Request for opinions - screencast formats
Posted by: Rob Wall in M.Ed. project, MacintoshI’m working on a guide to digital audio for educators as part of my M.Ed. program, and part of the guide will include screencasts on things like recording/editing with Audacity, recording/editing with Garageband, etc. My question is which is the better format for screencasts - Quicktime or Flash video? (I had one suggestion that I could just use YouTube or Google Video, but I need to be able to run the guide off of a CD or DVD)
I’m producing the screencasts on a Mac, so using quicktime is easy with something like iShowU. iShowU records to quicktime, which I can edit in iMovie (also useful for recording voiceovers). I can export from iMovie straight into quicktime and I’m done. This sounds relatively easy, so it is definitely appealing.
I’m honestly not too familiar with Flash authoring, so I don’t know exactly how I could get a Mac screencast into a flash video format. I know there are some ways to convert a quicktime movie to flash, but I don’t know exactly how this works. I also know that there seem to be a lack of options for recording screencasts directly into the flash format on the Mac. Something like Camtasia would be great, but I don’t think there is a Mac equivalent.
So - quicktime or flash? What tools should I use? Anybody … anybody … anybody. (See Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to understand this obscure reference) Any suggestions are welcome.
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January 17th, 2007 at 19:20
Rob, I haven’t done many, but I’ve been using Snapz (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/). I like iShowU’s interface more, however, the difference between the two (as I understand) is that iShowU renders video on the fly, while Snapz does it during the save. This can make a difference in the quality of your overall screencast.
From that point, if you want to convert to Flash, I recommend Sorenson Squeeze (I think it’s version 4). You can convert just about any format in Squeeze.
The only good free Mac converter I know of is ffmpegx (http://homepage.mac.com/major4/), but I don;’t think it deals with .flv. Could be wrong.
As for playing back later … I discovered something the other day. One of our school board’s laptop programs are locked down pretty hard … they don;’t come with Flash players in IE or Firefox. However, I found a USB-drive version of Opera that had the Flash player built in. You can download the single file, and run it on Windows if necessary (if you really want to run Windows). This may not answer any question you are asking, but it was a neat hack around the problem of playing youtube videos, for instance.
Good luck on the project.
January 17th, 2007 at 20:13
Rob,
I use snapz pro as well. I’m not too pleased with it at times as I won’t realize it crashed until I go to stop it and nothing happens. I’m thinking of trying ishowu. Seems I saw a really nice way to do screencasts on pcs that exported as flash (by macromedia I think).
I think this’ll do your converting for you http://www.media-convert.com/
I’ve used it to change a few movs into swfs.
If you want flv you can always upload it to youtube and pull it down with http://vixy.net/flv_converter
Both options are free anyway and won’t even really cost too much in terms of time.
Tom
January 17th, 2007 at 22:05
Alec - thanks for the tip on ffmpegx. I think I’ve seen this one mentioned somewhere before. The new version does indeed convert to flv. There is a link to a free swf video player that can be embedded in a web page. The same author also has a free swf mp3 player - this could come in handy during project as well. Sorensen Squeeze looks good, but I’m looking for something a little more economical (read that as I’m on a tight budget). As for the recording, unless Ambrosia releases a Universal Binary in the next week, I’ll go with iShowU. I tried the demo of Snapz Pro and it was soooooo slow running under Rosetta on my MacBook. If you’ve had some success with it on an Intel Mac, I may just give it a chance.
Tom - I hadn’t seen media-convert before. That’s a neat idea to have a web-based media converter. Free options are definitely my preference!
January 30th, 2007 at 00:38
ffmpegX is the cats pajamas - http://ffmpegx.com/ and more more than just doing QT to FLV (which it does in about 10 times the rate than the Flash Media Encoder).
Here is a secret trick that took a while to uncover- I’ve had a number of files I tried to convert that bork to a ok file. If this happens, hit the Audio tab and click the “invert mapping” checkbox — has something to do with the ordering or tracks.
While you are at it, make sure you get a copy of Perian (http://perian.org/) that allows you to play FLVs (and AVIs) in Quicktime.
Keep in mind that FLV is not swf that is typically generated by apps like Camtasia. There are FLV players (and a good batch of flv pliugins for WordPress) — I’d be wary about the ability to play an FLV directly from a CD.
January 30th, 2007 at 10:19
Thanks, Alan. I’ve been giving ffmpegX a try and I’m impressed by the variety of video file formats that it can convert. At this point, I think I’m just going to leave the screencasts in quicktime format for two reasons - the screencast software that is available on the Mac is pretty immature so far (I hate to compliment Windows, but the built in media encoder software does make screencasts pretty easily), and my project is due in about 7 weeks so I can’t take to much time twiddling with formats, although the chance to geek out is appealing. Gotta love deadlines - without them I’d never get anything done.
May 10th, 2007 at 06:27
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