Evenlypiece

My first screencast attempt was not really much of a failure. Although it did take a while because I quickly plunged into hitting that red button having no clue about the ideal configurations when recording demo or tutorial type of screencasting. You can imagine I had to record twice. Not do the drawing twice but do a recording of a playing recorded video. That was after first recording ate half a gigabyte that apparently no video sharing website would take — well if any would, no sane fellow would even want to wait for hours just to upload a tutorial up on the web.

So to save you from the trouble that I faced — I just have a keen affinity to learning the hard way, let me walk you through the process briefly and hopefully it’d be clear enough to get the idea across.

Tools

To screencast you must have the right program. You don’t need to spend a cent because our friends at the open source community are kind to develop CamStudio. It’s FREE it’s open source. So relax.

Configurations

I’m not going to teach how to use every function in Camstudio because what you need to know to avoid recording too big a size is just the proper configuration.

This video teaches you how to configure for a tutorial screencast and covers how to use some of the tools. If you’re lazy to load up a video, I’ll do you a favor:

That should do the trick. But we’re not done yet. So once you’re happy with the outcome read on.

Editing

You don’t need an expensive complicated branded video editing tool to edit your video. If you’re using Windows XP, you should find Windows Movie Maker in your Start > All Programs.

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to cut off portion of the video, you just trim. Yes it can do that. Windows Movie Maker is very intuitive, you just need to explore and in no time it can get you going.

Then you have decided to upload the video on Youtube. Here’s the tip: You can’t if you’re video is more than 1024MB or exceeding 10 minutes. But you’re video is 30 minutes after all the trimming. Okay, so let’s say you did a screencast of your very own The Last Supper Sketch, you don’t really want the viewer to all the way follow your mouse cursor. To decrease the overall video time, you have to speed up your video. How?

1. Right click on your video on the timeline and click Video Effects
2. Add the Speed Up, Double effect to speed up by… double, duh!

If you’re not happy because you feel it’s still a little too slow, add another Speed Up, Double. Add as many of it as you want until you’re satisfied with the speed.

Uploading

Now go to your Youtube account and show your video to the world.

Youtube kinda lack some features that might be looking for like tagging. I’m not referring to the text tags, because almost all Web2.0 do have. In case you haven’t heard, videos can be tagged on their timeline — and apparently I don’t know how it’s called. Say in time 12.02 minute, you finally drew the table in your The Last Supper, you can tag that timing and say “Table”. Viddler allows you to do just that.