Grrrr…Screencast Bloat

Apparently, there's more to screencasting than just pressing record. I have my first one ready to post. The problem is that it's just under 6 minutes long but the file size is around 290 megs! So, right now, some  avi to mpeg conversion software is crunching away on the video, hopefully this will bring the size to a more reasonable level.

I've also just realized that screencasts, presentations in general are a lot harder than I thought.  The whole practice of "winging it" sort of goes out the door, it takes too much time.  I've been working on this screencast since yesterday, and have rebuilt the demo code and re-recorded the presentation dozens of times.  I thought it would be cool to show all of the steps involved in not using the buildprovider code and then showing what it's like with the buildprovider, but I got bored watching myself type, so for the most part I've reduced the show and tell examples to some simple cut and pastes out of a cheat sheet I keep open in notepad++.

I'm new at the whole compression thing so I may have picked a lemon of a tool, it's been crunching for 33 minutes so far and is telling me that I have 46 minutes left, I'm gonna keep surfing for some other tools, that sure seems like a long time to convert a 5 minute AVI file to MPEG...