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As part of my coursework in LIBR 246, I also had to create a screencast, so I thought I would share that as well. The demo that I made shows how to use E41ST, an application created by Amit Gupta which was a mashup between Amazon and library catalogs. Unfortunately, the application is no longer available online.

For this screencast, I used the Adobe Captivate software, because I have it available and I’ve used it before to create a presentation. I fired it up, having written and practiced my script a bit, and started recording. I messed up several times when trying to navigate the websites and read from my script at the same time, so I decided to just record the interactive part first and do the voiceover afterwards. It took several tries, but I finally got what I thought was a great capture to which I could add my voice. The problem was, when I tried to start adding my voiceover, it was difficult to time it correctly to the mouse movements. I tried a few times but couldn’t quite get it to match up. By that time, I thought that I’d practiced the script and the movement enough that I could make do them together. I tried again to do them both at the same time and, after several more tries, it seemed to work out. Thank goodness!

We were also asked to upload our videos to YouTube. To convert my video to AVI, I used a free trial version of a SWF to Video converter . The first time I tried to convert it, I ended up with just the first 10 seconds. It seemed like it had finished quickly, but who was I to argue? I uploaded it to YouTube, then realized it wasn’t the whole thing. So I deleted that, then went back and tried again. I managed to get the whole thing to convert, but at 18 MB it took quite a while for it to upload.

You can watch a higher-quality version of my E41ST Demo, or check it out on YouTube.