I spent most of yesterday afternoon creating an enhanced podcast from one of our existing audiofiles — the one on Cezanne’s Still Life at MoMA. I had been looking at Pachyderm — and trying to create an example learning object to show the folks at the Museum at FIT what’s possible without a big technology budget. I realized that most of the Pachyderm templates allow for small movie files (2-3MB), but all of our screencasts are much larger. So, I thought that if I made an enhanced podcast with Camtasia, using only a few still images, perhaps the file size would be small enough to be plugged into Pachyderm.
So, I set out to make an enhanced podcast — it took a long time. As usual, a lot of time was spent gathering the right images and bringing them into Camtasia. Then I seemed to have problems with matching the still images with where I wanted them to go with the audio. When I would shift over the image, it seemed like other parts of the movie would shift in other places, and so I had to go back several times to fix things. When I first produced it as a quicktime movie, the transitions, which looked so lovely in Camtasia looked bad, and in addition, a couple of times the images changed sizes — when I hadn’t done that. And I think that later when I opened the Camtasia files, the alignment of the audio and visual tracks had shifted again.
Anyway, I got rid of the transitions and re-produced it. It is still too large (13MB) to put into Pachyderm I think, since the instructions there say 3-4 MB because of download time. Still, it might be useful to try it. We’ll see what it looks like on the video ipod…
Here it is.
April 23rd, 2006 at 7:59 pm
You might want to try Captivate for this. Unlike Camtasia, which does screen captures as movies, Captivate captures images and then animates cursors, etc., in between. This is closer to what you’re trying to achieve in your enhanced podcast.
May 2nd, 2006 at 1:51 am
Thanks Michael! Will do!