As I'm wrapping up my preparation for my screencasting workshop next weekend at CIL2010, I finally got around to reading my copy of the forthcoming book, The Screencasting Handbook, by Ian Ozsvald, and thought I'd provide a quick review.
Ian's releasing this book in stages; it's not done yet, though you can buy it at a discount and get all updates until it is finished. I have no affiliation with Ian, and get no kickback if you buy.
First off, this book is written with internet product marketing in mind. There's not a lot geared towards planning for strictly educational screencasting, though there are several mentions of best practices for creating tutorials to help users learn a commercial product, so that can work for those of us in library-land. Ian starts with examples of using simple tools such as Jing and Screentoaster to create quick and easy screencasts, and then progresses through different tools and techniques working towards the type of screencast that might take as long as a week to fully create, edit and distribute. He's got extensive experience with Camtasia Studio and BB Flashback on the Windows side, and ScreenFlow on the OSX side, so those are the tools he uses as examples.
New screencasters will find his early chapters on how to prepare to screencast useful, but it was the later chapters that I found valuable. Specifically the legwork he's done on HD recording dimensions, distribution tools (apparently TubeMogul allows you to upload a single screencast or video which will then be simultaneously published to a couple of dozen partner sites, including YouTube), and microphone selection suggestions.
Ian's got an easy style to read, and if you can get past the irony of reading a book about how much better it is to produce video tutorials (to be fair, there are many many links to follow included in the PDF copy), you may find this a valuable purchase. Especially if you can't get to one of my workshops :-)
