Creating Professional Screencasts With Jing Pro and iMovie

In the past I’ve shown examples of the type of compelling screencast content you can create with the combination of Jing Pro and iMovie. Today, I’ve created a quick tutorial (7:30) that illustrates how to do the following in iMovie:

• Import Jing video.
• Create and select clips.
• Add transitions.
• Use lower thirds.
• Introduce your screencast with a title clip.
• Create credits.
• Export an HD MPEG-4 video.

Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.

Polished Screencasts With Jing Pro and iMovie

The big selling point of Jing Pro is the real-time MPEG4-AVC (h.264) encoding it does. The bitrate is low enough to provide PDG (pretty damn good) file sizes regardless of the type of content that’s being captured, but high enough to allow post-production editing and encoding. If you’re lucky enough to be on OS X you need look no further than iMovie for proof of the interoperability benefits.

When it was initially released iMovie ’08 got some unwarranted bad press from existing users (it has a different model / approach than previous non-linear editors), but its actually a very slick and powerful little tool that promotes the creation of polished productions quickly. It’s extremely easy to combine multiple Jing Pro videos and its template presets allow you to quickly create sophisticated titles, transitions and credits. On the audio front, its simple to add an additional voiceover or background music and apply fading and ducking.

In short, iMovie can make your average screencast look like it was put together by a pro. To prove the point I put together a short (45 seconds) montage of some some recent Jing Pro screencasts I’ve made (I’m calling it a jingcast dash). Check it out, then start creating your own. ;-) (more…)