[Haskell-cafe] Making videos of your project

[Claus Reinke]

Is there anyone here with experience in screencasting of text-based
applications, who could offer advice on how to produce screencasts
on windows/xp? The basic screencasting (capture+annotation/editing)
is not the problem, eg, CamStudio seems ok, and Wink gives me
more control for mostly input-driven sessions (where I want
screenshots whenever something useful happens, not long videos of
my mousepointer wavering about the screen;-). Both can generate .swf.

The problem comes when trying to scale down the size to
what would fit in a browser window (what a viewer would see,
without having to scroll around) - text becomes hard to read (quality,
not size) if I scale from 1280x800 to 640x400, and if I try to work
in a screen area that fits 640x400 in the first place (so no scaling
would be needed), I can't really show anything..

The intended topic is still haskellmode for Vim, updating the
old screenshot tour from

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~cr3/toolbox/haskell/Vim/vim.html

so there'd be a gvim window and a browser window (in real
life, also a GHCi window, and quite possibly a cygwin window,
but lets keep it simple), and the most interesting info is not in
graphics, but in the texts, source code, menus, tooltips, ...,

Claus

>> What is Screencasting?
>> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/11/16/what-is-screencasting.html?page=1

>> As a windows user, I tried playing with CamStudio and that almost seems
>> to do the job (capture, annotation, replay, conversion
>> of .avi to compressed .swf) but I don't like the resolution of the .swf
>> it generates (screen text isn't as readable as I've seen in other
>> screencasts). Perhaps I'm missing an option to improve the quality, or
>> can anyone recommend another free tool for windows, from
>> positive experience (wikipedia has a whole list of tools
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software )?
>>
>> For the purpose I have in mind, it would be good to have
>> many small pieces of screencast, one for each feature, or even better,
>> one continuous screencast with the ability to link directly to sections
>> dealing with particular topics - a hyperlinked animation. Is that
>> supported by some (free) tool?