3d Screencasting: Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting

How hard is it to pay attention to the typical screencast? How quickly does your mind begin to wander? At what point do you give up and open a new browser tab or just turn the video off completely?

To date, screencasting has been very utilitarian in practice and application. Cinematography,the art and craft of visual storytelling, is largely eschewed in favor of faithful description. The result is, all too often, a structureless, 2d, static point-of-view video that fails to emotionally connect and provides little to no visual stimulation. It’s a recipe for boredom. We need to change this stale, tired and lazy approach to screencasting and we need to change it now!

What if we could give our screencasts a sense of depth, bring windows, panels and other UI elements to life in a 3d like environment? We can and should give the screen a sense of energy and excitement for our viewers. In fact, it’s imperative for screencasts to visually stimulate the brains of the people watching them. Today, more than ever, with all the distractions and opportunities that exist on the Internet you must give people a reason to keep on watching.

If you’re interested in learning how to shake things up with crazy cool 3d screencasting techniques stay tuned for the next six screencasting episodes on my blog. In part one, Snagit Product Manager Tiffany Wood demonstrates how to use Snagit 10 to grab the transparent Aero windows we’ll use to begin creating 3d objects. Hold on to your hats screencasting nerds–we’re going to bring the fun. ;-)

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

Hide / Show Mac OS X Desktop Icons

So you want to make a screencast and you’d like to put your best foot forward which means, in my case at least, hiding the mess that is your Mac OS X desktop. No sweat. In the screencast below you’ll learn how to quickly build two Automator applications that will allow you to toggle the visibility of your desktop icons on or off.

The shell commands you’ll need to build your Automator apps:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
killall Finder

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
killall Finder

*Update*

You can reduce this to a single Automator app that checks the current visibility and toggles to the opposite state using the following bash script:

# checks visibility and stores value in a variable
isVisible=”$(defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop)”

# toggle desktop icon visibility based on variable
if [ "$isVisible" = 1 ]
then
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
else
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
fi

# force changes by restarting Finder
killall Finder

***************************************************************************

And for the truly lazy–a precompiled app that toggles visibility on or off:

http://www.brooksandrus.com/downloads/hide_icons.zip

Importing Camtasia:mac Audio

In a previous post I demonstrated how to directly import Camtasia:mac screen footage into your professional video tooling. There is a small caveat that I didn’t mention–Camtasia:mac stores microphone and sound card data in separate file streams. The relationship between these file streams and your recorder settings is somewhat obtuse–thus, the screencast presented here.

After viewing you should understand which file streams in the recording application bundle contain audio. Luckily once you’re armed with this knowledge its a snap to import the audio streams along with the screen footage into the video tooling of your choice. Enjoy!

The Importance of Constraints

I stopped at the local Big Ten Party Store on the way to the golf course last week and busted up when I saw this sign:

Sometimes limits are a good thing. Now to convince my friends on the Jing team. ;-)

Import Camtasia:mac Recordings into Professional Video Tooling

Lots of folks use Camtasia Studio and Camtasia:mac to record their screen, but want to edit / composite the recording inside professional tools such as Final Cut Pro, Premiere, After Effects, or Vegas. The rub has always been that in order to get the footage into these tools you first needed to transcode the video from the proprietary recording format to a supported container / codec. Oh and by the way, you’d like to retain the lossless quality and small file sizes found in the original, but proprietary codec. Fat chance, right?

Not so fast. I’m here to tell you that its not just possible, but downright simple to directly import and edit screen recordings made by Camtasia:mac in the video tooling of your choice on the mac. You heard that right – direct import without transcoding the video. No long wait times. No bloated file sizes. Lossless footage. For realz. It’s the shiznit. Check it out.