FITC 2006 Presentation Screencasts

I created 48 minutes worth of tutorials exploring the use of Camtasia Studio, Flash, After Effects and more for my FITC presentation (way more than anyone will be able to stomach, but it was worth not sleeping for a 4 days :) ).

I haven’t updated the rss feed for the podcasts, but will tomorrow so that you can see what they look like in that format. I’m going to try and scratch out a couple of hours of sleep before my 9:00 A.M. presentation tomorrow.

Update: I have updated my itunes podcast feed, so you can now download and watch the screencasts on your video ipod.

Create a table of contents navigation tree for Camtasia Studio output

Customize your Camtasia Studio table of contents

Use After Effects to apply perspective and animation to Camtasia Studio screen recordings

Hack Camtasia Studio to Create a Flash 8 swf that imports into the Flash IDE without artifacting

Camtasia Studio makes major improvements to html wrapper—SwfObject (formerly known as FlashObject), CSS, XHTML 1.0 strict

Embed your Flash screencasts into your WordPress blog

Screencast: The Power of Perspective

One of the things you notice real quickly if you watch the typical screencast is how visually uninteresting and downright boring they are—my own included. With this in mind, I’ve begun to explore injecting some visual spice into screencasts using multi-application workflows.

One of the great strengths of Camtasia Studio is that its a video based tool with a set of lossless cross platform codecs (EnSharpen for .mov files and Techsmith for .avi files) which allow you to pass relatively small lossless video files between video editing applications. What’s the benefit you might ask—killer content that is visually compelling and maintains the interest of your audience.

A favorite multi-application workflow of mine is to record the screen with Camtasia Studio and take the resulting avi file into Adobe After Effects to add some visual spice. I’ve used After Effects quite a bit in the past to add keyframe tweening (zooms, pans and effects), but I recently have begun to experiment with perspective to add depth and visual interest (an old trick camera operators have been using for a long, long time).

After adding some visual punch, I typically export an .avi from After Effects that uses the TechSmith codec to maintain lossless quality while keeping file size way under a full frames uncompressed export. Finally, I take the avi back to Camtasia Studio and produce an .flv file that takes advantage of the 2-pass on2 compression Camtasia Studio has licensed. If I’m going to the iPod as well as the web, Camtasia Studio will also allow you to export an .mov file with the lossless TechSmith EnSharpen codec which can then be easily converted to an iPod .m4v file using iTunes.

As an interesting side note, I was reawakened to perspective when watching a professional video promo for the upcoming Microsoft Office 12 release which used perspective quite a effectively. Sadly the video didn’t have the desired effect of juicing me up for the new release—my impression of “the ribbon” was that it should be called “the double-wide” toolbar. :) Apparently a single-wide isn’t enough to impress the neighbors now that free alternatives like Open Office and Writely have begun to build homes in the neighborhood(The Java Posse were talking about a slick Java-based office web app, but I didn’t chase down the url).

The thumbnail below is your entry into the screencast and I’ve included the podcast rss below that for those who wish to go mobile.

Screencast: Camtasia Studio Productions & IE 6/7 Active Content Changes

At the request of some Camtasia Studio Users anxious about the latest round of changes forced on IE as a result of the Eolas patent suit against Microsoft, I’ve created a screencast which illustrates how to use FlashObject to update existing Camtasia Studio 2, Camtasia Studio 3 and Camtasia Theater productions. The screencast is geared towards an audience that has little to moderate Web development experience, so let me know if I missed my mark. :)

Click the image below to view the screencast.

I’m still waiting for approval from the iTunes Music Store, but in the mean time, here’s a podcast feed that you can use to subscribe to this and future screencasts. This is the exact same video, but I’ve done a bunch of zooming and panning enhancements for iPod viewing.

Cogito Ergo Flammeus podcast rss feed

UPDATE 1:
FlashObject has been renamed to SWFObject at the behest of the Adobe legal department. All this really means is that flashobject.js becomes swfobject.js and that the constructor changes from FlashObject to SWFObject.

UPDATE 2:
Some people are having difficulty seeing the hyperlink to download the html shells and other files needed to update Camtasia Studio Flash content, so I’m providing a direct link. The only catch is that I’ve updated the resources to include the latest version of SWFObject (1.4).
Download the Files