Okay, I’m tempering – if not quite recanting – the position I took in that last post. Probably the biggest frustration for me was the loss of audio when my own screencast was loaded to YouTube. I put the matter to Ambrosia technical support. The response:

Sorry for your frustration. The issue is obviously due to YouTube processing the file. Using the default audio settings has always worked in the past …

We do know that YouTube will take only the first audio track. If your movie has both Mac audio and mic audio, only the Mac audio will be used. You can resave the move in Quicktime to merge the two audio tracks, and both will appear in YouTube. Hope this helps

So, ah ha! Yes, I had been playing around with audio sources. It’s pretty cool actually; Snapz Pro X allows us to capture what comes from the computer and what we say into the mic all at once. We can create screencasts in which, for instance, we introduce and comment on files from our media collections. The movie settings allow for selection of one, both or neither track.

Unfortunately it seems one does need to own a QuickTime Pro license in order to re-save the file and merge the tracks. I’m not prepared to lay down the money for it yet and I cannot find a trial version (Apple is rather stingy that way – but if anyone knows where a trial version lives please let me know). So I worked around a little, opening the same screencast from our amazon server (to reduce the media player frame) and selecting it from the screen for a new take – this time using the mac audio track, but leaving the mic audio off. I created a movie of a movie. Why not? The result … a new YouTube video that makes better sense:

Now I guess I can turn my kvetching to the video quality itself. Not great, in this case (or in the case of the original YouTube version). I think I am partly to blame. To be sure, video quality always seems to suffer a bit through YouTube’s processes. I used the site’s preferred dimensions (320 x 240), but shot almost my entire screen because I was shooting two applications (at 50% ratio). This damaged the resolution slightly in the final product, which was damaged slightly more being loaded to YouTube. Compare the look of the unprocessed movie. Yet at least with my trenchant narrative now the video can be followed and the viewer given a fair idea of what goes on.

I don’t know. Maybe screencasting does not totally suck. But I still have a good deal to learn as far as annotations, creating interactive features and such (I don’t see this happening in Snapz Pro) before I start really loving it.

Plugin Update

By the way, I have been threatening for weeks to replace the old “Digg” button at the bottom of each post with the “ShareThis” widget that seems to be the favorite of most of my colleagues. ShareThis does indeed offer a whole lot more networking options than Digg (a single bookmarking site). But the real reason I wanted to switch was because I was just getting tired of being mocked by all those zeros. I am not concerned much if nobody ever thinks enough of these posts to bookmark or share them, but there is no sense having attention called to that fact. It just looks kind of stupid.

Old Post Update

Almost a month ago I posted notice about the addition of The Nietzsche Family Circus to my blogroll (which still needs attention). The other day I updated the post to include an example from the site which serves as a cool illustration of the last point I make in the post. Click here to see.