With new instrument flying students, we sit down together at a computer and obtain a weather briefing from DUATS. This is a 15-page document and one of the most important skills for an IFR pilot is to be able to pick out the important stuff and make decisions based upon that most critical information. The student sees a Web page on the screen. He or she sees a mouse cursor moving occasionally or some text being highlighted. He or she sees the Web page being scrolled down. He or she hears my voice explaining why a particular line or section is irrelevant or relevant. I went through this exercise with a group of pilots the other day and one suggested that it would be good training material to share on the Web. Now the question becomes how to do it. Here are my criteria:
- authoring should be almost as easy as sitting down at a browser, putting on a headset, and speaking while using the computer in a natural manner
- viewing should be sharp and crisp; the number of pixels being changed is very small and the amount of data necessary to transmit a perfect copy of the screen is small; (i.e., I would not want to stick a video camera a few feet from the screen and have the text be fuzzed up by the camera or by MPEG compression for distribution)
- viewing should be possible in a standard Web browser with no need to install additional software
- viewers should not have to pay a license fee for any software
- I should not have to pay any ongoing license fees for any software (since I want to make just one recording!)
My initial thought was that this is essentially what various Web-mediated meeting programs (WebEx; Live Meeting) do. They let a bunch of people scattered around the Internet see some computer screen interaction and hear a voice. If such a program had a “record” button and a means of distributing historical meetings, that would be ideal, especially if the program could compile into Flash or something similar.
If not all of the criteria can be met, I would be willing to accept a situation in which we distribute a somewhat fuzzy YouTube video and then offer a much higher quality version to those who are willing to download and install a free Web collaboration client program.
Ideas? Suggestions?
[A totally different way to go would be annotated text. Distribute the original DUATS briefing as an HTML document tarted up with some JavaScript. When the reader moves a mouse over a particular line, a text annotation pops up. I’m not sure if there is a convenient way to author that kind of text. I’m willing to do it all in Emacs, I guess, typing tags, as long as all of it can be done with CLASS= modifiers on P and LI tags and the code remains up at the top or in a style sheet.]
maybe try wink, it requires the browser to have flash though.
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
You’re describing “screencasting,” yes? There are various tools to capture, edit, and publish “screen-captured movies,” (including audio, of course) with my favorite being Camtasia Studio, from http://www.techsmith.com. They’ve got a 30-day demo, fully functioning, which would let you get some materials recorded with no out-of-pocket cost to you. They’ve also got a much simpler, fun little recorder called Jing (and Jing Pro, free and $19ish/year, respectively) which allows a 5-min recording. Both apps are both Wintel and Mac. Since they’re simply recording the screen, you can record net-based collaborations just as well as anything else.
We’ve used http://www.capturecampro.com/ at work for this sort of thing – it produces an .exe that plays back the recorded screen capture, with audio, but their web site says it can save FLV as well. They seem to have a 14-day trial available.
On the mac I’d use Jing ($15 for pro) or Snaps Pro X ($60 i think) on the PC people talk about Camtasia(sp).
the keword to google is screencasting.
If you have a Mac, there’s a program called Snapz Pro X that can produce a “movie” file that faithfully records on-screen actions as well as sounds emitted from your computer’s audio track plus (optionally) microphone input. I use it to record video-chatting sessions with family members. For your particular usage case, the only thing I’m not sure about is how far the resulting movie file can be compressed before compression lossage becomes apparent.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
The DUATS interface is straightforward enough that you could probably get away with doing some fancy JavaScript (utilizing JQuery or the likes) to step through a fake DUATS session, however the much easier method is to use something like ScreenFlow (for Mac) or Screencast-O-Matic (Java) which could then be outputted to YouTube or just an embedded Flash file.
In regards to an annotation of text documents, you could do that with Adobe Acrobat, and if you want to include some audio and video, then use the Pro Extended version of Acrobat 9.
In regards to WebEx, it does offer an archiving feature where people can view the presentation at a later time.
WebEx and its competitors do have a record button and a free trial, but I’m not sure if you can get your recordings off their site over time without paying.
I would try CamStudio (camstudio.org) and other alternatives, otherwise you can buy Adobe Captivate if you don’t mind shelling out $800 to get something state of the art that does this.
SnapzProX is used to make these excellent TextMate screencasts: http://macromates.com/screencasts
The GoToMeeting product by Citrix lets you record your session. There are free trial offers for various lengths if you know the codes. Just find a new person to sign up for a new trial.
Another interesting solution is http://www.onsitevideos.com. You can be there yourself.
Snapz Pro X fans: I could probably borrow a Macintosh for this purpose. The question then becomes how to distribute the resultant files to the wider Web (overwhelming majority of pilots and student pilots will be using Windows machines due to the fact that most aviation application programs are Windows-only). the Snapz Pro X Web site says that it distributes QuickTime movies. Are these MPEG-compressed or bit-for-bit copies of what was on the screen? Is the software smart about encoding only changes or do the files get huge?
Jing and Camtasia fans: A friend has the Camtasia software at his office and I could use it. He wasn’t sure about output formats. Let me ask essentially the same question that I asked about Snapz Pro X. Is it going to generate a huge MPEG “movie” for what is essentially a slide show of small black and white bitmaps?
