I'm planning on recording a couple of short webcast (say 10 minutes long) as internal training material. Are their any good tool for recording and editing that I should look into (besides Camtasia)? Any other tips that might be useful?
I'm also interested in good places to host the movies if I'd for example would post them on my blog for external access.
To answer your second question, I think Google Video or YouTube is what the common standard is.
CamStudio is decent and free. It seems a lot of people are using http://www.vimeo.com/ for hosting webcasts, since they have nice high quality which youtube does not.
I've had really good experiences with Camtasia for making internal training material. I haven't seen any other app in this field that works as good as Camtasia, really... The documentation is great, also (they have a lot of webcasts, obviously, which helped me get started real quick).
I used to upload stuff to an internal webserver, but I believe Camtasia also provides hosting for your webcasts --- haven't tried it, though.
What worked for me, btw, was to make a small storyboard in advance. That saved me a lot of time editing :) It's also a good idea to try keep your webcasts relatively short, and to provide a way of letting the viewer see the structure of your webcast. Putting in some static 'slides' with outlines (both at the beginning, between sections and at the end) really helps people understand and remember what you showed them.
Good luck!
Make sure you have a plan or outline to follow. Run through it a few times without recording first to work out any trouble spots. If you can, keep a reference copy of the code off screen so you can type against that instead of doing it from memory. A dual monitor setup really helps with this. Also, get a good mic and talk slowly and clearly.
I don't think anything comes close to Camtasia in functionality and ease of use for advanced features, but you'll definitely pay more for that privilege. Others I have heard about are BBFlashback, Camstudio (which is free, but more difficult to use) and Adobe Captivate (very expensive).
Use a good quality microphone for recording your vocal track, it makes all the difference. Think about spending at least $100 on one.
I personally use the jing project, it's a free product developed by techsmith (the camtasia company) that allows you to record screencasts and host them for free on screencast.com. You can then share them with the people you want while not making them available to the whole world. You can post really high resolution videos too.
The software also allows you to capture screenshot and minimally edit them ( add text, circles, arrows, boxes, etc). That can be good if you want to provide additional material with your screencasts.
please note however that the free hosting limits you to 2gb of storage and 2gb of bandwidth per month.
Another option is DemoCharge. It's nowhere near as costly as Camtasia and has some really nice features. It's well within the price range of a standard web user such as you and I.
As far as hosting goes, YouTube and Vimeo might be handy and free, but the video quality is, well.. crap :) They're great options for mucking around, but if you're serious I'd personally advise against it.
If you're serious about having high quality video and lots of traffic you may have to have a look at a hosting solution like Amazon S3. If not, just create your videos and store them on your own server until you notice the bandwidth load.
It seems your luck is in :) Smashing Magazine has a whole article devoted to webcasts, including a comprehensive overview of software and ways to publish the results.
@pbreault re: Jing - videos recorded with Jing are limited to 5 minutes in length as well.
It is pretty feature packed considering it is completely free.
A small tip, or rather, a request: do NOT upload screencasts to Youtube. The low-resolution and compression makes anything remotely text-related entirely impossible to see. Also the seek-bars are very inaccurate, which makes it impossible to skip back a few seconds to (try and) read the last command or line that was typed..
I personally like screencasts done in h.264 .mp4 or .mov files. Uploaded to Vimeo as HD would be not too bad (infinitely better than youtube, but its flash based seek-bars just aren't as good as local media players)
Basically, Youtube is utterly awful for screencasts.
If you are using OS X, this PeepCode episode is a good, pretty comprehensive screencast on screencasting..
Point 1: Look at DNRTV.com for a good example of what a webcast can be before settling on a YouTube level of quality. These guys pretty much set the standard.
Point 2: Definitely use a good microphone. If you can, listen to some web/pod casts using different microphones. The Microsoft LX-3000 Lifechat headset has gotten some good reviews and is fairly inexpensive. If you're going to be recording on different systems, USB is worth the extra money. You'll get more consistent results.
Point 3: Microsoft media encoder works pretty well for short to-the-point screen recordings. If you need more features, you don't need to look any farther than Camtasia.
Point 4: If you're recording anything besides screen events with voice-over, DO NOT use a web cam to do the recording. Use a decent video camera and either a good headset (that looks decent) or other quality microphone system. (Now you're looking at a much higher price tag for equipment).
Whatever you end up doing. Record the original at the highest quality possible. Any encoder should be able to downgrade the video to whatever eventual format you choose.
Remember PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. This includes producing a final result and WATCHING it, not just the recording.
--EDIT--
Use a machine with some "guts" to it. Video recording/editing can really bog down a system.
Planning - make a storyboard, practice it a few times. You can either record video+audio live (I do this for simple training material) or record the video with long pauses then do the audio later.
If you do the latter then use e.g. Audacity to record audio and import short segments of audio into CamTasia to sync them with each scene, then cut the long pauses after you've got the raw material together.
Video - I tend to use 800x600 or 1024x768 for recording and transcode down to 640x480 for presentation, with a high bitrate (2000kbps & keyframes every 30 secs) you get crystal-clear video. Expect 2-4mb per minute of video. CamTasia exports with a built-in player so you can easily upload it to the web. I avoid the SWF export and use FLVs.
For audio make sure you've got a quiet room and a nice mic too, drink so you don't dry out. Consider using a lip-salve if you're speaking so much that you get dry (you can hear it in the end result). Get a good mic, a cheap USB will sound...cheap. Decent audio equipment starts at $300US.
For examples of various techniques see ShowMeDo (I'm a co-founder). We have over 700 screencasts by 100 open-src authors, you'll get a good idea of techniques, approaches, voice-styles, editing styles etc.
There are some more tips in this interview I did with Jolt Magazine a few days back including 'stuff to avoid'.
For hosting I tend to host my own (e.g. at my ProCasts), a 3 minute video is about 10mb, any decent ftp host should offer the video reasonably quickly. YouTube has wide exposure but shockingly bad quality. Vimeo looks great and has nice embeddable players.
When hosting my own I use the JW FLV Player rather than CamTasia's default player, it supports nice callbacks (e.g. for start/stop event monitoring) and is skinnable.
I tried out the ScreenFlow software mentioned in the Smashing article. It's for Mac. It's killing my dual 2GHz Mac desktop. You need a fast computer, otherwise this will take you 3 hours to to 30 minutes when it could have taken 1.
As Brad Bruce said, make sure you watch the final product AND fully expect that you will redo your first try.