Not everyone can afford Camtasia and screencast like a pro. And it is PeeCee only.
There are other ways to do simple presentations of how to do tasks on a computer. Someone named “djweinstein” has done some elegant tutorials on how to do things in Audacity, by posting them as a flickr set, which can then be viewed as a slideshow- here is a snapshot from time shift— a tutorial that “illustrates a technique for sequencing audio tracks using Audacity’s time shift tool.”
Also in the mix is another one on Audacity Tutorial (Amplification/Normalization).
It would appear to be as simple as to outline the list of steps in a process, do a screen shot for each, edit each image with some overlay text, upload in flickr, and arrange in a slide set.
Nicely done, indeed. Simple, use an existing tool (flicr) in a nocely new way. Nicely done, djweinstein.
tip of the blog hat to Dean Shareski
Also for Mac, “Snapz pro X”
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
which I found intuitive to learn. Inexpensive with a free trial period during which I made a quick one to respond to a tech query in a learners forum:
http://firstclass.ultraversity.net/%7EAndy.Roberts/aud01.mov
I use CamStudio of late. Free and open source screen recorder – includes audio recording and exports to AVI and SWF. Some examples I’ve made and loaded to YouTube.
Thanks for the example, Andy. I’m happy witn Ambrosia’s other neat software, WireTap, for recording input and output audio from anything on the Mac. I do prefer/desire screencast software that can export as Flash.
And Leigh, from your blog a few posts ago. I have CamStudio on my list of Windows software to check out. (soon as I get back to broadband at my home I’ll check out the examples).
Cool.. one thing to look out for with Camstudio is that when you save the movie, that’s when it processes itself. Unfortunately it does not offer a load bar, but the window button down on window bar will display a process completion percentage everytime you role over it. It takes a little while to process a recording and of course the longer your recording the longer the processing, but when its done your movie will pop up in the CamStudio player. DO NOT CLOSE CamStudio until your movie pops up! Took me a while to figure this out. Should be very easy for CamStudio code monkeys to create a load bar I’d imagine. Maybe soon.
Alan, similar software for producing screencasts is (a href=”http://www.debugmode.com/wink/”>Wink which outputs in a number of formats. The limitation used to be that it wouldn’t record sound filoes with the captured video but I understand that the latest version has cured that. I’m off to have a play right now.
I’ve used Camstudio in the past too. Giving it to the pupils in a class to create their own “how tos” made a lesson more exciting and meant that they didn’t have to do more dreary word processing to produce user manuals. A pity the exam board wouldn’t see it that way; the kids had to create printed manuals too but the movies gave them a good headstart.