Yesterday, I was able to create a three minute screencast using Techsmith’s screen recording software called Camtasia Studio 6; convert that screencast into a flash video and upload it to the amazon.sjsu.edu server (and no, it’s not Amazon.com) and post it on this blog; and convert it to .MOV file format and create an account on YouTube and upload my very first YouTube video. Just enumerating it in this post makes me tired, but I actually had an easier time compared to the previous week’s activities on podcast. It was not a walk in the park, but it was not boot camp either. I worked on the set of activities from planning my topic up to the post on the YouTube upload from 6PM to 1AM, with just a few breaks in-between. And mind you, that does not include the time I spent on the reading, viewing and link clicking assignment. Whew, show business is a lot of work!
I went through three stages of production for my screencast project. The three stages were: planning and rehearsing the script, recording and editing the screencast, and converting and uploading the final product.
The first stage involves coming up with a topic that I am familiar with and can easily talk about. I decided early on that it would be the social bookmarking tool, delicious as other Web 2.0 tool that we have covered in class or I am familiar with would be too complex for a three minute screencast. Then I have to decide on what aspect of delicious I would talk about and come up with a script on that. I think that was the hardest part of this stage of the project since I tend to be talky when I explain stuff and I know that I am going to exceed that three-minute limit. Sure enough during my dry run with the original script I ended up clocking in at around four minutes. So I shortened my introduction and remove my elaboration on what a screencast is. I also removed an entire paragraph that describes what delicious is all about. I realized that with just three minutes I only have enough time to give a two-sentence introduction and jump right into my topic which was showing the viewer the two ways to add and tag bookmarks on delicious. The final product clocked in at just less than three minutes or two minutes and fifty five seconds, including the three second title clip.
In the next stage, I proceeded to record my screencast, script in hand as I go through the web pages displayed on my computer screen. One good tip I picked up from the tutorials available at the Techsmith site was to use the tab feature of Firefox to open the web pages needed for the screencast so that I could just tab through to the next page or site I needed for my narration. I went through several takes or recording before I finally settled on one that I like. So I proceeded to the next step which was to add intro music and a title clip, and some fancy transition effects to give my screencast some spit and polish. I decided to use the same intro music I used with my podcast and imported the media into the Camtasia studio software. By the way, the MP3 file I used for the intro music is called Acoustic Flash and is available through registration,royalty-free at this site.
Although you can make a title clip within Camtasia, I decided to make my own title clip using Microsoft Publisher so I can add the logo I used on the wiki assignment. After designing a simple title page on Publisher I proceeded to import the file, but the Camtasia software was not recognizing the file format as a media file. So I went back to Publisher and save the file as a picture file using the Microsoft picture viewer as format. Adding the title clip and the intro music into my screencast project was as simple as dragging the file into either the video-audio track that contained the screencast in the case of the title clip and dragging the MP3 music file into a second audio track in the case of the intro music. Afterwards most of my time was used mixing the three files. I also listened to the audio track of the narration several times to edit out areas wherein I said ums and ahs, thankfully there was not a lot of them I think I only have to edit out two instances. In parts of the narration wherein I tend to repeat the words I decided to just leave it as is since when I edited it out, it impacts on the flow of the narration and popping sounds are introduced into the track because of the edit. Then I added a transition effect called peeling between the title clip and the actual screencast to make it look seamless.
The final stage was converting the project into two file format specified in the assignment. One was in flash format and the other was .MOV file format. This was also the stage that I had to redo the size of the screen finally choosing 640 x 480 for the flash format and 480 x 360 for the .MOV format. I enabled the smart focus feature which allows the software to automatically zoom into cursor and keystrokes on the pages. This is a nifty feature that is also invaluable since the size made small text on the screen impossible to read. I had to go back to editing the project to adjust the focal point of the zoom and to lengthen the duration of the focus on a particular spot on the web page. Afterward I just had to choose custom settings and choose the file format in an easy to follow wizard that would guide you to converting the file into the format you specified. There are also some options you can play with, like changing the background color of the file and choosing the player controls for the flash format but I did not tinker with them. Then it was just a matter of uploading the files containing the flash format to the amazon.sjsu.edu server and the .MOV file into my newly-created YouTube account. In these last few steps, it took several minutes to render, encode, and upload the files into the respective servers. Finally, I just needed to copy the file location on the amazon.sjsu.edu server of the flash version of my screencast to post it on my blog and copy the embed code and paste it for the version that was uploaded on YouTube.
So there you have it, my experience in creating, converting, uploading and posting a screencast.
Cartoon by Andertoons