I began by scripting out the screencast. I didn’t want to forget the points I wanted to hit. I prepared by setting up the sites I wanted in a series of tabs and ran through the script a few times to rehearse. There isn’t anything worse than wasting time watching a screencast in order to learn something and having the screencaster not know where they are going or say “Um” a lot.
I used Jing Pro to record the screen cast. Jing is free, from TechSmith. I paid for the Pro version (14.95) because the free version only saves in .swf (flash). I have used their other product, Camtasia in the past and I do like it better. Camtasia is expensive though and the one license we bought for KUA is being used by a teacher.
Even with the scripting and rehearsing I had to edit it. I imported the .mv4 into iMovie 09 for the editing. I did have some difficulty during the run-through with the tap to click feature, and clicking the trackpad button makes way too much noise so I used a USB rollerball that I like. That has a little scraping noise that I never noticed before unfortunately.
Uploading to YouTube in the medium format that I exported the iMovie project to proved too low quality when viewed full screen. I then exported as an .mov but had the same problem.
Exporting to “large” (45.1 MB) was satisfactory as far as quality at full screen, but durn me if the left edge isn’t all cut off! I will have to recapture (and re-edit).
It is just an introduction to creating a site – I need to continue to posting, pages, static home pages, setting up Akismet and so forth but a screencast for this age group really can’t be any longer than five minutes.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of6W4MMQk5o[/youtube]