Creating a screencast of my recent presentation on SpokenMedia

I just posted a screencast of a remote presentation I gave on the SpokenMedia project.

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Source: Brandon Muramatsu

Cite as: Muramatsu, B., McKinney, A. & Wilkins, P. (2010, July 1). Implementing SpokenMedia for the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Presentation at Technology for Education Conference: Mumbai, India. July 1, 2010. Retrieved July 14, 2010 from SpokenMedia Web site: http://spokenmedia.mit.edu/demo/t4e-july2010/T4E2010-Implementing-SpokenMedia-Muramatsu-video-0710.mov

I gave this presentation from my apartment in Lexington, MA to the conference in Mumbai, India. (My butt was very happy it didn’t sit in a seat forever to fly there.)

Here’s how I did it.

I was connected to the conference via a Skype call–I would be speaking while someone at the conference manually advanced my slides for the audience. I displayed my slides on my local screen and talked about each slide, asking the person controlling the slides remotely to advance my slides when needed.

To record the presentation, I used Screenflow to capture the presentation on-screen. With Screenflow I was able to record both the slides on the screen as well as my laptop’s camera. This would be the end of the story if the screencast recording worked perfectly. Of course it didn’t.

Source: Brandon

Screenflow didn't like that...

As I was starting I was asked if I could switch on my camera in Skype. I tried doing that, but the output from the camera was already “captured” by Screenflow and Skype wasn’t able to use the camera. When I switched back into the presentation, it seems Screenflow didn’t like the fighting over the camera and it messed up the display of the slides. Though, thankfully, it kept recording the camera’s video and audio.

Screenflow records the desktop and the video camera as separate tracks–ok, great, I’ll just create another “good” recording of the slides and then replace the one track with the other After some simple trim edits to each track to line things up and I’d be done. Not so fast. It seems that Screenflow doesn’t include support for doing what I wanted to do–the edit tools really are designed for much simpler tasks and not splitting video+audio tracks into 23 segments and moving them around. Great.

Ok, time to bring in the big guns–so I switched to Final Cut Express HD. (I could have done this all in iMovie–I just didn’t want to use all of the space on my hard drive to save the bloated iMovie import files.) After some futzing (I’ve done video editing in the past, but I’ve never used Final Cut) I was able to produce the video you see above. I tried using the screen capture of the slides, but in the end I found it easier to just import the slides as separate images. Also, I probably should have included some more transitions and probably done a bit more with the audio leveling. But, I figured I had spent enough time to get the output that you see above. Mostly because it took 2-5 hours to render the video on my laptop–and I was tired of losing all the processing performance on the laptop during the day or setting it up to render overnight.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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