How I make screencasts: Lecture capture, part 1

Sorry for the time in between posts lately. It’s been an odd mix of attending conferences, getting ready to attend conferences, and spending time in the hospital being treated for skin infections picked up at those conferences for the last couple of weeks. Long story. Let’s talk about something more pleasant than cellulitis, namely screencasting.

So far I’ve posted about the general idea of screencasting and what I do with screencasts, and I’ve posted about the all-important planning phase of screencasating. Now I’m ready to start getting to the nuts and bolts. Of the three kinds of screencasts I do, probably the simplest is the lecture capture. In a lecture capture I am simply recording a slide presentation or a Prezi with a voiceover. Here’s an example, which is an overview of the first test being given to a freshman calculus class:

All this screencast is, is a Keynote slide deck that I prepared with a voiceover. Sometimes this is all you need for the task you want to accomplish. For those non-Mac people out there, Keynote is Apple’s version of PowerPoint -- a presentation software tool that comes with the iWork office suite. If you have a Mac and don’t use iWork, it’s well worth looking into. Many people find Keynote to be much better designed and easier to use than PowerPoint or any of the other presentation tools out there.

The basic gist behind a lecture capture is that you are just using a presentation tool to give a normal presentation, and capturing the audio and the video that goes with it. This does not include any sort of writing on the board; I’ll deal with that in the next post in this series on “whiteboard” screencasts. But everyone should note well that the lecture capture approach is often part of my screencasts but rarely the entire thing. Many of my MATLAB screencasts are set up by brief, 1- to 2-minute long lecture captures before cutting away to a live screencast straight out of MATLAB. So even if lecture capture doesn’t sound like your thing, it’s worth thinking about.

With Keynote, doing a lecture capture screencasts is very easy. After planning it out, you just make the slide deck exactly as you would if you were to present it live. Then, instead of clicking the “Play” button to do the slideshow, click on Play > Record Slideshow:

This put the slideshow into presentation mode on your screen but also record audio from the microphone at the same time. From here, you just go through your slideshow as you would normally, and whatever goes into the mic gets recorded. When you’re done recording, go to Share > Export...:

There’s an option on the screen that comes up next to export to Quicktime, and that’s what to select. (I use the default video/audio options; you can tweak these.) And presto -- you have a nice, high-quality Quicktime movie of your lecture that’s suitable for sharing online or burning to a disc.

PowerPoint (at least the version I have, which is PowerPoint 2008 for the Mac) has all of these capabilities as well. In PowerPoint, you would make up your slide deck as usual and then go to Slide Show > Record Narration...:

What happens next is a bit different from Keynote. PowerPoint does what it says: It attaches an audio narration to each slide as you click through it in presentation mode. There is the option -- but not a requirement -- to record the timing of the slide transitions as well. In Keynote, the transitions are automatically timed. To turn this voiceover-plus-presentation into a movie, just go to File > Save as Movie... and there are plenty of options to choose from.

I should mention that as for a microphone, I just use the built-in microphone on my Macbook Pro. I have used a USB headset microphone before and I think it did improve the audio quality noticeably, but to be honest with you: I’m really cheap. If I can get good audio quality that nobody complains about using the built-in mic, why spend $50 to get very good audio quality with a USB mic? One of these days I’ll break down and buy one, I’m sure. Until then I pinch my pennies.

There are a couple of issues to think about at this point regarding lecture captures.

• What if you want to use some other presentation tool besides Keynote or PowerPoint, for example the Beamer package for $latex \LaTeX$, or Prezi?
• What if you wanted to record portions of a lecture at a time and stitch them all together later, or conversely what if you wanted/needed to edit out or enhance portions of a lecture capture you created with Keynote or PowerPoint?

For those kinds of tasks, I would turn to my #1, go-to tool for almost all my screencasting needs: Camtasia for Mac. Camtasia is an all-purpose video and screencasting tool that does an outstanding job with just about anything I could possibly want to do with a basic screencast. There’s so much to Camtasia, and we are going to need to refer to it so much in later posts about whiteboard and demo screencasts, that I’m going to deal with Camtasia (and its alternatives) in a separate post.

Meanwhile, if you have other tricks and tips about lecture capture screencasting, please share in the comments.