Screencast Recording on Linux

Recently I needed to record some raw footage for my screencasting projects, this time recording from a Linux system. This system happens to be my power-horse video editing station with a 27" screen attached, with 2560×1440 pixels (in 16:9). So the frame size is beyond FullHD, which is 1920×1080: the maximum my HD rocket can record.

E-Paper for Screencasting ... Sort Of

Real e-paper ;)

There are sooo beautiful things to be found in this dark, filthy, intelligence-ridden Internet, such as real paper textures at Lost&Taken. One out of the bazillions of uses for paper textures is in my screencast projects. So real paper goes «e-paper», at least sort of.

3x Speedup Transcode Job for Kdenlive

Somehow Ffmpeg is the Chuck Norris of video processing, not least for speeding up raw video footage. However, better tame it through Kdenlive's transcode jobs. This way, speeding up video footage is only a single click away. And it is neatly integrated into the Kdenlive project workflow.

Fast Forward ... Using Ffmpeg

In my screencast videos about technical things I regularly face this situation: showing slides is boring, so watching an illustration develop is more interesting. Yet developing an illustration in real-time is boring, similar to watching paint dry. Just using a swipe transition from beginning to end looks again like Powerpoint presentations, yuk. Luckily, speeding up the drawing process works much better. And Kdenlive does come with a speed effect, right...?

Shuttle Crash: X11 & Qt 5.4

I've recently upgraded my Kubuntu installation to 15.10 ... just to find out that pressing any button of the ShuttlePro crashes Kdenlive. After some digging I found out that Qt 5.4 in combination with X11 are the culprits here. The ShuttlePro gets integrated as a pointing device by X11, then Qt dumps core trying to dispatching Shuttle events happily into the great void...

Audio Post in Audacity for better Screencasts

Screencasting: audio works...

A good screencast is not only about good video, it's also about good audio too. So in post I do not only work on cutting raw footage into something pleasing. I also need to process my raw audio recordings, so they get pleasing too. Luckily, there's a great open source tool for free to do this: Audacity. But what audio processing needs to be done?

One Year on the Surface: Screencasting Resume

The first anniversary of my Surface Pro 3 for screencasting and note taking is nearing. So it's time for a real-world usage review.

Recording Screencasts for Technology Training

So my Hauppauge HD PVR rocket HDMI recorder turned out to be a really useful little screencast recorder. Works like a charm without the need for a Windows host. I'm using the HD PVR rocket for recording illustrations for technology trainings. These are then used for my day job.

The HDMI recorder records raw screencast footage as H.264. I next do the voice over recording completely separately from the screen recording. I'm doing the audio recording in Audacity. My audio equipment consists of an analog Shure quality voice microphone connected to a Behringer QX1202USB mixer that doubles as a quality USB soundcard. Please, no USB podcaster microphones: they're ridiculous expensive, are often of questionable quality, and they often can't be used with a separate post. After the voice recording session I apply noise reduction and level normalization.

Raw screencast footage then gets edited in Kdenlive according to the voice over audio. That is, scenes of stepwise appearing illustrations with intermediate stills. One reason for this offline voice over recording is that I find it difficult to keep a good speaking performance while having to correctly draw illustrations at the same time. Doing it simultaneously heavily sucks, both in illustrative quality and voice.

There's even another benefit of doing video and voice separately. I can easily add in video footage later in case I recognize the need for it during voice recording. And I can also easily edit out voice sections when the overall projects turns out to get too long.

Quest for Screencasting Tools

My quest for screencasting tools takes another level: what is so difficult about creating decent screencasts? There are now several Android/iOS/Windows tablet whiteboard apps available, so no need for an HDMI recorder anymore, right?

Wireless Diva

Microsoft diva(tm)

Microsoft's wireless display adaptor is like a diva: having it stored securely in its bag together with other video adaptors and cabling I recently wanted to check its firmware status. To my dismay I couldn't connect to the wireless display adaptor. Not really the first time this diva turns a back on me...