The following are my tutorials for the Movie Music Comparison assignment and the Movie Scenes That Changed Our Lives assignment, respectively. I’m trying out Vimeo because at this point YouTube can kiss my frustrated not-read-only downtime-hating tush, and you can quote me on that. I used the 30-day free trial of Camtasia to create both tutorials, which I would highly recommend for anyone creating screencast tutorials. That does come with a small caveat: it’s a hefty program, and it’ll run slowly if your computer isn’t especially powerful. I also couldn’t get the “Upload to YouTube” function to work, but I figure that’s a combination of my craptop’s age and my own incompetence. Anyway, on to the tutorials!’

The first tutorial isn’t perfect, but my intention there wasn’t really to showcase how to complete the assignment, and rather to familiarize viewers with a program I’ve found incredibly useful all semester. While YTD Video Downloader is quite user-friendly, it can be helpful to have a tutorial showing exactly how the program works to get new users comfortable enough to try it out. One thing I probably should have realized earlier (and did change for the second video) was that my wallpaper, while clever, isn’t exactly safe for work. Oops! At least it’s clever. : )

The second tutorial is more traditional and perhaps more detailed, but that is in part because I’m only doing a walkthrough involving one program. Because of that it was a little easier to include more details about how to complete the project as a whole, rather than just talking about the “Add Narration” function, which was my initial goal.

I’m pretty pleased with how both of these tutorials came out, little errors and all, mostly because of the way Camtasia allows you to zoom in on different parts of your screen during post-production. That one tiny detail  is extremely important to me when viewing screencasts, because when watching screencast tutorials I most often get lost when I can’t find the specific menu or tool that I’m supposed to be using. By zooming in to the exact spot on the screen where the icons are located, it’s much easier to direct your viewer’s attention to what they’re supposed to be doing, and I hope that at the very least I achieved that with my tutorials.