But I did pick up on Dr. Norman’s method, and got me a copy of iShowU which seems to do a nifty job of screen/audio recording on Mac OSX — it does not save as Flash, but I crunched it a bit in QuickTime Pro to knock off some MB weight (for a smaller dimension movie, I switched my screen res to 800×600 and did full screen at that set).

My Google Reader Screencast [10.3 Mb, 6:03]

I am still utterly humbled at the masters of screencasting — it is very much an art to not only get a great recording, but to orchestrate it so as to be interesting, not a fumbling mumbling ramble, or not a snoozer. Maybe next year….

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

Awesome work, Brian, and your fans shall clamor for more.

Screencasts, in his vein, are really just that- a broadcast of some screen action. I am not trying to hammer out or argue over defintiions, but in my attempts to use the same/similar tools for telling a story , it sort of works, but bleeds into other terrains beyond screen action.

Hey it was just a play with the tools, not much more. So from the comments, as Brian noted:

Have you ruled out iMovie? Last week Bryan Alexander did a session on multimedia storytelling and described iMovie as a great tool… the “Ken Burns effect” was particularly good at providing a bit of motion to still images. Or is it a bandwidth issue?

Not ruled our iMovie at all- it is likely the most fantabulous tool for doing this. It is what our faculty leaders use in our LearnShops on Digital Storytelling. But I was not after creating a movie per se, more to see if it could be done easily in a web friendly format.

And Paul did prove that ViewletBuilder is as much as an effective tool:

you’ll be pleased to know) can do both the traditional annotated screencasts, as well as a screencast of imported (all at once no less) pictures. Check this out, which I threw together for you this afternoon in about 20 minutes…

Again, I am less advocatiing the tools and trying to get more at the messages we can create. I like what Paul aimed at- assembling a voice over image narration in a little amount of time. And my method cited was definitely the wrong way to go. It was awful and not recommended.

I am a major, major fan of the methods and outcomes of the digital storytelling movement, especially the approach by the Center for Digital Storytelling, where many of our active faculty got their training. It is done so effectively teaching the process of finding voice and finding a story to tell, and generating the message that everyone can do that (and not being about the technology first and foremost).

What I do see however, that the voice over images plus Ken Burns Ken Burns Ken Burns digital video is the only way to do this. I think there is much much more we can do , be it podcasts synched to slide shows, or the wildly fantastic multimedia net narratives uncovered by Bryan Alexander (where I steal examples all the time). These were examples I labeled as “Other Variants” of digital stories, like:

* Flickton – a use of the digital photo site to compose stories about digital images
* Found Floppy a multimedia story told through bits and fragments on a found floppy disk
* Random Access Memory “a collection focused on the September 11 tragedies”
* i love bees: a hypermedia story told and demonstrated via a “hacked” web site
* I found a Digital Camera in the Woods

And more… there is much much more to creating compelling stories than just DV movies. Like the ten-year-old we watched last weekend use a simple digital camera to record audio over the captured digital images…. simple tools for creating complex messages. That is where my interest was aimed.

But technology is quite often stuff we play with out of which something unexpected emerges… that is the exciting part of this work.

Creating “How-tos” for using RSS, or a course management system, or some other technology is fine, but it is not all that interesting to me. What is more interesting is using technology to create stories, compelling things.

In this entry, I will share a quick digital story I created with simple tools, and in a short time frame (shorter if were not for my own boneheaded blunders). I deliberately created the basic slide show in PowerPoint, not because I love it, but because it is prevalent.

This is on the heels of sitting in on the start of our week long “LearnShop” on digital storytelling, where unfortunately due to timing and commitments, I could not sticka round for. And that I regret, as the digital stories created by our faculty last August where well above excellent– but what is most exciting is the process created by the leaders Linda Hicks and Rachel Woodburn.

And Linda welcomed them today with her always on enthusiasm, and stressing, as a Communications faculty, the power of story for connecting and creating a strong message. Just think of how many of the most clever ads and commercials (if that is not an oxymoron) create a story in a short span of time.

My long winded point is that we yearn as humans for something interesting, that we can connect with, that moves us… not some voice droning on about how to use MS Word to format a bulleted list. Am I wrong or just tired?

