LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

Captivate is probably the most featureful of the screencasting software options. It takes a while to figure out what features with Captivate that you need to use and what features really aren't that important. There is so much that you can do with Captivate and I don't touch the great majority of the features when I'm creating a screencast.

I think that the more you try to create a customizable experience for the user, the more time you're going to spend on the screencast. So it's often a trade-off between creating a good user experience and practicality.

When I checked out the price of Adobe Captivate ($799), I realized why everyone who used Captivate was able to produce a much more professional-looking product. The free software that I used doesn't come close to what can be done with the Adobe program, but I'm wondering how you can afford it? I'm guessing that everyone who uses Captivate is associated with a university that is willing to shell out the bucks for such a (useful) program. I would never be able to get approval for that kind of expenditure in the middle school where I work, especially in the current economic crisis.

I also want to mention that when I used Freescreencast.com, I chose to capture in full screen mode (the size of the screen capture is about the  only option available when using the program - everything else is take what you get). Despite choosing full screen, the  resolution was not very good, and the mouse movements were jerky, probably because of the slow default frame rate.

I also had a problem when uploading to Yahoo video (which I chose because I have a Yahoo email account). Yahoo does not accept the flv format and instead transcribes your screencast from whatever format you used (Freescreencast.com uses wmv) to flv. I thought the process would take a few seconds, but when I checked several hours later, Yahoo video was still "transcoding" (into flv format). I thought it was not going to work at all, so I let it go until the following morning, and sure enough, my screencast was indexed and ready for viewing when I woke up. However, the transcoding process reduced the resolution even further, and after looking at everyone else's fairly high resolution screencasts (especially with Captivate), I can see why Yahoo video is not the best choice.

Finally, I want to say that I looked at everyone's screencasts, and this has to be the most (software) tech-savvy class that I've ever been in at SJSU SLIS. Watching your presentations was truly a learning experience for me, and I want to thank all of you for doing such a great job on your screencasts.

I think it would be wonderful for users to be able to turn interactive options on and off. While this educational game from the Field Museum isn't a screencast, it's a prime example why users should be able to turn off/skip interactive stuff - every time you start this game, you have to work through every scene to get to the next one. And part of it is a huge puzzle!

It's a shame most computer program suites cost so much darn money. (Although Adobe Creative Suite for $300 is very tempting..!) I'm afraid to download any free trials these days, now that there's so much fine print that allows the company to start billing you unless you explicitly cancel the service. I'm thinking of freecreditreport.com and that whole acai berry supplement ordeal.

I too really loved the look of the Captivate presentations. I definitely am considering taking advantage of my student discount now while I have the chance!