I've been investigating screencasting today. I think this has relevance to the IOCT and Lecture 2.0. I've posted two excerpts from articles linked from the Wikipedia ScreenCast page. I'll be adding more article excerpts before pulling it all together in a future post.
O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/)
What is Screencasting by Jon Udell 11/16/2005
- A screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action. It's not a new idea. The screencaster's tools—for video capture, editing, and production of compressed files—have long been used to market software products, and to train people in the use of those products. What's new is the emergence of a genre of documentary filmmaking that tells stories about software-based cultures like Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and content remixing. These uses of the medium, along with a new breed of lightweight software demonstrations, inspired the collaborative coining of a new term, screencast.
Screencast Genres
Here are some of the ways screencasts are used.
Tutorial: A screencast that demonstrates how to use an application or service. The screencasts on my LibraryLookup page are examples of tutorials. One of the most dramatic examples of this genre is called Cracking WEP in 10 minutes. To a thumping electronic beat, it shows you how to use kismet to locate a victim, aireplay to generate the requisite hundreds of thousands of WEP initialization vectors, aerodump to save the traffic to a file, and aircrack to analyze the file and recover the WEP key. It's a stunning contribution to the literature of wireless security.
Short how-to: Examples include this 90-second short on Linky, a Mozilla/Firefox extension, and another shortie on Windows' hidden desktop search feature. For screencasts as brief as these, editing is optional because you can get a usable result in a single take. That means that almost anybody can create one, blog it, and thus make it discoverable by search, tagging, and word-of-mouth referral.
Conversational demo: My first effort here was a demo of JotSpot, the "application Wiki," in which Joe Kraus drives the demo and I ask questions. A more recent example is this co-narrated demonstration of Zend Platform. As software grows ever more complex and dependent on elaborate substrates—especially in the enterprise category—I expect that this genre will be increasingly useful as a way for developers, reviewers, and users to reach a shared understanding of the software.
Feature story: My first foray into this genre was Aunt Tillie's OS X Adventure, in which I respond to a pair of Eric Raymond essays [1, 2] on the horror of Linux's printer support ...
Good old-fashioned software review: If you're reviewing a software product, for example the latest version of Photoshop, why wouldn't you do it as a screencast? That's just what David Pogue did.
Spontaneous user-produced demo: My favorite example of this genre is Paul Everitt's ad hoc demo of the oXygen XML editor ...
Animated whiteboard: Troy Stein, product manager for Camtasia Studio, made this screencast for the soccer team he coaches ...
Screencast-enhanced video: Although most of my screencasts have focused mainly on software action, with bits of live video sometimes spliced in, my screencasts about a flood and a pumpkin festival reverse the emphasis ...
Concept screencast: The ACLU's digital identity nightmare is a screencast about software that doesn't exist, but could: an application for a pizza store order-taker that violates the customer's privacy in a dozen different ways ...
DonationCoder (http://www.donationcoder.com/)
Best ScreenCasting Tools
ScreenCasting is the new hip term for recording movies of your computer desktop as you demonstrate some program ...
... Regardless of whether you call it screencasting or demo movie recording, a new breed of tools (combined with the market penetration of Macromedia Flash) is making it easier and easier for home users to produce software demonstrations.
After an exhaustive review of screencasting software, which involved making dozens of demo movies spanning several full hours of video, we narrowed down the list of best screencasting tools to a small handfull. We tried hard to choose a single best tool from this set of top contenders, but in the end we decided that we couldn't pick a single winner. Instead, this review represents the first shared Best-in-Class award at DonationCoder.com:
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TechSmith Camtasia Studio
BEST Fast-motion/Quality
BEST Editing |
BB FlashBack
BEST Price
BEST Low-bandwidth |
Macromedia Captivate
BEST interaction, quiz, scripting |
