How to Make Screencasts on the Mac

Tom Hoffman, over at Ed-Tech Insider, has posted an interesting discussion of creating instructional "screencasts" on the Mac and delivering them as PDFs. Hoffman notes: "instead of creating a fully animated screencast, I created a sequence of annotated screenshots. The key is to take lots of screenshots, so every step is captured. Even so, this method works best with web applications, where your interaction with the program is dictated by clicking on links to load new pages, rather than more dynamic actions you use in a desktop app like dragging and dropping and pulling down menus."

In order to take the numerous screenshots he needed, Hoffman used Automator to create a script that takes a screenshot and moves the resulting Picture file into iPhoto. After he finished grabbing the screenshots he needed, he then imported the iPhoto pictures into Keynote, organized them and added visual elements and then exported to PDF. This is cool, but I would have opened iMovie, imported all the screenshots from the iPhoto library, then put them in sequence in the timeline, animating them, and then add a voice-over. After I was done, I'd simply export to MPEG-4 for easy screencasting to the web.

I'll work on a workflow for doing this and if it works out nicely, I might start including a few screencasts with some of our How-tos here at TUAW.