Player Debugger
Encoding Tips for Screencasts
Screencasts are digital recordings of a computer screen, and can include elements such as audio narration, slide presentations or other media. This article will cover some tips for creating a high quality screencast, as well as the best settings to use for uploading your screencast to Brightcove and programming it in a Brightcove video player.
Screen capture software
There are a variety of Screen Capturing tools available; however, the most popular pieces of software today are Camtasia and Snapz Pro X. We are often asked which software we use for the screencasts used on our own website. These are created using Snapz Pro X.
Issues to keep in mind when creating your screencasts
Two of the main difficulties you may find when working with video screen captures are:
- displaying text
- exporting at the correct resolution
The reason the above points pose problems is that not everybody's computer monitor resolution is the same. Take for example, how one website may be viewed on a 1920x1080 monitor versus how it may be viewed in a 480x360 player embedded on a webpage. They are quite different, and when your screencast includes elements such as 12-pt text, you must compensate for this by tailoring your screencast for how it will be presented to the end user on your website.
In the below example, I am creating a screencast that takes us from the Brightcove.com Home Page to the list of 'Top Tags' on the Community section of the website. I've chosen to provide this as an example, because the tag cloud was some of the lightest text I could find on the Brightcove site.
In the first video below, I have captured almost my entire screen at 1280x960 and am placing it inside of a 480x360 Player:
Notice how the text in the screencast is unreadable and very messy. This is because we are scaling down the 1280x960 video into a 480x360 area. Because the above video is actually 1280x960 in size and was uploaded without any processing on our end, you can click to 'Full Screen' and view the screencast in its full quality.
In the next video, I have made a few different screencasts and have stitched the clips together using various editing techniques. Knowing that my video would end up in a 480x360 Player, any close-up shot I created was recorded at these dimensions. Also, the end video output after editing was also 480x360.
Techniques for configuring your player
Take another look at the second video example I showed above. This time, click the 'Full Screen' button. While the text is still legible in the close-ups, the video is rather poor quality and you are unable to read the text in full screen shot. This is because you are blowing up a 480x360 resolution video onto your full screen, and this is probably where a video more like the first example would come in handy.
Disabling 'Full Screen mode in the player
Depending on your situation, you may choose to disable the 'Full Screen' functionality in your Player. This ensures viewers can only view your screencast at the resolution it was created within the Player embedded on your webpage. You can remove the 'Full Screen' functionality by taking the following steps:
- In the Publishing module, select your player.
- Click the Settings button.
- Select the Video Player tab.
- Select the Prevent full screen functionality checkbox.
- Click Save Changes.
Using multiple renditions
In another situation, you may want to offer a different version of your video which was created for Full Screen use. This is where our Multi-Bitrate Streaming feature proves to be useful. With Multi-Bitrate Streaming, the Brightcove player can switch to a higher-quality video rendition when the viewer clicks to 'Full Screen'.
To create this extra rendition, you will want to create a separate file on your end rather than run your file through our transcoder. Running your screencast file through our transcoder will compress multiple renditions at different resolutions and bitrates and cause garbled text among some of these renditions which some viewers will experience. If you are looking to include a Full Screen-enabled screencast, then it is recommended to create 2 renditions of your video, one exported customized for Full Screen mode and one customized for a smaller embedded player. You don't have to use different editing as I did in my example, but they should be exported at different resolutions:
- Full Screen rendition = exported at source file resolution
- Embedded Player rendition = exported at resolution of Player size
To upload both video files as renditions under the same Video ID, you must currently use our FTP batch provisioning feature. Please read our documentation on how to use Multi-Bitrate Streaming with Batch Provisioning.
