Library Web Chic

I’ve been working on getting screencasts ready to go for the 5 Weeks to a Social Library class and playing with podcasting on the LITA blog. All of this has gotten me exploring tools that are helpful for screencasting and podcasting on the Mac. While some of the tools are for capture, others are for converting one type of video to another.

For the screencasting piece of 5 Weeks we are putting on some screencasts in Flash and others we are streaming using the Darwin streaming server. However to use Darwin for streaming you have to get the files into Quicktime and then “hint” them. This means you need to upgrade your Quicktime to Quicktime Pro. Also, depending on how the files come you may need a tool like VisualHub to get them from one format to another or something like Flip4Mac that allows you to open WMV files in Quicktime. I should also mention that VisualHub will help you burn a movie to DVD which I wanted to do for one of the 5 weeks presenters so she has a more permanent copy of her hard work.
One interesting thing I discovered with VisualHub is it does conversions of true “video” from one format to Flash great, but it doesn’t deal particularly well with screencasts that are Powerpoint with voice over. I think some of this has to do with frame-rate and the fact that VisualHub can’t tell that the screen has changed.

As part of this process I’ve also been working with Camtasia. Not necessarily creating things, but helping people get their content output properly. One thing I’ve noticed is that you need to be VERY careful to tell Camtasia to put all the components of your screencast in one place. Otherwise, when you move it to another computer to work on you end up play the where is the file I’m missing game. Believe me it isn’t fun and can make your life very difficult. I’d suggest that for every Camtasia project you are working on you create a folder and put all the components and the Camtasia project file in that folder so you do “misplace” anything.

Most of our Flash files we’ve uploaded to blip.tv which thus far has been quite reliable. There is always some quality lost with Flash though some I’m anxious to do a side-by-side comparison of the files I’m streaming with their Flash counterpart to see if the quality difference is noticeable.

On the podcasting side of things, I’ve been trying to figure out how to encode MP3s at a particular rate via Audacity. We are using Podpress to handle podcasting on the LITA blog and it wants things encoded at a particular rate. All of this is pretty new for me, but I’m really having fun learning about it.