ScreencastTeam video tutorials

[Alan Pope]

2009/7/21 Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 16:49 -0500, Belinda Lopez wrote:
>> Standard development rates are about 10x production time per
>> minute/hour of final video; 1 hour video takes about 10 hours to
>> produce.  Alan's correct, the planning and setup can take more time
>> than the actual screencast creation.
>>

Of course there's the _other_ method of screencasting which involves
plugging in a headset, hitting the 'record' button and uploading
whatever comes out.

I recently created a quick screencast to show someone how to use
gparted to move a partition. I have put it on my personal blip account
rather than the ubuntu screencasts one.

http://blip.tv/file/2384259

I used the "click the button and upload what comes out" method.
There's not title, no subtitles, little preparation (other than
putting in a USB stick and checking gparted can see/manipulate it),
and no editing of either the audio or video.

There's certainly room for these short format screencasts, as Belinda
says they're easily digestible and show an atomic unit of work which
can be linked to from elsewhere - such as documentation web pages.

> There a few teams that I can think of who might be interested in
> collaborating on this. We should invite them to the next doc team
> meeting, or we can have a meeting dedicated to discussing this.
>

Agreed. When will that be? The wiki page is out of date.

> For the purposes of integrating with the documentation, <2 minute videos
> would be ideal. It would also cut the production time and make it easier
> to provide translations.
>

Whilst I agree that short format ones are beneficial for this specific
task, there is still room for long-format shows, and they should not
be dismissed when we are discussing screencasts in general.

> In terms of documentation integration, we would have to be careful to
> choose topics which would benefit from videos. I think that providing a
> video for each topic would be overkill (like providing a screenshot for
> each step in a procedure), so I'd prefer to use them sparingly. What
> sort of problems do you think videos would help-out with the most?
>

I'm not convinced that there is much that doesn't benefit from
screencasting. Whilst I appreciate that some people learn by reading
docs, many don't. There's a significant number of people who learn by
being shown what to do, and like to see the result of doing something
to improve confidence before running it themselves.

Ok, we don't need a screencast that tells someone how to click the
firefox icon, then another for how to click the evolution icon, that's
taking it too far, but there's a happy medium. The original idea
behind the screencast team was to create videos for very new users.
People who may have never even seen Ubuntu before. I've had a lot of
feedback from people telling me they felt more confident installing
Ubuntu once they'd seen various parts of it in a video.

Cheers,
Al.