I just discovered a really handy way of creating (very) basic video tutorials and slideshows that I wanted to pass along.
Lisa Lane recently indicated she couldn’t figure out how I’d configured Facebook to import my Delicious bookmarks and I decided to put something together quickly to show her what I’d done. The problem is I didn’t have much time to spare and needed a quick way to put something together that still looked nice and was easy to share.
What I ended up doing is using a combination of screenshots and Picasa3 to compose a video tutorial outlining the process.
Last I looked however, Picasa is still only available for the PC, so this information may not be useful for Mac or Linux users. There are ways to run Picasa on Linux, however given the default video file format that Picasa uses is WMV, or Windows Media Video, it’s possible that Linux won’t be able to complete the process.
The process
Basically what you want to do is capture the steps you want to demonstrate using a series of screeshots and bulletpoints (to use as captions during the editing process in Picasa). Personally I find the FireShot add-on for Firefox to be really handy, because it integrates a button into the browser that let’s you quickly capture screenshots – either as the entire page (including what is farther down the page, beyond what is displayed), or just what is displayed onscreen at the time.
I recommend including all the screen shots in a single, unique folder that you assign the name you want to give the final product (e.g. the slideshow). Not only does it make the screenshots easier to find, Picasa3 also automatically uses the folder name as the slideshow’s title and first slide. I’d also suggest adding a number to the beginning of the file name for each screenshot that corresponds to the step in the process that it depicts. This will help Picasa sort the images in the proper order, so you don’t have to move things around later.
For example, in this video I names the files: 01-FB-Profile.JPG, 02-FB-Settings.JPG, 03-FB-DeliciousUsername.JPG, and 04-FB-BookmarksImported.JPG.
Once you’ve captured everything Picasa3 lets you make a variety of changes to the images, including cropping or colour filtering. Note it needs to be version 3 because previous versions don’t offer the video slideshow option
Once you’re happy with this, select all the images you plan on using and select the Create Video Clip Presentation tool. Here you’ll be able to assign captions, choose transition settings, rename the presentation, and a few other elements.
At the end of this process you’re then able to upload the finished video directly to YouTube from within Picasa, or export the file to a standard WMV file for use elsewhere. In the case of the this particular slideshow, the entire 40 second video was less than 3 Megabytes, meaning I could even email it as an attachment if I wanted.
