Screencasts for Fun

I spent the better part of today doing Telegram screencasts:

I recorded the screencasts using the most excellent ScreenFlow software on the Mac. I used a Logitech camera and a lavalier microphone that came with a wireless setup, but the microphone was connected directly to the computer. The recording was done on my 2011 era MacBook Air at a screen resolution of 1024x768.

The recording was pretty simple. I started recording and went. When I made a mistake, I continued to record after a pause.

Then I used ScreenFlow to edit the screencasts. ScreenFlow is nothing short of awesome for the task of capturing and editing screencasts. I use about 5% of the power of the package, but the most important thing for me is that ScreenFlow has no stutters or dropouts. The recording is captured verbatim.

Once I finished editing the videos (basically cutting out the mistakes), I used ScreenFlow's "Export as Flash Video" feature to create F4V files. I tested the files on my Macs and on Windows with IE9. The videos played perfectly on the Macs, but Windows required a upgrade from the default Flash 6 to the latest in order to play the videos. Then again, YouTube didn't work with IE until I upgraded Flash, so I didn't feel so bad.

I'm hosting the video files on Amazon S3 and use 3Hub to manage my buckets.

The hardest part of the screencasts was figuring out a video format that played on both Mac and PC. Tonight, I'll try it with my Ubuntu system.

I expect to do more screencasting for Telegram… and expect to turn it on Windows as well as Mac.