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.
5 Comments
cool video perspective. I’d like to see a screencast on how you did this fanciness in Adobe’s product. Nice work, Brooks!
-T-roy
Hi Brooks. When are you going to talk Techsmith into adding that perspective feature?
You create nice visuals and the voice-over is great too.
I’m jealous!!!
Geoff S
This is great stuff, giving lots of visual “sizzle’ to the screencast. A slightly different thought, though…
I wonder if 50% (or 30, or 60?) of the benefits might be possible to achieve by just putting some *still* images into a perspective view, and dropping them into the movie. Would it be lots easier to create (in Photoshop, maybe Paintshop Pro, maybe some specialized image-warping tools) a single image which has perspective, drop that into the movie, give it some duration while there’s voiceover narration, and then go back to the normally-captured CS movie?
This use of interspersed “mini-sizzles” wouldn’t be as much of a “wow, that’s different
and engaging,” but it wouldn’t be as complex to create, and could be done by someone who didn’t have (or know how to use) fancy movie-editing tools.
I just realized that Snagit’s “shear” editing tool makes it drop-dead easy to get some perspective view. If Snag were used to make a few of these perspective “stills” and if a few of those stills were plopped into the movie (at transition points between scenes, for example), this might give a little bit of “spice” at a very low cost.
Hey Mike,
I’m not sure that a still frame every once in a while impacts me the way that full motion perspective does. I want to zoom in on the mouse but have the page appear to fall away, but not just for a single extended still shot–I want the mouse to move and I want the ability to pan and zoom based on that perspective.
To me, what perspective brings is the ability to envision and “shoot” a tutorial in much the same way that a director of a movie might. I can begin to look at applications from angles which is makes my cuts, transitions and zooms and pans more effective. It also allows me to “pull” the user in to a specific area of the application and minimize some of the overall 2D interface clutter.
I’d love to see your interpretation prototyped though. :)