LibCasting

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.

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 — that you film and narrate simultaneously — 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 “I’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.

Screencasting software often has a PowerPoint plug in which can be used to convert a lecture with PowerPoint to a screencast. I have not used this feature to produce any screencasts yet, but I have seen several that have been done this way. It seems especially useful for recording an entire lecture.

Kevin Yank has posted Recognizing Web 2.0 which is a screen cast from his talk of that title delivered to the Victorian Association for Library Automation. He has a captioned and uncaptioned version of the screencast linked. These are screencasts of his lecture, which means they both are very large files. Even on broadband, give either one some time to download.

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.

Paul has posted links from his screencasting workshop along with the PowerPoint he used for it. The presentation gives an excellent overview of screencasting along with links to software, some examples, and other tidbits. I was especially intrigued by and will have to try out Sizer myself since it looks like it could be useful for grabbing the correct size screen shots.

I’ve been waiting a bit before I try the new versions of Captivate and Camtasia, in part in the hopes of reading what others have to say first. Yesterday, Paul pointed to just such a comparison. At WebBriefcase, we now have Camtasia Studio vs Adobe Captivate. Written from the perspective of a Captivate user, this short comparison primarily looks at the new Camtasia. While the author decides to stick with Captivate, Camtasia gets credit for having more output format options. There is a nice description of the different approaches to recording and editing that the two programs use.

I’m not sure that I agree with a few comments, just based on my experience with Camtasia 3. “With Camtasia, everything on your screen (within your selected area, that is) is recorded. Recording is done in real time. So, if you were to pause for awhile to think, the pause would be recorded as well.” Yes, but Camtasia can easily be paused during the recording. As to “several features that were available in Captivate are not in included in Camtasia, for example, adding a highlight box, adding a click box, text entry box,” if I’m interpreting this part correctly, the first two, at least, are available as callouts, “highlight rectangle” and “transparent hot spot.”
I’m looking forward to seeing additional reviews and comparisons. But maybe it is time, and I just need to test them both myself.

I have given my workshop “Creating Online Tutorials in Less Than 30 Minutes” several times this year. This site is based on much of that content, but if you’d like to read some attendee’s summaries of the workshop that I gave in Monterey at Internet Librarian 2006, see Cindy Chick’s post at LawLibTech and one from the Impromptu Librarian. For an older version, see a report from the workshop I gave in March at Computers in Libraries 2006.

At Internet Librarian 2006 in Monterey on Wed. Oct. 25 at 11:30, I’m leading an interactive Training Tutorial Tour looking at a variety of screencasting tutorials as well as other library tutorials. I hope the audience will participate in identifying strengths and weaknesses of each. I’ll be curious to see if we all agree on them. And I hope it will help us be more aware of what techniques work.

Here’s my preliminary list of tutorials to view, in case anyone planning on attending the session has a chance to look at these ahead of time.

• NYU: How to find a book, HTML and Video versions
• Yale: Researching a Topic in 4 Easy Steps
• UIUC: Reserves Tutorials
• TILT: Texas Information Literacy Tutorial

Notes and comments on Writeboard (pass of monterey)

Techsmith has updated Camtasia Studio to version 4. While I have yet to download the new version to try it, there are some nice sounding features like more output formats, including m4v for podcasts, improved audio editing capabilities, production previews, open ended survey questions, extending end frames to fit added audio, closed captioning, and more. Paul mentioned the release and a first look from Digital Inspiration.

With all the new features comes a higher price for educational users ($199 instead of $149). The upgrade price for educational users is $89.50. I was hoping for less expensive pricing that that, especially with competition from free products like Wink. I’m also disappointed that version three never fixed the looping bug. Users of version 3 should not have to upgrade to get that fixed, and even more discourage is a report on 10/17 in that thread that the bug continues even in version 4!

Paul points out that Adobe is now shipping Captivate 2 and that Techsmith will have version 4 of Camtasia Studio out soon (next week if they stay on schedule). I’m hoping to see that both find the balance between being even easier to use and adding more features and capabilities.