Screencasting

For a while I've been watching videos online, you know tutorials, old cartoons, even movies, mostly because when you live with your computer it's just more convenient than watching TV. I've even done a couple of screencasts, and I'm working on Spanish vocab video as well, which led me to thinking how can I make some money from these.

Of course I started looking at the big name video hosting guys but the kind of stuff I make, Ning screencasts etc, are never going to get a big audience and anything else I make is just going to plain stupid, and frankly an embarrassment to put online. Unless... that's the whole point of the video, to be stupid, embarrassing, b-grade etc.

The thing is though, stupid videos get eyeballs watching them, they become viral, remember the light saber kid, or the women dancing in the gym, but none of the people who made those videos ever made any money from them. So on my Google hunt I found a new site called Cash Tomato that has a weekly prize draw for the best video of the week and the winner gets $1,000 free money for their video which is fairly tempting, I think I'm going to try my hand at a cartoon screencast.

Yeah there you go, I said it, I'm going to make a cartoon. It'll be really bad, not worth watching, but I've already decided I'm going to tell a joke and put some really bad stick figure drawings into the video pane and use my voice to provide the atmosphere. Having done a lot of public speaking I can really get some serious atmosphere going. And a thousand bucks for a video is pretty sweet.

A couple of days ago I talked about having problems with the line-in, specifically that my headset microphone on my MacBook Pro wasn't working. I fixed the problem by connecting a USB headset with boom microphone, and now I have to deal with aspect size and ratios when I screencast.

I bought iShowU and Stomp as a combined package and started mucking around with it to see what sort of screencast I could make. My first effort was pretty disappointing but my second is much better.

Now that I think I've figured it out, well as far as a beginner can, I'm going to make a bunch of English language tutorials for Serendipity, things like how to install Serendipity, using Spartacus, adding counter code using the HTML nugget plugin etc. Hopefully a few of the other s9y people can suggest topics.

I'm also putting together a bunch of screencasts on using Ning, and might even produce some for Blogger. I'm not sure what else to do but I guess once I start working on them other ideas will materialise.

I've recently started learning about screencasting, which resulted in discovering some problems on my MacBook where the microphone on my headset wouldn't work.

This appears to be a common problem with MacBooks, I think it affects the complete range from the consumer white and black versions, right through to the Pro versions. Basically the MacBook has a headphone jack and line-in jack on the side, which should allow you to use any multimedia headset for screencasting, using Skype etc. I thought it was working for me until a good friend told me that my volume was really low on a recent Skype call.

I tried everything, making sure the line-in microphone was selected as default in System Preferences, adjusting the microphone volume upwards, opening the midi manager and selecting line-in as default and also increasing volume there, and none of it worked. Luckily I found out why and have been able to fix it. Read More