Screencasting

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Introduction

A screencast is a digital recording of your computer screen activities over a short period of time and in which audio narration describes on-screen action. The result may be as simple as a video of steps in accessing information or something more involved such as the steps in doing a computer search. Screencasting typically involves voice-over audio, annotation and sometimes video within a video. Screencasts are usually distributed via RSS. In the way that screenshots are static shots of a computer screen, screencasts capture what happens on a monitor at a specific point in time. The audio can be sound from an application being demonstrated, narrative from a presenter or background audio.

Screencasts can be created in various formats and users generally watch them as streamed video on the Internet.

File formats

swf/flv - Flash filetypes. swf generally for shorter video, flv generally for longer video. Flash has about 98% support in modern browsers, great for simple web use
wmv - Windows Media Video. Nice file sizes, streaming files
mov - Quicktime file. If making a vodcast and looking for iTunes support make sure to make a mov
avi - Audio Video Interleave. Uncompressed video...great for original files, don't even think of putting these on the web