Creating My Screencasts

I’ve received a questions from a few people about how I created videos for some of my lessons, and I thought it would be useful to talk here about some of the tools I’ve experimented with in creating some of these videos. I still haven’t found the perfect solution.

To start, I will say that I know Camtasia and Adobe Captivate are commonly used to create tutorials. However, I’ve been in search for a free solution, not just to save SEMLS money, but also because I know many libraries would not be able to spend money on these products. I plan to try the free trials at some time to have a basis for comparison.

I created the tagging tutorial during my first Learning 2.0 class last spring. I used a simple screen capture program called HyperSnap to take static screen shots. Both Windows Vista and most Mac operating systems have built-in tools to take screen captures, but I’ve been using HyperSnap for my handouts for years. I then used Windows Movie Maker (free on every XP and Vista computer) to import the screen shots, record my voice, and create a movie. We have offered a couple of Windows Movie Maker classes with Barbara Andrews in the past, and I intend to bring her back to SEMLS again, either this winter or in the spring. What I like about using Movie Maker is if I do a perfect voice recording with just one second where I stumble upon my words, I can re-edit that one second piece very easily.

Hyperionics, the company that makes HyperSnap, also has a product called HyperCam. This product works much more like Camtasia and Captivate. It records everything you are doing on the screen and allows you to record your voice at the same time. I haven’t tried it yet, but I do intend to try it since it is much more affordable than Camtasia or Captivate. However, there are also some free options that I will discuss below, and HyperCam would have to do a better job than those alternatives to convince me to buy it.

For the week that we did Images and Recommending a Good Book, I had to create a new video for this session since they had been included in other lessons the last time around. I had discovered some freely available screencasting programs, and I wanted to give them a try. I explored using Screencast Recorder, Jing (thanks for the suggestion Inna!) and CamStudio. However, I couldn’t find a way in any of these applications to edit the audio after creating the initial screencast. I ended up using TipCam from uTIPu. This program allows you to re-record the entire audio track if you aren’t happy with the first attempt, but I find it very difficult to record an entire 10-minute audio without any trouble. There’s a reason I never went into radio!

I do intend to try HyperCam and to take a second look at CamStudio. Both applications will save the videos in AVI format, which is something I can import into Windows Movie Maker if I want to do more detailed editing of the video.

I also wanted to mention that we had a class last spring where Rita Gavelis from the Metrowest Regional Library System showed participants how to create tutorials using Windows Media Encoder. I don’t know much about it, but it is free with Windows. We can certainly bring her back for a training as well.

Let me know if you’ve found anything you like to use.