Overview

I thought I’ll try something new by recording screencasts for some of my work on Ruby open source libraries.

This is quite a change for me since I’m primarily focused on the programming and designing side of things. Creating documentation is something I’ve not ventured into a lot except the usual YARD markup for Ruby methods and classes.

In this blog post (which I will keep updating as time progresses) I hope to document my efforts in creating screencasts. Mind you this is the first time I’m creating a screencast so if you find any potential improvements in my methods please point them out in the comments.

Creating the video

My first ever screencast will be for my benchmark-plot gem. For creating the video I’m mainly using two tools - Kdenlive for video editing and Kazam for recording screen activity. I initially tried using Pitivi and OpenShot for video editing, but the former did not seem user friendly and the latter kept crashing on my system. For the desktop recording I first tried using RecordMyDesktop but gave up on it since it’s too heavy on resources and recoreded poor quality screencasts with not too many customization options.

For creating informative visuals, I’m using LibreOffice Impress so that I can create a slide, take it’s screenshot when in slideshow mode and put in the screencast. However I’ve generally found that using slides does not serve well the content delivery in a screencast and will probably not feature too many slides in future screencasts.

Sublime Text 3 is my primary text editor. I use it’s in built code execution functionality (by pressing Ctrl + Shift + B) to execute a code snippet and display the results immediately.

Creating the audio

I am using Audacity for recording sound. Sadly my mic produces a lot of noise, so for removing that noise in Audacity, I use the inbuilt noise reduction tools.

Noise reduction in Audacity can be achieved by first selecting a small part of the sound that does not contain speech, then go to Effects -> Noise Reduction and click on ‘Get Noise Profile’. Then select the whole sound wave with Ctrl + A. Go to Effects -> Noise Reduction again and click ‘OK’. It should considerably reduce static noise from your sound file.

All files are exported to Ogg Vorbis.

Putting it all together

I did some research on the screencasting process and found this article by Avdi Grimm and this one by Sayanee Basu extremely helpful.

I first started by writing the transcript along with any code samples that I had to show. I made it a point to describe the code being typed/displayed on the screen since it’s generally more useful to have a voice over explaning the code than having to pause the video and go over it yourself.

Then I recorded the voice over just for the part that featured slides. I imported the screenshots of the slides in kdenlive and adjusted them such that they fit the voice over. Recording the code samples was a bit of a challenge. I started typing out the code and talking about it into the mic. This was more difficult than I thought, almost like playing a Guitar and singing at the same time. I ended up recording the screencast in 4 separate takes, with several retakes for each take.

After importing the screencast with voice over into kdenlive and separating the audio and video components, I did some cuts to reduce redundancy or imperfections in my VO. Some of the parts of the video where there was a lot of typing had to be sped up by using kdenlive’s Speed tool.

Once this was upto my satisfaction, I exported it to mp4.

The video of my first screencast is now up on YouTube in the video below. Have a look and leave your feedback in the comments!