Don’t Use a Video Camcorder to Capture Screencast Demos

Jon Udell, the brain behind the screencasting revolution, reveals his tricks of the trade - he uses Camtasia, Windows Media Encoder and other screen sharing tools for his software video demos. He also shares a few tips on producing great audio-video screencasts:

A technique that’s really useful for podcasters who are struggling with expensive and/or poor-quality phone lines - If you can get both parties to record high-quality audio locally, you can use a marginal VoIP setup to converse and then join up the high-quality audio later. I did that here and I’d love to do more shows that way.

For audio I also mostly use Camtasia. Originally I didn’t, I used Audacity, because I hadn’t figured out how to get Camtasia to record the two channels (caller, callee) from my Telos as a stereo track. Eventually I found that setting. It’s in Tools Options -> Streams -> Audio Setup.

..a lot of people who think they don’t have digital audio recorders overlook the fact that they have camcorders which can perform that function. A related point: if you use a camcorder, it’s tempting to let it do the whole job — that is, screen capture as well as audio capture. Although my Channel 9 colleagues do that all the time, I don’t recommend it.

..If you want to do micro-edits in Camtasia, one important tip is to record at a higher frame rate than you will ultimately produce. A screencast is legible at 5 or even fewer frames per second. But if you only capture at that rate, you’ll find that you can’t make intra-frame audio micro-edits. So record at 15 or more frames per second, then produce at a lower rate. Link

[tags]screencasting[/tags]