Posted by greggles on May 15, 2006 at 5:04pm
As a non-mac user, I'm curious what recommendations people have for screencasts.
I have used Wink which worked fine and has handy callouts and prev/next buttons but it only producses flash. Wink works on MSWindows and Linux.
Someone else recommended using camstudio (the GPL version of camtasia) which produces flash or avi files, though I haven't used it yet. This is MSWindows only software.
I've read about various Linux only tools that all seemed relatively complex to produce anything with voiceovers...and people like voiceovers so that's a deal-killer.
Any advice? Whatever advice comes I'll happily add to the hanbook page (thanks for starting that, Matt).
Comments
Some more comparison on
Some more comparison on these two tools:
The callouts and navigation buttons and the various controls you get in "post production" kinds of things in Wink are very solid in comparison to what you get in camstudio. I also tried out the "palette" feature in Wink which goes through all of the thumbnails in the presentation and makes a more limited set of colors which allows it to produce a smaller final file. For me this cut the file size in half - pretty nice! It takes a couple of minutes to create a palette and then apply it, but the result is worth it when the file is going to be downloaded hundreds of times.
I have finally used Camstudio.
Camstudio can output to AVI - so if you have a good video editing program you like you can just use that to do the post-production and Camstudio comes with the ability to convert from AVI to SWF if you like flash (or you could probably use other pieces of software to transcode from AVI to a more desirable format.
Camstudio also has the ability to do autopan which is a nice middle-ground between making your presentation 800x600 and still having your browser window sized to 1024x768.
Autopan is a very nice feature and it makes my decision relatively hard that wink lacks that feature.
Any other thoughts?
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I had tried Camstudio on
I had tried Camstudio on Linux and couldn't get it to compile.
You got Wink to work on
You got Wink to work on Linux, right?
Ideally, I'd like to Wink support two more ideas: Autopan and language files with batch rendering.
Gerhard brought up a good point on IRC that it would be nice to use Wink with the text bubbles and then allow our translation team to edit language files for the movies so that they are available to a wider audience. That means 1) a bit more work 2) large file storage requirements since the language files have to be compiled into the flash movie and not just included in at runtime.
Greg
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
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Yes, wink worked on Linux. I
Yes, wink worked on Linux.
I have another idea which might be useful for better translations: Use the TestGen4Web Firefox extension which is available here: http://developer.spikesource.com/wiki/index.php/Projects:TestGen4Web
to record your actions on the browser. Since the recording is to a plain text file, it should be possible to translate it. You shoudl then be able to record this by replaying it and capturing the browser window.
Now that is a seriously
Now that is a seriously hacky idea, but one that would work pretty well.
If anyone wants to create massive amounts of translated screencasts that seems like a great way to do it!
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I have looked at wink, but I
I have looked at wink, but I think it requires too much effort in post-production. What I'd like to do is a simple screencast. xvidcap seems to be a viable solution, but sound is difficult according to this page: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/08/16/2128226
A vnc solution might be the best.
I've gotten faster with the
I've gotten faster with the post-production stuff in making these two movies (and 3 others that went straight to the bit-bucket).
Perhaps it's because I don't like video editing, but the bitmap based system of wink really makes sense to me for making these movies. It also makes splicing them together pretty easy e.g. the RSS feed movie I did is actually two movies spliced together - there is a small continuity problem when I go refresh the live bookmark where I have two tabs open but prevoiusly only had 1.
Greg
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I think I found the ultimate
I think I found the ultimate solution: a patch to ffmpeg. This will allow me to directly grab a screen area and it also records sound. I am not sure the sound syncronization works too well, though.
See here:
http://clemens.endorphin.org/weblog/archives/2006-02.shtml#e2006-02-15T1...
Another interesting tool is gromit which allows you to draw on the screen to point things out.
Istanbul
I haven't tried it, but have you looked into Istanbul?
I don't know if you can add audio track to the file, but there must be a tool to add audio to the videos.
Time has passed and there
Time has passed and there are not one but two videocasting apps that work on Linux:
1) recordmydesktop
http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/
2) krut
http://sourceforge.net/projects/krut/
Isn't Open Source great? All you need to do is wait a bit.
krut and camtasia
I've been using camtasia recently and it is great, but it is not Free (nor free) so that is a bummer. It has more features than anything else I've used - but $300 is not cheap...
I tested out Krut and was very impressed with the results. It outputs a mov and an mp3 file - the settings and features are a bit weak, but it is very usable for most purposes. You will likely need something to edit the movies and compress them but that's the job of editing software, not recording software...
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Indeed the size of the
Indeed the size of the movies is a problem. Do you have suggestions on how to compress the movies afterwards?
Also general hints on how to
Also general hints on how to clean up the sound would be appreciated. Krut produces the audio and video files separately. My microphone picks up some whining noices during recording. I'd like to get rid of them and then recombine audio and video. I've looked at using audacity, but I'd obviously like to use a scriptable solution.
encoding
These tips produce good yet small files: http://groups.drupal.org/node/2424 I tried to get those to work with mencoder, but didn't have any success. I use camtasia or iMovie to compress/output the movies.
In terms of sound, I don't have much advice - anyone else?
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Knaddison Family | mmm Free Range Burritos
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
It would not surprise me!!!
On linux go "apt-cache search video" and I bet it is already all installed for you :)
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"linux"
And by "linux" you mean debian ;)
I haven't tried it on LInux yet, but I believe Krut is our best bet in general.
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Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Free Range Burritos
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xvidcap, avidemux
To illustrate some of my recent complicated patches, I have done video demonstrations with xvidcap. It can record the audio or not if you want. I also used avidemux to concatenate videos, or remove the sound or replace the sound with an mp3. it works nicely for me.