Tools for creating Video Tutorial

Sun, May 23, 2021

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322117 May, 2020

My takeaway:

• Camtasia is easy to use for recording and editing and feature rich. but it only supports Mac and Windows.
• OBS Studio is only for recording. and it is free and opensource
• DaVanci Resolve for video editing
• ScreenFlow is simpler and has few features than Camtasia.
• For MacOS, You can use Quicktime or Screenshot for recording.
• For termnial base solutions
  • script and scriptreplay
  • demo magic
    • Simulates typing. It looks like you are actually typing out commands
    • Allows you to actually run commands or pretend to do so.
    • Can hide commands from presentation. Useful for behind the scenes stuff that doesn’t need to be shown.
  • asciinema
    • support copy/paste
    • support sharing with url
• tools I have bookmarked previously
  • screengif
    • A commandline tool to convert SCREENCAST.mov into ANIMATED.gif

For editing, Camtasia makes it almost too easy to create nice looking title overlays with backgrounds, dimming / blurring areas, highlights, zooming / panning and other basic effects. Even pretty complicated animations too, without having to mess around with key framing or needing a video editing degree.

DaVanci is a much more powerful editor and you can do crazy Hollywood style animations and effects, but for someone who just wants to do typical screencasting edits, it’s hard to beat Camtasia’s efficiency. I’m sure with enough time you could do those things with DaVinci by making your own custom scripts and effects templates but it will take a decent amount of effort to get there instead of getting all of that out of the box.

I know ScreenFlow is also quite good. Very comparable to Camtasia. Camtasia seems to have better license terms and isn’t MacOS exclusive.

I like OBS as it allows a good amount of customization.

Also allows you to set up your layout for the video-windows, with presets/templates, iirc.

Recommend you have a second screen open on the obs, though, so you can easily manage what’s up or not.

Would also be a good idea to start experimenting early to figure out some good layouts etc depending on how you want to present the material.

+1 for OBS. It’s very easy to use (add different inputs and click record). External monitor is a must. A good (as in > $20) microphone is worth investing in to avoid annoying noises, in particular computer fan noise which is likely to be an issue given you’ll be recording video.

I record with Screenflow. It is much simpler (read: slimmer feature set) than Camtasia as well as cheaper.

For as straightforward an application as recording a screen w/ voiceover, there aren’t many bad options. Personally, what I like about Screenflow is that it is easy to record straight to a timeline. I.E. I do a take, it saves to the timeline in Screenflow, I cut out the pauses/mistakes/dead air, or split a clip to redo audio or video for a particular section. Once satisfied, I move onto recording the next chunk, it’s quite streamlined compared to recording in one app and then editing in another.

Egghead.io has a few free resources for their instructors, I’d recommend checking them out for some practical tips.

• https://egghead.io/courses/record-badass-screencasts-for-egghead-io
• https://egghead.io/articles/recording-a-great-coding-screencast

Tools from MacOS

If you want to stick with what’s on your Mac, you can screen record with QuickTime. If you need to speak during the recording, there’s an option for capturing audio while you record the screen. Alternatively, you can record the screen with QuickTime, import the video into iMovie, then add an audio track after the fact. This can be a particularly nice approach if you’re good at scripting your way through a video, plus it allows you the ability to add some freeze-frames when you need more time to explain than you have video.

By default, macOS ships with a Screenshot utility (Applications > Utilities > Screenshot).

It can capture PNG files or record the whole screen or a portion of it and generate a video file from the whole session.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/take-screenshots-or-screen-recordings-mh26782/mac

For terminal based solutions:

Most linux systems should include script [1] and scriptreplay[2], which should suit your needs. Here’s a complete example of a recorded/replayed session[3].

On MacOS it should be as easy as script -r <filename> to record and script -p <filename> to replay. YMMV, but I like it for small use-cases, as it puts simplicity and portability over features.

[1] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/script.1.html

[2] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/scriptreplay.1.html

[3] https://www.tecmint.com/record-and-replay-linux-terminal-ses…

Demo magic is a good tool. I used it for recording a video course. But here’s one minor caveat: there’s no hint for what command will be executed next. Sometimes I would start talking about a subject, then hit ENTER to auto-type the next command, only to find that my words were off topic from the current command. My fault, but it was always a pain to recover from.

I still recommend demo magic. But use it with eyes open if you’re mistake-prone like me.