On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 1:35 AM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:

On 12 March 2015 at 15:10, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:
Following up on this: Cascadia Wikimedians may need some kind of presentation outline or screencast along these lines by mid-April. If the WMF education team and others can't create one by that time, we/I might hack together a rudimentary version and put it on Commons for others to reuse and/or build on.

Does anyone have recommendations for screencast creation software, preferably ones that are open source?

I started using a Chromebook last July, precisely because I wanted to make screencast videos. I would recommend the screencast app for Chromebook, simply because it is free and I could get quick results. (I don't know whether it is open source.)

In this context, of training videos that will need to be changed soon, it makes a lot of sense to me to work with this sort of lightweight system, and develop an informal, conversational style - very much "live".

Of course you need to do some rehearsal and scripting, but it is possible to get decent results after a few hours. (I do have lecturing experience: I probably like the approach for that reason.)

Charles

Screencasts:

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SCREENCAST for a good resource about screencasts. (And please help update it!)

For linux, I really like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Screencast/Software#RecordMyDesktop - very simple and easy to use.

I made this 40 second video using it: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Navigation_popups_quick_tour.ogv (notes on talkpage)
The process took about 2.5 hours: half that time was getting the script right, and the browser-tabs setup properly; and half was making about 50 recording run-throughs before I had an error/stutter-free version.

The hardest (most labour intensive) part of any screencast-creation, is getting the resources created and organized (script re-re-re-re-written, images/pages selected).

VE screencast:

I too, would love to see a few VE screencasts. Ideally some very short and high-velocity ones aimed at power-users (look at how awesome VE is now!), as well as some more calm and polished (but still short) ones aimed at newcomers.

VE GuidedTour:

There's also a task to make a more extensive GuidedTour for VE, at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89074

(See the old and very very basic (2-step) "demonstration" version, linked at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GuidedTour#List_of_tours if you just want an example to dissect/adapt. I hope these will proliferate over the coming years.)

Hope that helps.

--Quiddity