Create Screencasts for Educational Purposes

If you’re a technical fellow of some sort, you’ve no doubt experienced the pain and frustration when trying to explain how to perform certain procedures or functions on the computer to regular users. The problem isn’t that the users aren’t smart enough to do what you tell them to do (well, most of the time anyway). It’s just that things could be a lot easier if they had something more to go on than just words alone. Pictures definitely help but a video demonstration is even better in many situations. Creating screencasts can help both the presenter and the audience it was intended for. For the the presenter, they don’t have to rely on writing blocks and blocks of text explaining how to do something on the computer. For the viewers, watching a screencast can help minimize confusion. Also, users feel a lot more confident if they watch an expert do something and then try to mimic those actions rather than just doing it by themselves after reading the instructions. Here, we are going to learn how simple it is to create awesome looking screencasts for broadcasting.

A screencast is just a video recording of your screen’s output. Basically, what you do and see on your screen will be recorded to a video file which can be then edited and broadcast via Youtube or another method that suits your needs. Technically, there’s nothing stopping you from just grabbing your digital camcorder or iPhone and recording your monitor that way but if you’ll be attaching that recording to your blog or website for educational purposes, well, that’s not the best way to go about it. It’s very unprofessional looking.
There are many professional software and online services out there that allows you to capture your own screencasts, notably Jing and Camtasia Studio, but Microsoft has a hidden gem that allows everyone to create their own screencasts easily and efficiently. That tool is called Microsoft Expression Encoder 4.0 and best of all, it’s free!

Microsoft Expression Encoder 4.0

Although there is a professional edition for Microsoft Expression Encoder (MEE), the free edition should be well enough to satisfy everyone if all you needed to do is create simple screencasts. The main drawback with the free edition of MEE is that each screencast session you create is limited to a maximum of 10 minutes. However, there are ways to overcome this limitation which I’ll go over later. The free edition also limits your output encoded video to only either Windows Media Video (WMV), Siliverlight, or IIS. Again, there are ways around this limitation. To view a list of the comparison features between editions along with the ability to download the free edition, head over to their website by clicking on the banner below.

There are two components of MEE 4.0 that you need to be familiar with. The first one, called Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 Screen Capture within your Start Menu, is the component that you’ll use to perform the actual screencast recording. The second one, called Microsoft Expression Encoder 4, is the component or utility you’ll use to edit and encode your videos/screencast. In other words, you have the capture utility and the editor utility. Here, I’ll go over how to create a simple screencast and encode it to WMV so that it will be ready for uploading to Youtube.

Recording a Screencast

The installation of MEE 4.0 is just like any other software installation. Accept the defaults and you should be good to go. To begin creating a screencast, start the screen capturing utility portion of MEE within your Start Menu.

You should now see the screen capture utility toolbar. A screencast would be really boring to watch if all we’re allowed to capture was just our screen output. However, by being able to capture audio from your microphone and video camera, the screencast can be as effective as possible at getting the point across to the viewers. Luckily, MEE allows us to do just that even in the free edition. Before using any software for the first time, we should always head into the configuration menu to configure the right settings. So, on the toolbar you should see five buttons like so:

Click on the button that resembles a cogwheel first. It is here where we get to configure some of the general options for the screen capturing utility portion of MEE. You’ll see six tabs here. Under Screen, you get to configure the quality of your screen capture along with whether to show your mouse pointer on the screencast or not.

In Camera, you get to configure which camera (if any) you would like to use to capture your face. Usually, this capture will be shown as a small box on the lower right hand corner overlaying the main recording. This option is useful if you need to show something you have physically to your audience members.

The Audio tab allows you to configure which microphone source (if any) you would like to use to capture your voice. To create a highly effective screencast recording, it is usually recommended that you record your voice as well so you can give precise information on what it is you are doing while the audience is watching video.

The Hotkey tab allows you to set which key combination you would like to use to start/pause, stop, and zooming of the screencast.

In the Other tab, you get to set other options that don’t belong to any other categories. Once you have gotten a little more familiar with MEE, you can come back here to configure the settings to your liking.

