First Screencast

Ok, so I have been messing around with this free app called Jing. Everyone knows I like free (mommy geek on a tight budget) otherwise I would love to use SnapzProX but I can't yet spare the 70 clams to purchase it. Plus I just want to practice my hand at this whole screencasting thing before committing to it. I teach classes using a projector and this method, so I thought why not record some video and create an archive for my students to sort through. So here is my very first screencast for your viewing enjoyment...or not.

Right now, I am messing around with this post because for some reason I can not intuitively figure out how to get the resolution scaled down. The video is way too large. Not to mention the file size is honkin huge. I tried tinkering with the code, but I have no clue what I'm doing in there. I tried changing some of the sizes but then the video container box got small but the rest of the video remained large. I'll keep investigating this.

I've tried creating several different versions on the same theme but I really don't like my voice. Well, my voice isn't horrible, but I have to work on the uhhhs and places where I screw up. Maybe I need to write a script or just practice a little more first. The other thing is that I'm using the built in microphone and so you can hear my fans running and my fingers hitting the keys. I discovered I'm a very heavy hitter when it comes to typing. So, I decided to forgo the whole sound thing and find a way to get instructions in there. Watch for yourself and see what you think.

This is not what I would pick for a final, but I wanted to at least start testing how posting this sort of thing to my blog might work out. I welcome any comments or feedback if anyone knows more about this stuff. I would loooove to learn how to do this better. It seems like a lot of fun and I really want to teach people how to do things visually.

[Edit] I ended up abandoning Jing for the time being to try out Screenflick. I really like it. I'll post more on it later but for now, I wanted to test it some more by replacing the prior Jing screencast with this Quicktime movie. Testing here to see if the code embeds the movie in a nicer size. I think the file size is larger though. Will work on reducing that but for now, I'm just embedding the code.

[Edit] I had to remove the embedded code because it made the page load way too slow. Clicking the link in the post title should go to the file where I uploaded it.

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