Flickr Has Video, my test for short ScreenCasts
I'm sure you've all seen by now that flickr supports video. I've been wanting this for a long time, and when my friend Tim Heuer sent me a Text message with the news, I was very excited.
After playing with this for a while, one of the things that I like, is that the video can be sized. Maybe other video services have this, but I haven't seen it. In fairness, I haven't used YouTube, or any other video hosting service at length.
For recording screens (which I'm trying to do more of), I wanted to be able to do a short little Camtasia screen cast(is it "screencast" or "screen cast") test, and see what it's outcome is. This video was recorded at the size of my browser window, which happened to be 912X820 at the time. I was hoping that the original dimensions of the video would be kept, but when asking for the player code, the "actual" size was registered at 499 wide. Maybe this means that the video is re-encoded on upload, so that it's max height and potentially max width are 500? Just a guess.
On the first go-round, I just encoded the video, and it was too small to read when playing back. Then I used the Camtasia tools for pan / zoom, and the video is now watchable, where I can get a quick point across. Although this video has no point, the pan/zoom work nicely.
One concern is that the video/screen cast is limited to 90 seconds in length - which could be viewed as a positive. I'll have to be a little creative to get my point across in 90 seconds - maybe that's better for everyone :)
Test Screen Cast with pan/zoom