We recently co-hosted a webinar with Tony White of the Gilbane Group discussing best practices for improving the user adoption rates of web content management systems. To make the content more widely available I wanted us to produce a nice online video of the webinar... something that I thought would be relatively simple but alas was not.
Here are the results of the efforts, documented for next time we (or someone else) would like to do this. Part of the reason of putting so much effort in this time around was to get our 'system' down so that we can produce many more screencasts in the future.
We use GoToMeeting for hosting our web meetings ("webinars") and for the most part it works well. But its screen capture of a meeting is in a proprietary codec that is only compatible with Windows Media Player on Windows XP. It doesn't even run in Vista!
To re-encode the screen capture of the webinar we used Camtasia to capture the screen whilst the webinar was replayed. Camtasia was excellent for also mixing in the MP3 audio file we had from the audio conferencing provider and producing a variety of outputs. In fact, I would use Camtasia on a spare machine to record the whole thing live in the future.
The next challenge came producing a video in the correct format for online. Camtasia has some native Flash export capabilities but it wasn't embeddable to the same extent as a Youtube video. I really wanted I high quality Youtube-style Flash video of the screencast. Camtasia's native export is not a single embeddable Flash movie and only worked well in a standalone window.
Screencast.com, by the makers of Camtasia, looked like it would solve my problems but alas it crashed when I uploaded a ZIP of the Flash movie.
Most of the online video providers such as Youtube, Google Video, Veoh, etc. all accept Quicktime files so I exported from Camtasia as Quicktime using the very useful video encoding settings for Camtasia I found from Digital Inspiration.
I won't go into great detail about why pretty much all of the video providers were not suitable but the reasons generally fell into a) poor quality, b) limited length (e.g. Youtube is <10 mins) and c) too consumer-ish (e.g. inappropriate ads). The best one I found by a country mile was Revver.
Here is the net result of the process:
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