November 7, 2008

Easy Training Videos with Camstudio

As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the cool tools I learned about at this year's Michigan Library Association conference was camstudio.org -- an open source ware that is, as, its website says: "able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)."

I downloaded camstudio one day last week at work and started playing with it. It is a great tool! I have already made two staff training videos -- one of which we are actually using -- and I just made my first training video for the public on how you can log into your Library accounts on our website to check your holds, renew your material, etc.

Camstudio is quick to download, and simple to learn. Though I am no Fellini, nor Antonioni, nor even Roman Polanski, I was quickly able to make pretty good 2 or 3 minute videos.

Here's the one I made for the public. Click on the picture of our web site and turn up your volume. Take a look and let me know what you think.

The only drawback is that the video files are huge. However, I used another site I learned about at the conference to store the 50+ mg videos in the clouds: drop.io.

1 comment:

Lauren Henderson said...

Great video! I like this - can we embed videos into our blog posts? I think I might try that out soon.