Authoring tutorial movies for your software
In preparation for my wednesday CINF 101 talk in San Francisco I’ve produced my first tutorial movie on how to author nmrshiftdb datasets.
The goal was to find open software which allows to record what one performs on the screen Downloading PuTTY and WinSCP , ideally also what one talks during this procedure. A quick web search revealed a large number of commercial software packages as well as a view free options. I decided to go for the ultraVNC option which got good reviews from a number of users. UltraVNC is a remote desktop solution, which seems to include a very fast driver which is able to record and export to a remote machine what happens on your screen.
Installing UltraVNC on my Windows machine went smoothly with a regular installer – nothing more to do.
On top of that I used UltraRecorder, a screen graphics and sound capture, which uses the UltraVNC drivers. This also worked extremely well. there might be similar solutions on Linux.
I used the predefined setting to record screen video (microsoft video 1) and audio (PCM) using a regular headset to record my screen while I authored an NMRShiftDB dataset. The resulting video was very large and contained some bugs, so I used VirtualDub to cut the movie, which works by marking the part which you like, stream them to AVI snippets on disk and reappend them again. This part sound lenthy, but is not. The recorded movie in this case was more than 1 GB large, to I again used the VirtualDub and the help of the free MPEG4 codec XVID to compress it down to 27 MB without loosing any quality.
The resulting movie can be seen here.
The production has taken a while. I guess, it took me about 10 times to get things right. You can’t imagine how many things can go wrong when you do something, try to say something reasonable at the same time and must not forget anything because you are recorded 🙂
My suggestions:
- Make a script with what you want to do and say
- Practise before you record
- Make sure your browser is in the right state. You may want to have applets in cache, but other things not (like for data).
- If possible, have one person do the clicking and pointing and another person do the talking.
Categorised as: Conferences and Meetings, Open Source, Publishing, Teaching
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