Screencasting

Camstudio

I published my podcast last week, so this week I tried a screencast. I used the free camstudio that Rick and Pete referred to in class. It is robust for a free program, and I recommend it. The pop-up text boxes take quite a bit of choreography, a process that would be unnecessary if one used voice instructions. However, there are multiple reasons that I felt like written directions were the ideal accompaniment to the screencast:

• This is, after all, a digital writing class. So practice in writing short, concise directions is valuable for teacher and student alike.
• My college is loaded with thin clients that often do not function appropriately with sound.
• Even if they did, it would be less distracting for all users in a computer lab if the screencast did not employ sound. Headphones could remedy that problem, but I feel the text directions are still more convenient for users.
• Also, whereas voice directions might have to be repeated multiple times for the user to comprehend, a short text box can be displayed for an extended period of time to allow the user to “soak” it up.
• I also liked the freedom of not having to speak during “dead air,” as some of the processes I demonstrated take a while to load.

I hope you will view my screencast. It’s only 2 minutes. It’s about how to access network applications at my school. The “ghosting” (vapor trails from the cursor) do not occur in the original file that I am using on my network. I hope that is not too annoying for you!

https://netfiles.umn.edu/users/blum0137/Citrix%20via%20PCs.swf?uniq=hzt1kv

File Formats

Camstudio records as a very large windows movie video file (.avi). My two-minute screen cast was a whopping 33MB! However, Camstudio lets you convert to shockwave (.swf), which is a super-compact flash format that shrank the file down to just 2.2MB. At such a small file size, I can choose to host the file on my own company intranet. I tried uploading both the big and small file formats to Media Mill, but it did not recognize either. So my solution was to use the netfiles service that Rick and Pete told us about in class. They said this could be our “go to” storage site once we lose our Medial Mill access. The shockwave file didn’t even make a dent in my 5GB of storage, and I was able to copy a public link to my screencast. To set up your free U of M netfiles account, go to https://netfiles.umn.edu/xythoswfs/webui and follow the prompts. It took less than a minute before I was up and running. Since I started with a finished file codec, I didn’t check if there is anything else available in netfiles other than just storage.

Future Uses

Both screencasting and podcasting are attractive multimedia options, especially compared to video, because they are relatively bandwidth friendly for uploading and downloading. Screencasting would be an ideal assignment for computer students in their helpdesk class and to support their final project (which already required “documentation,” such as a user manual). I could also see Public Speaking students using screencasting to support a demonstration speech. I will continue to develop screencasts for faculty development, in particular for the faculty in-service I am developing as my final project. While I love commoncraft tutorials on youtube, I also enjoy making my own.