Once you got the audio and camera settings configured correctly, you can easily enable them on any of your future screencast recording by pressing on the microphone and/or camera button on the toolbar respectively. You will know they have been enabled because the buttons will turn red. The bullet-list style button shows a panel showing all of your screencast recordings. You can also browse to another folder location to store your screencast recordings. Keep in mind that this recording is not the final video you will use for broadcasting. Your initial screencast recordings have a file extension of .XESC. After the screencast has been recorded, we will need to encode it to .WMV or to another video format.
Once you are satisfied with everything, hit the record button. Immediately, you should see a big red border on your screen along with another toolbar. You now get to configure the region of your screen that should be recorded on the screencast. You can either type in a custom height and width and then reposition the border to anywhere on the screen, manually drag and configure the red border to your choosing, or you can use the drop-down box to specify common size settings.

To begin the actual recording, simply hit the record button. By default, a 3 second countdown timer will be shown on your screen before the recording will start. When you are finished with the recording, simply press Ctrl+Shift+F12 (default setting) to stop the recording. The screen capture toolbar should now show your recording in the panel with a date and time stamp for the file name.

You can preview your screencast by selecting it from the panel and clicking the Play button next to it. If you have enabled your video camera for your screencast, it will not be shown in this preview area. Don’t worry because when we import our video for editing and encoding in the next step, the video will be there. As mentioned earlier, this preview is not the actual video that you will use for broadcasting. To create that video, we need to encode the recording and that’s what we will do next.
If you really need to create screencasts longer than 10 minutes in length, then this is what you can do. Record your screencast as usual. However, you’ll have two or more videos since the recording will break off at the 10 minute mark. Encode the video as to WMV as usual (detailed below). Once they have been encoded, use Format Factory’s Video Joiner feature under the Advanced setting to merge the two or more screencast. By doing so, you will still have one single video file at the end for ease of broadcast but your screencast will be longer than 10 minutes in length.

Encoding the Screencast

To encode our recording, we will use the encoder utility of MEE. While still in the screen capture utility, select your recording and hit the “Send to Encoder” button on the lower right corner. Your recording should then automatically be imported into the encoder tool for editing and encoding.

By far, the encoder utility is far more complicated than the screen capture tool. However, do not be intimidated as encoding your video to WMV is very simple to perform.

You recording will be displayed on the top window. You can easily zoom in or out of the recording by scrolling with your mouse wheel button or using the drop-down menu in the left corner. Before encoding our video, we need to configure a few presets. In the upper right corner is where you can configure them. Click on the System tab. Under Encoded Quality, you have three options to pick: Balanced (average quality), Best Quality, and Fastest (low quality). Right-click on Best Quality and select Set as Default to have this option apply to all future encoding jobs.

If your screencast will be viewed on a specific device, you can apply a template under the Encoding for Devices setting. By selecting one of these templates, your recording will be encoded to a specific resolution to match that device type. If you want your recording to be shown as is, leave this setting alone.

Under the Preset window is another window with five tabs along with advanced video and audio settings to configure. However, we really don’t need to do anything other than on the Encode tab. Here we can select the output file type for our screencast. For the free edition of MEE, we only get to choose between WMV, MP4 and ISS. WMV should suffice most users. On the Output tab, you can see where your encoded video will reside in. Change it from the default folder if you wish. In the Media File Name field, please do not change it from the default. You can simply change the filename of your sceencast after it has been encoded.

If you need to have your screencast in a format other than what is provided with MEE, you can use a third party utility such as Format Factory. So, encode your video to WMV with MEE and then encode that video to another format within Format Factory afterwards. Keep in mind that the more encoding process the video goes through, the quality might degrade as well.

Once everything is set, we can now encode the recording. Go to File –> Encode to begin the process. How long the encoding process takes depends on your computer hardware specs.

Once the process has completed, head over to the folder destination and your newly encoded WMV screencast should be ready for broadcast. By default, this folder should be located in: C:Users”Username”DocumentsExpressionExpression EncoderOutput.

 

MEE 4.0 gives you a very basic video editor. However, one of the more important task of trimming or cutting unwanted parts out of your recording is still possible. To perform more advance tasks though, you’ll definitely need a third-party utility.