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#Reco... - 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