As long as you’re borrowing a Macintosh, you could try using QuickTime screen recording. On a Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) machine, start QuickTime and do File > New Screen Recording. The output is AVC1-encoded video and mp4a-encoded audio in a QuickTime container file. So, it’s not as redundant as uncompressed video and not as efficient as a stream of graphics API calls could be. It is portable, though. The screencast of me typing this message had an average data rate of 1034.99kbps.
Bugzilla has online help with hover annotations. Browse https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/query.cgi?help=1&format=advanced to see it. See https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/js/help.js for details.
As a Camtasia/Jing fanboy, I can say…
–Movie files are relatively *very* small, Techsmith invented a codec which is esp efficient for screen recording
–They make it easy to send files to youtube, to their own screencast.com (free or $99/yr), or now, for Jing, to twitter.
–With free 30-day (I think) trials, without restriction, you can do a pilot-test easily.
–Finally, you’re right, this kinda “watch-over-my-shoulder” movie is a fine way to get “students” started… there’s no interactivity, but it’s a very efficient “passive” learning strategy, as a foundation before more interactive/expensive training.
Phil,
Go with Camtasia.
1) It outputs in mp4 format (Best quality and output file size match). Will create the html page with embedded flash code if you select that option.
2) It was built from ground up for the purpose you are describing. Has various ‘online lesson creation’ friendly features, especially for situations when small pixel changes are being made on screen.
3) User friendly. I am guessing you don’t want to invest hours of your time learning how to use it. I downloaded it on a friend’s recommendation, and was up and running in 15 minutes, creating my first video screencast lesson.
4) Just record videos in HD and upload on Youtube (or your own servers if you have that bandwidth). I believe youtube limits HD videos to 10 mins duration. IN which case you can always Lesson part1, lesson part2, and so on…
5) IN your case it’s free. You have the fully functional demo which works for 30 days (after which you’re required to buy).
Hope this helps.
-Ritesh
Camtasia is quite popular, and it’s worked well in the limited use I’ve given it. Yes, it generates a movie (in QuickTime, Flash, AVI or WMV) that represents your movement on the screen and voice. It’s not abstracted beyond that.
Adobe’s product, Captivate, does abstract out the “video” a bit more, showing bitmaps and an animated cursor in a more compressed format because it’s not really video. I haven’t used it beyond a demo, though.
If you do use a Mac, nowadays I’d say just use QuickTime X’s built-in recording feature. I’ve used it to record screencasts and it’s worked remarkably well. You can use QuickTime’s built-in edit features to trim the beginning and end if you want. You can’t annotate and add menus and whatnot like in Camtasia and Captivate, but for quick-and-dirty videos it’s quite good. And free, part of Snow Leopard.
Given that you’re on Windows, I’d go for Camtasia. It’s very flexible and easy to use.
Camtasia has some preset encoding settings, along with the ability to customize them. The default web setting creates a 640×480 Flash movie.
Lifehacker recently ran a survey of “best screencasting programs.”
The five best, according to their users [http://lifehacker.com/5410229/five-best-screencasting-tools]: ScreenFlow, Jing, CamStudio, Camtasia Studio, and ScreenToaster.
The winners [http://lifehacker.com/5411403/best-screencasting-tool-camstudio]: CamStudio and Camtasia Studio tied for first place.
Citrix “GoView” might work for you:
http://goview.com
Seems free and the videos should play anywhere…
As a Camtasia/Jing fanboy, I can say…
–Movie files are relatively *very* small, Techsmith invented a codec which is esp efficient for screen recording
–They make it easy to send files to youtube, to their own screencast.com (free or $99/yr), or now, for Jing, to twitter.
–With free 30-day (I think) trials, without restriction, you can do a pilot-test easily.
–Finally, you’re right, this kinda “watch-over-my-shoulder” movie is a fine way to get “students” started… there’s no interactivity, but it’s a very efficient “passive” learning strategy, as a foundation before more interactive/expensive training.
Sean: “As long as you’re borrowing a Macintosh, you could try using QuickTime screen recording. … The screencast of me typing this message had an average data rate of 1034.99kbps.” One megabit per second? With a modern codec, isn’t that sufficient for DVD-quality natural scenes in movies? I was hoping for 32 kbps for my voice and maybe 30 kbps for the scrolling text (2.3 MB total over 5m). 1 mbps = 37.5 MB for a 5-minute clip. We’re got about 1 megabit of black and white data to display and we’ll page down 15 times so that is 15 megabits or 2 MB.
Another vote for Camtasia Studio. Camtasia rules!
http://www.screentoaster.com works very well for this, is just a browser plugin, and meets all your needs. A big part of their secret sauce is how they capture the video – they do something with getting it from the video card somehow, but it’s much clearer than other choices. I use it to file bugs with my devs all the time, and they are able to easily see the text on the screen, I think it would work OK for annotating those DUATS IFR briefings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screen_readers
The Savannah College of Art and Design uses Adobe Acrobat Connect. I know this because I am a student there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Acrobat_Connect
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnect/
I noticed a mention of http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
Have never used Snapz Pro X myself, however I am happy to say that Ambrosia SW makes excellent software and has for years and years.
This might not suit your current needs but check out anyway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzweil_Educational_Systems
Also keep in mind that much of the concepts behind this type of process is already built into the core of the Macintosh OS.