Techies rarely discuss how to present their message, be it Server 2003′s auto reboot functionality triggered by a Blue screen or other routine just in time learning.

Take a look at the generally well regarded Lynda.Com site. You’ll see a wide range of technical teaching styles through screen casting. From faux enthusiasm projected by some “instructors” to the dry, self important manner of others. Still others, actually convey substantive information in an interesting manner without injecting ego and other phoney methods to engage their audience.

As for Sean McCown being bitten by the “screencasting bug”…one wonders, where has he been? It’s not a new process.

Mike Whatley
Altadena, Ca.

About screencasting, I had to make a demonstration that involved complex orchestration of many machines we integrate such as mainframes, Tandem NonStop machines, etc. This kind of thing rarely succeeds in a live demo and I decided that making a screencast of this would be much safer.

Our company had one copy of Camtasia that was not available. Looking for another tool, I found a comment on one of your blogs regarding a freeware tool named Wink (http://www.debugmode.com/wink/). I tried it and manged to create a good screencast within minutes (with audio in a flash format with a sample HTML code to run it). I think it is an amazing tool that definitely worths mentioning (even more so since it is also available on Linux – in your blog you mentioned only Windows and Mac).

The only problem I found with the tool is that if you use the Time Capture mode (rather than the default input-based capture) then the screencast size becomes very big – the other modes result in surprisingly small flash files. In fact, it’s help menu actually opens a wink presentation that you render and view to see how the program runs.

For me it was amazing to see such a powerful program being free (so free that there is not even donation button or link to be found anywhere on the site). It includes sound editing, callouts and navigation aids so that people with time and will can produce professional screencasts with it.

Regards,

Dror Harari

I’ve had really good results with wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ to capture and edit screencasts. It’s freeware, crossplatform, outputs to flash and a bunch of other platforms. If you want to get fancy you can add text boxes and arrows, callouts etc. I recommend it.

Good luck with your upcoming MS job, they need more people like you.

-Josh

We’re also trying to capture our internal training sessions, mixing the screen captures during the training with the DV camera feed looking the speaker. Basically we need to combine the screen capture video (when presenting something on-screen) with segments when the speaker just talks and draws stuff on a whiteboard. This turns out to be quite a hassle.

So either we find a nice capture/combine workflow for the screencast and the speaker video, or we need to just stick to capturing the screencast, and just mix in the speaker’s voice, and not the video.

This would mean that we can’t really use the whiteboard during the training, which would be unfortunate. I suppose we could use a software whiteboard to sketch and illustrate points during the session, but it would not feel very natural somehow.

When I was leading the team to implement the fix for the applet loading change in IE (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/using/techinfo/activexupdate.mspx) earlier this year, we had several issues where people in the field didn’t know:

1. Exactly what the issue looked like when it appeared in our applications.
2. How to verify whether the Microsoft IE Patch had been installed.
3. How to uninstall the IE Patch.

I was able to use Camtasia and create several short (less than 2 minutes each) screencasts that helped explain each of these issues clearly to the support folks.

The biggest issue I found was scripting the words that I wanted to say alongside the video. It took several attempts to get this right, and it was a LOT easier on the last one that on the first one.

Thanks for the pointer to lower cost alternatives to Camtasia, I’ll investigate these for personal use.