Screencasts for perfectionists
Screencasts can be a powerful tool when promoting your product or providing support to existing customers. Some things that are very hard to document in a manual are super simple to illustrate through a simple screencast. We utilize screencasts more and more at SlideShowPro, including our current series previewing the forthcoming update to Director.
The problem with screencasts is that they can be an absolute time-eater. Typically you use a program that records the screen and the input from your microphone at the same time. That’s all well and good, but when you are picky about quality, you end up stopping and starting over at every little “um” and “ah”.
So when I sat down to do my last screencast, I decided to take a different tack and do it in pieces. Here’s how I did it.
First, some prerequisites. You’ll need a Mac with Snapz Pro X, Garageband and Quicktime Pro (or some other program to export the video to its final state, like Squeeze).
Step 1: Capture the video
The frustrating part of trying to do both the audio and video at the same time is that the video is pretty simple, its the audio that you always end up screwing up. With this process, we’ll capture the video on its own first, then use GarageBand to add the voiceover.
So, pop open Snapz Pro X and make sure that you deselect the “Microphone track” box, ensuring you capture just the video. Record your screencast, talking your way through it like you normally would so that your timing will be right when it comes to do the voice over.
When you’re finished, it’s time to export the video. In order to keep the quality pristine through the process, we’ll use the “Apple Animation” codec, which when set to “Best” in the settings menu is lossless. Export the video to somewhere familiar and close out Snapz Pro X.
Step 2: Lay down the audio
GarageBand 3 introduced a nice new feature known as “Movie Scoring”. It allows you to import a video, lay down some audio beneath it and then export it out as a video file. We’ll use this to add the voiceover to our screencast.
Create a new project in GarageBand and select “New Movie Score”. Give it a name and you are presented with a new GB project window. The first track is for the video, so just find the file on your Desktop (or wherever you put it) and drag it on to the top track. Now you need to add a track for your audio, so click Track->New Track from the top menu. You’ll want a “Real Instrument” track for your voiceover.
Now, here’s something that caught me up. GB uses its own setting for what input to use, not really caring about the setting you have in the Sound System Preferences pane. So, go to the GarageBand preferences pane and select the Audio/MIDI header. Make sure your input of choice is selected for the Audio Input.
Now you can start to play the video and record audio at will. Once you have a section the way you want, trim up its ends and start on the next one. GB is really great for audio editing like this, so there are lots of things you can do. Once your happy with it, time to export it.
Step 3: Finishing
One disappointing thing about GB is that it doesn’t allow you to export video using customized settings. So, we’ll export it as is from GB and use Quicktime Pro to export it to its final state.
Go back to GB’s preferences and this time select the Export tab. Set both Audio and Movie settings to their highest values (Higher Quality and Full Quality, respectfully). Now go to Share->Save Podcast to Disk. Again, save it somewhere familiar, you’ll need it in a second.
Now just open that file in QT Pro, or any other video compressor, and export it with its final settings. I use MPEG-4 set to High, Key Frames and Data Rate Automatic. For Audio, I use AAC 22.050 stereo. I’d also suggest using Fast Start - Compressed under “Prepare for Internet Streaming” if you are using a Quicktime based codec.
That’t it, and you couldn’t ask for anything better. You get a better quality product and it actually saves time. Here’s an example of a screencast I did with this technique: Director Preview Video 2.
Wow, I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to just recording the audio/video separately. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some screencasts in my evenings, and they are incredibly tedious. The last one is about 15 minutes long, and after 5 hours of recording I have ended up with 26 segments to stitch together.
If I had have just recorded the video first, then written a script and read that over the top, I’m sure it would have taken a quarter the time. I’ll certainly do that for future screencasts!
Comment left on July 30th, 2007 at 6:06 pm Link