For https://www.youtube.com/webconverger/ we've made a couple of videos to show users around Webconverger.

Our video camera is a Iphone 4S with a generic plastic iphone4 and tripod to keep the "video camera" steady. The tripod was 18GBP from ALDI and the iphone mount was ~5GBP from Ebay.

For editing we are using iMovie '11 (9.0.4) on a MBP, which came with it.

Screencasting

Surprisingly screencasting is a dark art.

MacOSX

Although vlc can capture screen:// we found it unstable, so we forked out 20USD for http://shinywhitebox.com/ishowu-v1/

The tricky thing here was setting up the preset as the same size as the full size screen.

Windows

Unfortunately vlc was also unstable when capturing screen://.

I did try CamStudio but it had some bugs like not being able to stop a record once minimised and not detecting that I dropped to a lower 800x600 resolution.

After studying Wikipedia I found Active Presenter Free edition and downloaded it.

"Smart Capture" looks cool, but it did some weird things so I ended with Full Motion with 1024x768.

Next problem is importing the Exported AVI file to iMovie. By default the exported ActivePresenter MP4/AVI files are greyed out, since they are not in the correct format, whatever that is. Workaround here was to copy the exported file to my Linux machine and run HandBrake over it:

HandBrakeCLI -i export.avi -o export-able-to-be-imported.mp4

Now the resulting file can be imported into iMovie on the MBP. A joint Windows, Linux & Mac effort!

recordmydesktop 2.0

recordmydesktop has been a reliable tool for creating screencasts in OGG video format. Unfortunately uploading a OGG video to Youtube results in a green mess (no kidding). So instead we've been using: https://github.com/kaihendry/recordmydesktop2.0

iMovie

When importing videos, the Inspector tool's Normalize Clip Volume in the Audio tab and Enhance to reduce background noise are its killer features.