This is an overview of the presentation that I gave at Yokohama Barcamp. Me and my brother Steve went through making a chess video screencast — going through moves on a board, and commenting on them as we go along. Before go any further, here is a list of the software I used:
- Screenflow
- Skype
- Skype Call Recorder
- Snapz Pro (optional)
- iChat for screensharing
For the chess board, we embedded the a board into a Wordpress blog using a standard chess png file and the chess by blog plugin.
As I said, me and my brother made this chess video together. But what I didn’t mention was that he was in Newfoundland and I was in Tokyo. Sure, there’s a 12 and a half hour time difference, but it all worked out well thanks to Skype and iChat.
The final video that we wanted would have a chess board on screen, as well as another video of our ‘talking heads’ commenting on the moves being made. Here’s a very rough sketch of the layout of the video we hoped to make together:
In order to do this we each recorded one video:
On Steve’s side (in Newfoundland) he used Snapz to record a screen capture video of the chess board as we played through the game. Please note that he could also have used Screenflow, but we chose Snapz because we wanted to capture ony the board, and not the entire screen. The captured video looked like this (pic):
On my side (in Tokyo) I would use Skype Call Recorder to capture our video chat. The resultant split-screen video looked like this (pic):
*Note: If either of us had better hardware, we might have been able to capture the two videos on one machine. But because neither of our laptops are especially high-powered — we figured it would make sense to split the load between them, and do one video each.
I then used Drop.io to transfer my video to his machine. And then we brought both videos into Screenflow, and synced them to make sure that the moves on the board was in time with our verbal commentary. We did run into some problems here, mostly because he hadn’t rehearsed — but I think the attendees could clearly see what kind of video tutorial could be created in this way. Here’s a pic of the screen as we were editing the video in Screenflow. You can see the final video on the left. If we wanted to make it look really good, we could drop in a pretty background behind the two embedded videos. Maybe next time.
The most important thing that aspiring podcastors/educators can take away from this process is the realization that it only takes about 40 minutes. I think we helped dispel the erroneous notions that video tutorials/screencasts like these require huge amounts of time, money, and skill. In contrast, this was super fast, cheap, and fool-proof.
The entire presentation was live streamed as well, and you can view the video here — though we did run into some hiccups along the way. But a big thanks to Brian and the good folks at Yokohama International School for doing the recording.
More information:
Thanks for the post, I’ve added this to the BarCamp Yokohama wiki http://tinyurl.com/qp9xyz
I was wondering if a free tool like project jing http://www.jingproject.com/ could take over the same task of Snapz pro?
Cheers Brian. Yes, Jing would be a good Snapz alternative, for sure. Thanks for the reminder. And thanks again for organizing an awesome Barcamp!