Avogadro: New Screencasts a...

I spent quite a bit of yesterday making a few test screencasts at various resolutions, and then trying several video sharing sites in the hopes of finding something better than youtube. There are quite a few screencasts I made that were placed on youtube in the past but I was never happy with the quality. I also spent some time investigating better tools for recording, editing and commentating my screencasts.

The link above is to the blip.tv version. It is the first screencast I ever made with a title page and audio commentary. It is intended to be a brief introduction to Avogadro. It shows a few of the basic features and then moves onto some new and more advanced functionality, such as molecular orbital ray-tracing.

I also uploaded a hi-definition screencast recorded at 1280x720 to Vimeo, and the same one to blip.tv. Finally I gave the showmedo service a try here, I do like their default player size.

I used qt-recordmydesktop to record the screencasts, and kdenlive to edit the video files, compose and render the final video. I also used Audacity to record the audio commentary. The quality of the screencast with audio is a little poor due to recordmydesktop actually recording at 800x604, this resulted in some scaling which made some labels tough to read. Other than that the quality seems to be quite good.

Hopefully the screencasts are useful. I am hoping that I and some of the other developers will be able to produce some tutorial screencasts in the near future. Right now I am coding, adding new features, unit tests and padding out our core API so that we can stabilise it. It looks like screencast quality is improving, let me know what you think of this one