Dominoe
My story is about a dog (what a surprise), not any dog, but the first one I was responsible for and what I learned early on about being responsible for someone other than myself. Below you will find the details, but the story is available in Flash format (about 5 Mb):
http://cogdogblog.com/alan/movies/dominoe.swf

And for an experiment, I am trying to hoist the .wmv copy on OurMedia (still waiting for it to appear):
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/11303

The Making Of…

1. Last night I spent about 45 minutes going through my old print photo albums and scanning images as TIF format.
2. Probably the longest sinkhole of time was importing 25 images into PowerPoint on my iBook at home. I just used a simple black background and an image only layout, and a Fade to Black inter-screen transition No words beyond the title on the first screen. I cannot believe that this is the numero uno presentation tool, and there is nothing built in to load a folder of images. I had to do them one at a time by duplicating a slide, deleting the image, and inserting the next image. Sigh. I would share that, but it weighs in at 62 Mb.
3. At work, I moved the big fat PPT to my PC laptop (sneaker net via a USB thumb drive). I fiddled a bit with avoiding creating a full screen show, and found via Slide Show Settings, you can have it play in a Window rather than full screen. I set it up in a window about 900 wide by 600 high. During playback, the PageDown key acts as a screen advancer.
4. I then opened Windows Media Encoder to record my story. Here is where I really goofed. The first pass, I forgot to select my USB headsets as an audio source. SO although I spoke, none was recorded. The next time through, it came out okay on audio, except I had the wrong video output settings, and it ended up 320 x 240, small and it looked ugly trying to scale it in SwishVideo. IN fact, I could not get one menu selection for Video source to be recognized until I loaded the settings from my first screencast, used the same video settings, and updated the other info. I recorded it, and got it right on strike 3, producing a 9 MB *wmv file
5. Then I opened SwishVideo (13 days left on my trial version), and processed it. Oops, I had not changed the scaling from 200%. Reset that and do it again.

If it were not for my settings fumbling and being impatient with #@*& Windows software, I may have been more efficient. My goal was to produce a digital story using the tools available… it is not optimal set up, and from what I am reading/seeing, Camtasia Studio 2 seems to do this work a lot more efficiently than Media Encoder + Swish.

And form a quick google, I do not find many references to “digital story” and “screencast”…. I guess it is not really much of a screencast (if that is defined), just me talking over a slide show. The tools will improve, more people will try it… but what we really need are more good stories.

Anyhow, Jon uses Camtasia Studio 2 as well, writing:

For most stuff I’m using Camtasia Studio, which enables me to do a fair amount of editing (not as much or as easily as I’d like) and produce pretty well-compressed SWF.

WME is fine for capture, about as effective as Camtasia, but obviously lacks the editing and SWF production aspects. I hadn’t heard about Swish, that’s good to know about.

Ultimately there are three separable parts:

1. capture
2. editing
3. production

These can be bundled into one package (as with Camtasia) but need not necessarily be. When I find a more useful editor, I’ll probably switch that component.

My screen quality went south since I was trying to squash down the Flash file size, but since it streams, I guess I can leave it as is.

In addition, among the WP pingbacks (and phoeey to those who cry about Trackback being DOA) is a post from Information Wants to Be Free that mentions a list of other tools. Judging from the other comments, screencasting is a bubbling meme, but I sure hope we can aim further than narrated tours of software.

I have something new on the side burner to publish, perhaps later today.

Anyhow, I recorded an 11 minute quick attempt at showing wide range of RSS feeds we provide in the Maricopa Learning eXchange, and then how you can copy them over to our Feed2JS site, create a cut and paste JavaScript, and then put them into a site.

I sketched out my topics, figured out which URLs to have open in Firefox (you have to love tabbed browsing, apparently that has not boarded the cluetrain in the MSIE shop), and gave it a go. I am not nearly as smooth as Jn Udell, and one of my demo links was kafloooey (bad), but oh well. It is a go. It ended up as a 16 Mb .wm file. Big.

Since some folks do not like sending their Canadian dollars to Macromedia, I did a quick check out and downloaded a trila versions of SwishVideo to convert the big file to Flash format.. which somehow managed to end up as a 16 Mb .swf (I tried a range of settings to make it smaller, this was as tiny as I could get)

Okay so here that are, but remember, I am an amateur:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/show/ocotillo05/mlx_rss.swf
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/show/ocotillo05/mlx_rss.wmv (does not stream but downloads)

In summary, it was not all that hard to do, and with practice, I can see that it is effective. I need to get a better grip on the software settings and features. Stay tuned to my new category.