I posted about my screencasting project that I started last week.

I am ready to declare a final version:  http://www.simplykaren.org/videos/gbscreencast.mov

It is just over 9 megs including the audio, which I managed to get down to 3 megs itself.

The final format for the movie is as follows: H.264, 640X480, with medium-quality AAC

It seems one problem is that SnapZ creates Apple Animation files that get blurry when they are read into iMovie.  Couldn’t figure out a way to change the setting in SnapZ.  Final Cut Pro is probably the answer here as iMovie only imports in certain formats.

And that problem will be solved when my new MacPro arrives!

So, let’s reflect here:

What have I learned?  How to make a small but high quality screencast

How did I learn it?  Trial and error, some reading, some discussion (Troy was the one who told me that iMovie doesn’t import every file format.)

How could I have learned it better?  I could have actually read all the stuff that’s out there about creating screencasts (What is Screencasting? from O’Reilly is particulary detailed) but then the screencast wouldn’t be done, would it?  I did do a little reading about codecs and had experimented with mpeg-4 over the summer so decided to try out H.264.

How could I use what I’ve learned to benefit others?  I am going to be creating a screencast of my Moodle site for the K12 Online Conference in October so my skills will be used to teach about another topic.