claus.reinke:
Perhaps the "make a video" slogan doesn't quite explain what is intended - it didn't to me!-) Reading John Udell's short article
What is Screencasting? http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/11/16/what-is-scre...
gave me a better idea: the screen video part is the modern, animated version of manuals with screenshots, now with audio or text caption annotations (a canned demo). He also gives some tool references, and some suggestions for focussing the bandwidth on useful contents, editing, privacy considerations, etc. Almost certainly, this
2. type 'recordmydesktop' 3. do something with haskell 4. hit control-C 5. upload out.ogv to youtube
is not a useful recipe - screencasts need planning of the steps one wants to demonstrate, editing out of aimless moving around or thinking about what to show next, annotations that guide the viewer (text labels or audio track that explains what can be seen, or what keyboard shortcuts are used, or what the plan is), and probably several attempts to get one useful result (minimal bandwith/length/.. with maximal "ah, that is how I do it" or "ah, that is how it works" or "cool, I want to install that" effect).
But with a little effort, this could be very useful, more so than simple screenshots, lots of text, or combinations thereof, if the focus is not so much on producing a video to watch, but on showing potential users what they are going to see, and how to work with it if they decide to install it. For instance, I'd now like to replace my old tour of haskellmode for Vim with a screencast.
Great! Yes, this is exactly what I hope. It is so much clearer why I would want to use something when I can see it in use.
As a windows user, I tried playing with CamStudio and that almost seems to do the job (capture, annotation, replay, conversion of .avi to compressed .swf) but I don't like the resolution of the .swf it generates (screen text isn't as readable as I've seen in other screencasts). Perhaps I'm missing an option to improve the quality, or can anyone recommend another free tool for windows, from positive experience (wikipedia has a whole list of tools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software )?
For the purpose I have in mind, it would be good to have many small pieces of screencast, one for each feature, or even better, one continuous screencast with the ability to link directly to sections dealing with particular topics - a hyperlinked animation. Is that supported by some (free) tool?
That would be very cool.