gridengine.info

Current thoughts

Overall I'm pretty happy with the results. They certainly don't look, feel or sound "professional" but I'm more interested in the value-for-effort ratio. If it takes me more than an hour to create a 2-minute screencast then I'm wasting my time and I'd be better off with traditional technical writing. In particular the Camtasia Studio software is fantastic for producing videos that involve either (a) narrated powerpoint presentations or (b) recordings of computer and application usage.

Gear, technology, products and services

Video
Finding a camcorder to record the "talking head" stuff was fairly tough at first. Most consumer cameras these days lack an audio input or microphone jack which is crucial if you are trying to record a lecture, presentation or someone speaking. I feared that I'd end up with an almost-obsolete tape-based miniDV system just so that I could get a microphone input option without spending $3,000 on a "prosumer" camera. I did find a great camera though, not online but at a local camera store. It's a Sanyo Xacti HD1A digital camcorder -- not the most current model and possibly already replaced by follow-on versions but it has what I need:

• Small form factor (tiny!)
• Solid state (records to SDHC cards)
• Hi-Def Video recorded directly to MPEG-4
• A microphone jack!

For the HD camcorder, we just use a standard clip-on lav mic and a 15 foot audio cable. For recording narrations and powerpoint presentations I've been using Plantronics USB headsets. There are a number of headsets out there designed for gaming or VOIP communications that work and sound great. Parallels does a great job of taking the Mac USB headset and presenting it as the default audio-input feed for the virtualized Windows system that is running the recording software.

Even though I use a Mac, the hands down winner here (so far!) is Camtasia Studio 5 which happily runs on a virtualized Windows XP install on my powerbook via Parallels. The only real downside is having to use Cygwin-putty terminal windows when recording SGE usage instead of the more "pretty" terminal that is my default tool on OS X. Camtasia will run virtualized but it can't record windows or applications that exist outside of the virtual container. I do have a "professional" Mac screenshot and recording software application called Snapz Pro X -- I use it all the time for screenshots when doing technical writing and it can record videos of computer usage too. If I wanted to be 100% Mac I could get away with Snapz Pro, Quicktime Pro and iMovie HD but I'd have to integrate all of those into a single workflow and deal with the specific hassles of transcoding for web viewing and creating the HTML files to wrap/present things. At the end of the day, Camtasia Studio wins because it combines recording and editing features within an application that was designed from the ground up for both creating and publishing these types of videos.

Right now, videos are hosted on screencast.com mostly because I'm lazy and some of the features (like RSS feeds and access control) are more than I want to implement on one of my own internet-facing servers. Bandwidth is also a concern, internet usage in my colocation cage is already averaging close to 18 megabits/sec -- a level that is certainly not cheap to sustain and not something I want to see grow all that much more!.