My Setup & Workflow

Updated: 28th December 2011

As you might imagine, I get lots of emails asking about what I use for my screencast recording. Rather than answer each one, I've decided to put this page together to document the process at a fairly high level so I can just direct people to this page. 

Computer Equipment
General Purpose Editing & Encoding Machine - Apple MacPro (2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 16GB RAM)

1 x 30" Dell Monitor

1 x 19" Dell Monitors

1 x 256GB SSD Drive

3 x 750GB Drives

Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P Card

Shuttle Pro 2

Screen Capture Machine & General Laptop - MacBook Air 11" (1.8 Ghz Intel Core i7, 4GB RAM, 256GB Flash Storage)

Storage
External - 2 x Fusion D500P with Multiplier Support (multiple 1.5 & 2TB drives configured as multiple RAID 1 drives)

DroboPro with 7 x eSata Drives providing 6.7TB Storage

Various Firewire external drives

Audio Equipment
Heil PR-30 Microphone
dbx-266XL - Limiter/Compressor
Mackie Onyx 1220 Mixer
Edirol UA-1ex USB Interface

Software
Capture and Assembly Edit - Vara ScreenFlow
Final Edit - Final Cut Studio
Titling and Effects - Motion 3
Encoding - Compressor

Basic Workflow
I record the tutorial using ScreenFlow on the capture MacBook Air in multiple segments, usually no more than 5 to 10 minutes long. Each segment will contain mistakes or retakes that will need to be edited out following recording. If I completely screw up, I may discard the segment and start again! All captures are done at 1600x900 to allow for zooming at native resolution to 1280x720.

Once I have covered all the main points of the tutorial, I use the dedicated Mac Pro for the initial assembly edit. This is where I review all the captured segments in sequence. During this assembly edit, I will remove any mistakes or retakes. The Shuttle Pro 2 is a tremendous boon during this process and I have a number of custom "macros" set up to assist in the editing process. If I think a section of the screen needs to be zoomed or highlighted, this is mainly done during the assembly edit within Screenflow. Once I've tidied up each segment, I export the segment to a Quicktime movie file directly from Screenflow using the lossless preset at 100%

Once all the segments have been edited and exported, I then use a second conversion process on the Quicktime files converting them to Apple AIC format. This is done in batch mode using Compressor.

The final edit is done in Final Cut Pro where I import the AIC files and start to cut the segments together. The show opening and chapters are Motion templates which are updated to reflect the current show subject. The segments are joined using various transitions in FCP and in some cases additional text and information is overlaid on the screen using FCP Text effects.

The final version of the show is the Members version and I insert chapter markings in the timeline before exporting it to full quality Quicktime format.

The full quality version of the show can be up to 20 Gigabytes or even larger so this needs re-encoding to make the file sizes more manageable for distribution. 

1280x720 HD
1280x720 HD Overscan (for Apple TV owners with HDTVs that overscan)
480x272 iPod/iPhone

Once these files are encoded, I add addition artwork and metadata using SimpleMovieX.

The audio is extracted from a master file via FCP and converted to MP3. The audio file is then sent to a transcription service to be converted to a plain text file. On receipt, the text file is processed using TextSoap and imported into MovieCaptioner to create the English subtitles. The resultant SRT file is then embedded into each verion of the show using iSubtitle.

The finished video files are thne flattened using Lillipot and uploaded via FTP using Transmit to Libsyn as my hosting provider for my media files.

The distribution of the files are controlled via custom RSS feeds created by Feeder - a brilliant software package by Re-Invented Software. Once the files have completed uploading, I create a new entry for each of the files in 5 test RSS feeds. These test feeds are published and each file is downloaded and tested to ensure that the FTP process has been successful and all files are intact.

Once the testing is completed, I then update the 5 live RSS feeds using Feeder and publish.

The Members Only webpages are updated with direct links to the files to allow members to either download directly from the website or to stream the shows in real time.

The next step is to update the ScreenCastsOnline Forum with the details of the new show and create the show notes in Rapidweaver for publication to the public version of the website.

But there's more!

That's the members version of the show published but there is also the free version to do.

Once every month is a full free version of the show and on weeks when there are members versions I create a sampler version of the show. So it's back to Final Cut Studio where I create a duplicate of the members version and edit the show accordingly including adding information about ScreenCastsOnline Extra!, changing the titles, removing the chapter marks and various other components. Once the free version is completed, I export the new version of the show into full quality quicktime and run it through Compressor to produce two new versions:

1280x720 HD Overscan
480x272 - iPod/iPhone versions

The free versions of the show or the trailers for the members shows are uploaded to YouTube where I have a partner account. This enables me to upload full length episodes in HD and used the embed videos from YouTube on my web pages

Both versions of the free show are also uploaded to Libsyn and the test RSS Feeds for the free show are updated and each show downloaded and tested. Once the tests are completed, the live RSS feeds for the free show are updated and published.

And that's about it!