greg R Notess — Tue, 27 May 2008 03:47:43 +0000

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.

Screencasting Advice

Greg R Notess — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:32:07 +0000

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.Â 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:

Sound interesting but do not speak too fast
Record the screen at sensible size
Publish in Flash
Use a good microphone
Go easy on the ‘special effects’
Plan but don’t script
Aim for a standard format

Sharing vs. Succinctness

Greg R Notess — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:47:04 +0000

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.

For the Techies: How Flash is Embedding on the page

Greg R Notess — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:07:09 +0000

For the more technically minded Web designers, A List Apart has an article, Flash Embedding Cage Match, that looks at various methods in which Flash can be embedded on a Web page. A List Apart always aims for standards-compliance, and sometimes their approaches will not work in all browsers, but it might be useful to compare with the default embedding that screencasting software produces.

Sound or No Sound? CustomizeGoogle and LexisNexis

Greg R Notess — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 04:44:48 +0000

I’ve added a couple new screencasts to my Database Examples page. First of all, CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox add-on extension which can, surprise!, customize Google in a wide variety of ways. When they updated their extension recently, I was pleased to see they offered screencasts, labeled as their “Introduction Movie.” With three versions available (Flash, Animated GIF, and Windows Media Player), all produced from Camtasia by the looks of it, I was surprised that the only audio was background music and that call outs highlighted the actions. In general, I much prefer an audio commentary that explains what is happening. In this case, I actually found the music helped to hold my interest as the call out speech bubbles would give the explanatory textual explanation. I think the pacing is just about right (perhaps a little fast), and the music is not too distracting.

Contrast those with the silent screencasts that LexisNexis offers showing its new Academic interface that will be launching in beta in January and go live summer 2007. These will be available within the new interface as well. But for now, to view these, go to the Redesign 2007 page and scroll down to the tutorials section under Features. Or use the links I’ve extracted below.

I assume these have no sound since someone assumes they’ll be viewed in a library. Despite my interest in the new interface, I lost interest in these screencasts fairly quickly. The pause and other controls are at the top, rather than at the bottom like on most online video players. Even though I could control the pace, I found it a bit slow and confusing. The Selecting Sources tutorial kept giving a “You try it” option where I can click on a particular button, but then the next step did not have me click anything. I’d rather have more information, like an audio commentary.

So there are my conflicting evaluations of two screencasts with no audio commentary. I’m curious to hear if others have the same or different reactions to these.

Photoshop Pan Example

Greg R Notess — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 04:36:32 +0000

At 7:40 into the YouTube video showing Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta, this video finally becomes a screencast and demonstration of the new Photoshop. What I found interesting here is that to demonstrate an application like Photoshop which uses up so much screen real estate and yet make it viewable within the small YouTube window, the creators just pan from one section of the screen to another. I find this to be fairly effective, although the pace was a bit quick for me to fully absorb the information. With most screencasting software like Camtasia, to get the same effect, the easiest way is probably to move the program window to have the highlighted features within the recording window, or add zoom and pan functions after a recording is made. I hope to experiment more with this in the future.

Meredith Muses on Screencasts

Greg R Notess — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 18:01:02 +0000

Last month, Meredith Farkas mused about screencasting. She mentions a variety of issues, includes links to other sources (including this blog), and talks about how more academic libraries seem to be using the technology than public libraries. My favorite quote — “You can make a very basic screencast â€” that you film and narrate simultaneously â€” in 20 minutes. Or you can spend an entire day or more developing a really polished screencast tutorial.”

She also talks about her process and issues with creating screencasts: An introduction to library services and resources and one for Academic Search Premiere. The importance of being able to create these quickly is highlighted by her story that “Iâ€™d created a screencast on using Thomas about a week before they redesigned their Website and had to do it all over again.”

Also note the comment from GinaP about Idaho’s use of a screencast to explain a statewide library catalog to legislators. That sounds like a great use of the technology for anyone working with legislators.

Process Refresher

Greg R Notess — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 06:06:32 +0000

So I had the opportunity to create a quick screencast for an updated FAQ page at work. Since I’ve been busy lately, this was a good opportunity to use my techniques for creating one in less than 30 minutes, just like I teach in my Creating Online Tutorials in Less Than 30 Minutes workshops. I took just a few minutes to make the recording and re-did it once or twice to fix a couple problems. But then. . . .

Here’s my warning for others: don’t let yourself get distracted! I decided the tutorial might benefit from downloading the new Camtasia 4 and using some of the new features. So I download the trial and started experimenting with it. Soon I was trying new features and checking old problems, and then I ran out of time. An hour or so later, the screencast was unfinished, and I still had more to explore in Camtasia 4. This was last week, and I have yet to find the time to finish it.

For a reminder to myself, I’ve updated the process page and hope the my own advice will get me back on track to finish the screencast tomorrow. The process is a very basic outline, and for anyone who’s like to try it, I’ve also linked to a PDF of a screencasting planning worksheet.