LibCasting

ACRL had a Getting Started with Screencasting Webcast back in April and it is scheduled again for July 26. Echoing Paul’s post, I am not exactly sure how “delivering screen captures via RSS” connects with screencasting, but see the comment to that post for an attendee of the earlier Webcast to see if it sounds interesting to you.

Paul “Distant Librarian” Pival has posted a YouTube video and a better quality screencast on how to find the RSS feeds now available on Ebscohost. The problem with posting a screencast on YouTube is that it is hard to read the text on the screens due to the YouTube resolution. I need to blog the details of how I’ve done it to try and get the highest quality possible. The advantage of YouTube is that it makes it very easy to embed the screencast in a blog post of on most any Web page. Note that Paul has to link to the “nicer-quality version” of the screencast.

This Camtasia-produced screencast is hosted on TechSmith’s Screencast.com, which is a fee-based system. It does not have an embed option like YouTube, and only provides HTML code for a fairly standard link. It would be nice if Camtasia provided a way to embed a screencast as easily as YouTube does, but with the higher quality.

Want to get an idea of what features might be available in the next version of Camtasia? See the “What’s coming in Camtasia Studio 5?” interview with  Camtasia Studio Product Manager, Troy Stein. I was intrigued that the interview is presented as an audio-only podcast rather than a screencast. It makes sense since the interview took place by phone (well, Skype anyway). Maybe Camtasia 5 would make it easy to produce a podcast like this without the need to use the Flash MP3 player used on this site.

One other use I’ve been making of screencasting is for communication with technical support and systems departments. Ever call in a technical issue and have the tech person not understand the problem? As a reference librarian, I know that I get calls where I am trying to guess the problem based on a verbal description. It is much easier when I can look over the person’s should and see the problem when it occurs.

So, this evening on the reference desk, I came across a strange problem with subject headings in our catalog. After describing it an an email, I decided to use Wink again to do a quick screencast to document the problem. In between answering reference questions, I was able to reproduce the problem, add a few call-out text boxes, and upload the screencast. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have Wink at the reference desk since I can’t see recording audio there while I’m staffing the desk. Yet Wink lets me take a quick screencast for purposes like this one. Another benefit to creating screencasts for tech support issues is just that it provides another opportunity to practice making screencasts quickly. It is not (nor does it need to be) a highly polished production. Take a look if you would like.

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.

While I’m catching up, I thought I’d follow up on my process post from November. I still haven’t finished (or even worked on) the screencast I talked about in that post, primarily because our site was going to be changing and the steps I wanted to show would be changing as well. That change is not yet complete, so I’ll be waiting awhile to try that screencast. However, later on the same day that I posted, I was working at the reference desk and received a reference question on voice mail. The person left an email address, but the process to get to the wanted information had many steps — a perfect candidate for a screencast. Unfortunately, not only did I not have Camtasia available at the reference desk, but there is also no microphone. Nor could I see putting on a headset-microphone combination while I was supposed to be approachable at the desk.

So, I thought I might try Wink instead. I fairly quickly downloaded and installed Wink. Then I just recorded the steps as I wrote them up in a draft email as well. Then I produced the screencast and uploaded it to a Web server (fortunately, I did have access to my work Web server from the reference desk). Then I sent the email along with a link to the screencast (0.8MB, 1:10). I could have taken more time to add call-outs, but I thought it better to respond more quickly. I tried to make sure that each step was clear and had a couple seconds between. It seemed to work, at least based on the email thank-you response I received. I wonder if other situations like this will crop up. If so, that’s another reason to learn to be able to produce screencasts quickly.

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.

I just came across this nice guide to screencasting for Linux, if you don’t mind the “Capure” typo: Screencast Guide: Capure Your Linux Desktop on Video!. For any Linux users out there, this looks like it provides a variety of choices with different software from the usual Windows collection of screencasting programs. I have not tried any of these, but the post discusses four options (all downloadable from the Softpedia site which hosts this guide): Xvidcap, Istanbul, recordMyDesktop, and Pyvnc2swf (which also requires x11vnc).

I came across an interesting Quicktime screencast of How to use OpenID. I find it helpful to watch non-library-related screencasts not only to see how others put together a screencast, but by watching a screencast about a resource that I don’t know much about, I can analyze my reactions to try and understand how viewers might react to my screencasts, which are typically about resources that I know quite well.

I find Quicktime is a common format for screencasts, especially from Mac-oriented creators. While Quicktime works for this screencast, I find that it takes a very long time to download the file even on broadband. The author notes that it is 6.2 MB and links to a lower quality version at Google Video. Still, I find that I need to have a strong desire to see a screencast that does not load quickly. Otherwise, I just browse elsewhere on the Web. So this one is added incentive to try to keep my screencasts smaller.

I also found the pace of the OpenID screencast to be a bit quick at the beginning. I also realized that I have gotten used to screencasts which tell you how long they are. With Quicktime, there is no duration information shown. For me, at least, knowing how long the total screencast will be is important, and I certainly advocate having it included when possible. Most Flash-based screencast output does include that option.

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.

• Overview
• Selecting Sources
• Working with Results

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.