About the Videos

If you are interested in creating your own screen captures there a few applications out there that allow you to accomplish this for free. Initially I thought I would need some expensive product like Camtasia Studio 4, so I tried the demo out for my first Introduction to MoI project. However, I got some great feedback on free alternatives for screen capture on the MoI forums from Frenchy Pilou and Michael Gibson.

The software I have decided to use is called CamStudio. This is a great little open source app that works as well as any commercial app. My process for this tool is to use a fixed sized window to record from at 800 x 600. This produces very nice .avi files to work with which do not take up much hard drive space at all. I have not dug very deep into this app, but I am really looking forward to exploring the captioning features.

Another application to try is DebugMode's Wink. Wink is design specifically for output into Flash .swf files. It helps you create step-by-step presentations for distribution on the web. I think this would be a great product for me if I planned to present professional quality training materials. But as it is, designing, setting up, and producing complete presentations takes a lot of extra time compared to the quick recordings I am currently doing.

If you want to edit your recordings and are a Windows user, you already have a tool for it, Movie Maker. I ignored this application for a long time because I thought it was some bare-bones gimmick from Microsoft, but I finally tried it out and was very surprised with its functionality. It's ease of use and ample list of features are all I need for producing my video clips.

Then there is the encoding part. This is still up in the air, as Windows Media is a viable alternative, but for now I have decided to go with Quicktime. This involves an extra step and an additional piece of software called, Avid Free DV. This is a free non-linear video editor which outputs to Quicktime, so there is no need to spend money upgrading to Quicktime Pro for encoding. Freevlog has a great little tutorial you can check out on using Movie Maker and Avid Free DV to encode video into Quicktime for streaming.

But what about distribution? Well, I looked at a lot of sites and the best I found is Blip.TV. This site gives you complete control over the presentation, distribution, and licensing of your video. It caters to video bloggers, artists, and up-and-coming directors. Other video sites are all about having their members create content which they compress down into a pixelated mess and attempt to generate profits with from advertisements.

So the next step for me is to get my microphone and Mackie mixer back from a friend and start recording voice-overs for the videos. I have a background in audio recording and music production, so learning the video editors came naturally. It shouldn't be long before I'm editing in, voice, sound effects, and music and the experience brings me one step closer to my ultimate goal of producing an cg animated series for online distribution.