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…)

Video: After Effects Vector Paint Primer

If you’re looking to spice your video up and draw your viewers in quick post-production annotations can help. This short video (3:47) walks you through the basics of using vector paint to create animated annotations in After Effects. Enjoy! (more…)

After Effects Spotlight Effect

*Update*

I highly recommend you check out a much more recent tutorial I did that illustrates how to use After Effects’ built-in 3d spotlights.

——————————

Sometimes you really just want to emphasize a particular area in a screencast which means if you’re like me its time to dust off your favorite compositor (After Effects in my case) and add a little visual magic. This short screencast (2:40) gives you a leg up if you’re chasing this technique. (more…)

The Ethics of Screencasting in the Read-Write Web Era

While watching a Charlie Rose interview of Lawrence Lessig I was particularly struck by the description of our uneven legal / ethical handling of copyrighted text content vs digital media.

Essentially Lessig questions why we treat the use of digital media differently from text. We freely and frequently quote (aka copy) text from copyrighted sources yet “throw the book” at anyone who uses digital media in the same manner. In Lessig’s view this treatment stifles ideas and creativity, inhibiting our individual and collective contributions to culture.

Call me a twit for saying it, but this has profound implications for screencasting. In fact, I used Jing to “quote” the section of Charlie’s interview with Larry you see above. Is this legal? Is it ethical? A small citation would seemingly fall under fair use guidelines, but there’s been so much FUD that its hard to ascertain how the copyright owners and their lawyers would perceive my use.

(more…)